In 2026, this pattern is so familiar it’s almost become a cliché. A teacher’s OnlyFans account is discovered, the school or employer acts, and the teacher is left asking whether the Constitution protects what they do on their own time. For now, nobody quite knows the answer.
Let’s start locally in St. Louis. In fall 2023, St. Clair High School English teacher Brianna Coppage was put on leave after her OnlyFans account was reported to the district, and she resigned. Just a few weeks later, fellow English teacher Megan Gaither was suspended after her own account surfaced, and she also lost her job. Coppage was earning about $42,000 a year in the classroom and says she made close to $1 million on the platform. Gaither, who earned around $47,000 and carried $126,000 in student loans, told local media that what she does in her free time “should be of no business to the school.” Both were cast on TLC’s “Double Lives of Suburban Wives,” where Gaither recently revealed she wouldn’t make content if she could do it over. Coppage was later fired from a new health-care job after five days.
And it just happened again in Ballwin. Substitute teacher Sheena Sittner lost her job through Kelly Education, the staffing contractor that placed her, after her OnlyFans account was found. “If teachers were paid better, women wouldn’t have to resort to online content creation,” she told KTVI. The agency suspended her pending termination and told her to avoid contacting schools, though it later clarified that the restriction didn’t affect her rights as a parent.
Do these firings violate the First Amendment? The short legal answer is that it depends on who the employer is, and the details aren’t clear.
The First Amendment limits what the government can do, not what private employers can do. That distinction matters in these cases. A school district is a public employer, one run primarily on government funding, which means Coppage and Gaither at least had an argument to make. A private staffing company like Kelly Education is a different story. Detroit attorney Corey Silverstein told The Washington Post that legal challenges in cases like Sittner’s usually fail, because contracts often include language barring “moral turpitude,” a catch-all for behavior outside social norms. But Missouri’s teacher tenure law, according to one report, allows dismissal for immorality, which is what the other women would have fallen under.
But even for public employees, speech protections have limits. They generally cover speech on matters of “public concern,” and the Supreme Court has ruled in at least one case that making pornography isn’t one. That hasn’t stopped it from being litigated over and over, and the most closely watched test case right now is in Wisconsin. Joe Gow, a chancellor and tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, was fired in 2023 after officials learned he made explicit videos with his wife. Gow argues his videos are protected speech based on public concern. He compares his case to the professors who were fired, then reinstated, over comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder. But the state disagrees, arguing that unlike in those instances, he was furthering personal and commercial interests, not contributing to public discourse. His trial is set for September 2027.
Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which supports Gow, says none of these cases have actually been adjudicated. “It’s messy,” he said. “These cases keep coming up, but I don’t think any of them have gone to trial yet.” In his view, schools would need to prove that off-campus activity harmed them, not just assert it. A single upset stranger probably wouldn’t meet that bar, he said. Complaints at school board meetings, parents pulling kids from class, or families skipping conferences might. Teachers face a tougher test because they’re public-facing, and community standards still matter. And he notes that location matters: “People just react differently to things in different parts of the country.”
Mary Anne Franks, a George Washington University law professor, adds a broader complication. The old standard for obscenity, the Miller test, depends on “community standards” in an age when the community is the entire internet.
Even critics of the industry find the firings hard to defend. Gail Dines, an anti-pornography advocate who runs Culture Reframed, said of the Missouri substitute: “Why go after her? Go after the men, the consumers. Don’t go after the women.” She said OnlyFans creators average about $130 a month. It seems these women were making quite a bit more than that, but it’s important to note that the money is why, at least the Missouri teachers, cited they joined the platform to begin with.
Teachers in Missouri typically earn less than $50,000 a year, and these two were struggling to raise their families on that. Yet when they found a way to supplement that income, the institutions that employ them found a reason to end their careers for good. With the economy getting worse and teachers’ salaries not increasing enough to keep up, it’s only a matter of time before more teachers with this kind of side hustle face a similar fate. But you have to wonder if a side job isn’t illegal and happens off the clock, what exactly makes it grounds for firing?