A former University of Mississippi employee argues in a new court filing that Chancellor Glenn Boyce bowed to public pressure when he fired her because of backlash from a social media post about the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
In a brief filed with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week, Lauren Stokes, former executive assistant in the university’s development office, challenged Boyce’s claims that her post – or the resulting public outcry over it – disrupted the university operations, including a fundraising event and its social media channels.
Instead, she said, Boyce and the university gave in to what she called a “heckler’s veto.” That’s when a speaker is drowned out by hecklers. Stokes asserts that the university, when it fired her, did the bidding of Kirk’s supporters who wanted her silenced.
The latest court filing is part of an appeal Stokes filed in July, after a U.S. district court judge dismissed her initial lawsuit claiming that she was wrongly terminated. The judge ruled that Boyce, as chancellor of the university, was entitled to qualified immunity and did not violate her First Amendment rights.
At the root of the dispute is a post she shared on her private Instagram account following Kirk’s assasination. The post criticized Kirk views on guns, abortion and race and described those like him as “yt supremacist and reimagined Klan members” who had “wreaked havoc on our communities, condemning children and the populace at large to mass death for the sake of keeping their automatic guns,” the online statement said. Stokes later deleted the post and apologized.
The post received immediate backlash from conservative activists and state leaders, including Mississippi State Auditor Shad White, a vocal critic of what he calls “woke” initiatives in higher education. He shared a screenshot of Stokes’ post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and tagged the university.
Alysson Mills, Stokes’ attorney, declined to comment. Jacob Batte, a spokesperson for the university, said its position is laid out in court filings. Cal Mayo Jr., an attorney for Boyce, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
