A former state employee who was fired for making a social media comment related to the late Charlie Kirk is now suing the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on Dec. 10 on behalf of Monica Meeks, a U.S. Army veteran who previously worked as a financial services investigator for TDCI. The lawsuit alleges that Meeks was unlawfully terminated from her job by TDCI Commissioner Carter Lawrence after she commented on another account's Facebook post calling Kirk a white supremacist.
The suit also alleges that Lawrence violated Meeks’ First Amendment right to free speech due to his personal disagreement with her views stated online.
In the hours after Meeks posted the comment on Sept. 12, more than a dozen X accounts shared screenshots of her post. Several hours later, Lawrence sent Meeks a termination letter and publicly announced her termination via a post on X.
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The lawsuit claims Lawrence wrote in the letter that her Facebook comment was “inflammatory" and "insulting.” In the letter, Lawrence also purportedly claimed Meeks violated the state’s code of conduct and the department’s human resources policies. However, the lawsuit claims that the department’s social media policy outlines online posts as protected by the First Amendment.
The suit additionally claims that Meeks’ comment was not intended to be widely shared online, as the comment was not posted on her personal Facebook account but rather as a comment on another account's post. It notes that her social media does not clearly identify her as a state employee and that she stated on her page that all posts reflect her views alone.
Meeks has made several appeals over her termination, which has been upheld. The lawsuit is requesting that she be reinstated to her position and that she receive monetary and punitive damages to be determined by the court.
“I’ve never backed down from a fight in my life, and I don’t plan to start now,” Meeks says in a release. “I took an oath to defend the Constitution. Now, it’s time to stand up for it again.”
“You may disagree with Monica’s take on Charlie Kirk,” FIRE staff attorney Cary Davis says in the release. “But letting a few angry individuals get a public employee fired for off-the-clock speech, even when it has no impact on the workplace, will inevitably boomerang back on people with views you do support. When public employees are forced into silence for fear of offending someone on the internet, we all lose.”
In response to Scene sister publication the Nashville Post’s request for comment, TDCI says the department does not comment on pending litigation.
The lawsuit comes in the wake of several local firings over online comments that followed the assassination of Kirk, a right-wing activist. A former assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University sued the school’s leaders in November over her termination. Another lawsuit was filed in October by a Williamson County high school teacher who was suspended following social media posts over the matter.
This article was first published by our sister publication, the Nashville Post.
