On August 7, a tenured theater professor at Austin Peay State University filed a federal lawsuit against Marsha Blackburn. He says she used her office to get him fired for something he posted online.

The timing is hard to miss. He filed the day after Blackburn won the Republican primary for governor of Tennessee.

The professor is Darren Michael. He had taught at Austin Peay for 19 years. According to The Tennessean, his lawsuit accuses Blackburn of a "calculated campaign to punish" him "for expression she and the government disfavored by threatening adverse action against his employer."

What he actually posted

Michael shared an article. That's it.

The article was about something Charlie Kirk said at a Turning Point USA Faith event in Salt Lake City on April 5, 2023 — about a week after a shooter killed three students and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023. Asked about gun rights, Kirk said:

"I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."

Michael added no comment of his own. He posted the quote.

Blackburn shared his post from her government account and wrote: "What do you say, @austinpeay?"

The lawsuit says she also shared a screenshot showing Michael's face and his contact information.

On September 12, 2025, Austin Peay announced it had fired him. The school said his comments were "insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death."

He got his job back. And $500,000 of your money.

The university did not hold up. The next month it walked the whole thing back, saying Michael had actually been suspended, not terminated. On December 31, 2025, a spokesperson confirmed he had been fully reinstated as a tenured professor.

In January, he reached a settlement with the school. His lawyer confirmed to The Tennessean that Michael was ordered to receive $500,000.

That money comes from a public university in Tennessee. Which means it comes from Tennesseans.

And he is not the only one. At least seven Tennessee lawsuits have come out of firings and other legal actions tied to Charlie Kirk's death. Together they have cost Tennessee taxpayers more than $3.2 million in settlements and back pay — more than any other state in the country, according to public records reviewed by The Tennessean.

That is the bill Tennessee is paying for a pressure campaign against people's speech.

What the lawsuit says Blackburn did

The lawsuit does not just point at a tweet. It alleges Blackburn "crossed" into "impermissible coercion" through "public statements, private correspondence and private meetings," along with "explicit and implicit threats" of sanctions and enforcement proceedings against the university unless it fired Michael.

It also says Austin Peay's own administration described the school as being "under external pressure, including coercive pressure from Blackburn," and from "government actors who have direct influence over funding for APSU."

That last part matters. A U.S. senator has real power over federal money that flows to a public university. When that senator publicly demands to know what the school is going to do about one of its professors, the school hears more than a question.

Michael says he was fired "without prior notice, without a hearing and without opportunity to respond to charges." He says he and his family had to move after the university handed his home address to at least one news outlet.

Blackburn's campaign is fighting it. Her spokesperson, Abigail Sigler, said they had not been served yet and called the suit "a meritless attempt to punish Senator Blackburn and others for criticizing outrageous public statements concerning political violence and the murder of a husband, father, and patriot." Sigler said criticizing public statements is "protected speech, not defamation."

These are allegations, and a court will sort them out. But the underlying facts — the post, the tag from her government account, the firing days later — are not in dispute.

This is the second one

Michael's case is the second lawsuit that names Blackburn. It's the first that names her as a defendant.

Laura Sosh-Lightsy, a dean at Middle Tennessee State University, was fired on September 10, 2025 — one hour after Blackburn tagged the college in a post about comments Sosh-Lightsy made the night Kirk was killed. She has sued MTSU, accusing Blackburn of using her "position to pressure MTSU to retaliate" against her. That case is still going.

One post from a senator. One hour. One career.

Now the part where she says the opposite

Here is what makes this more than a lawsuit.

Blackburn has spent years telling Americans that a government official leaning on a private institution to silence speech is the mark of a dictatorship.

In July 2021, she wrote to President Biden over his administration's work with Facebook on vaccine misinformation. Her words:

"The blatant actions by your administration to work with big tech companies to censor Americans' free speech are shocking – and arguably a violation of the First Amendment."

And:

"ordering big tech companies to ban Americans that do not regurgitate government approved messaging—is what authoritarian regimes do."

She said the U.S. government "should be standing up to, not looking to mirror, authoritarian regimes."

Read that again, then read what she is accused of here. A sitting United States senator pointed her official account at a state university and asked what it was going to do about an employee who shared a quote she didn't like. Days later he was gone.

If a government official pressuring a private company to drop a citizen's speech is what authoritarian regimes do, it is difficult to explain why a government official pressuring a public college to fire a professor is something else.

This is a pattern with her. When a dark-money group ran an ad she didn't like about her opioid record, her lawyers demanded it come off the air within 48 hours. Free speech, in Blackburn's telling, is a principle that seems to apply mostly to people who agree with her.

And about that quote

There's one more thing worth sitting with.

The speech Michael was fired for sharing was Charlie Kirk saying that some gun deaths every year are "worth it." Michael didn't say it. He repeated it.

Blackburn's own record on guns is not in tension with that sentiment. She is the 12th-most NRA-funded lawmaker in the country, taking roughly $1.3 million over her career — about 12% of everything she has raised. In June 2022, she voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a modest gun safety law that expanded mental health services and strengthened background checks for buyers under 21.

Nine months later, six people were killed at The Covenant School in her state.

A Tennessee professor lost his job for circulating a quote about the cost of that policy. The senator who helped cost him his job voted to keep the policy.

What this means for Tennessee

Blackburn is asking Tennesseans to make her governor. Governors have far more direct control over public universities than senators do — over budgets, over boards, over appointments.

The question every Tennessean should ask is simple: if this is what she did to a professor with a Senate seat, what does she do with a governor's office?

Tennessee taxpayers have already paid more than $3.2 million to clean up after this campaign. They didn't get a vote on it.

Source

Evan Mealins and Angele Latham, "Austin Peay prof fired over Charlie Kirk post sues Marsha Blackburn," The Tennessean, August 8, 2026. Photo: The Tennessean / USA TODAY Network.