Plenty of people run an OnlyFans page on the side, but what happens when the day job finds out? According to Deseret News‘ Jennifer Graham, a growing list of educators fired over after-hours adult content is forcing a question the courts still haven’t answered: does the First Amendment protect making porn as a side gig?
The cases piling up
Graham points to a substitute teacher in Missouri who lost an elementary school assignment after her employment agency learned about her OnlyFans account, and to the much bigger fight in Wisconsin. Joe Gow, the longtime chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, was removed as chancellor and later fired as a tenured professor after officials learned he and his wife had been making adult videos together.
Gow has argued that the videos and erotic books he made with his wife are protected speech on matters of public concern. The state’s position, as quoted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, is that he was furthering “his personal and commercial interests in his outside venture as a pornography actor and producer, rather than to contribute to significant public discourse.”
The fight is far from over. According to News 8000, Gow’s federal jury trial against the UW Board of Regents was pushed from June 2026 to September 13, 2027, and is expected to last five days. Inside Higher Ed reported that the state has argued officials are protected by qualified immunity and that Gow had no clearly established right to keep his job after appearing in and distributing the videos.
Nobody has a clear answer yet
“It’s messy,” Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is backing Gow, told Deseret News. As far as he knows, none of these firing cases has actually gone to trial, so “we’re all waiting to get the answers to these questions.”
Goldstein said a school would have to show real harm from a teacher’s off-campus activity, not just assert it. One upset stranger probably isn’t enough, he said, but parents pulling kids out of class or packing school board meetings could be. He also noted that teachers face a tougher road because they’re public facing: “This would be an easier question if you worked in an office.”
Where you work matters too. George Washington University law professor Mary Anne Franks explained that the First Amendment is about people versus the government, so it carries more weight for someone like Gow, who worked at a public university, than for someone at a private school. For the Missouri teacher, who was employed through an agency, Detroit attorney Corey Silverstein told The Washington Post that a legal challenge would likely fail because such contracts often bar “moral turpitude.”
“Community standards” in a borderless internet
The bigger problem, Graham writes, is that the old Miller test for obscenity leans on “community standards,” a yardstick that barely works when the community is the whole internet. Franks argued it makes more sense to talk about measurable harms than vague offensiveness.
Gail Dines, who leads the anti-porn nonprofit Culture Reframed, went further, saying she told one lawmaker to drop the word “obscene” from a draft age-verification bill because “it doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Even so, Dines voiced sympathy for the Missouri teacher, who said she started her account because she needed the income. “Why go after her?” she asked.
The takeaway
For creators who also hold a regular job, the law hasn’t caught up. Until a case like Gow’s reaches a verdict, whether an employer can fire you for your OnlyFans comes down to who signs your paycheck, what your contract says, and how loudly your community complains. Read the fine print before you hit post.
Image: AI-generated illustration
