Ball State to pay former employee $225K to settle case over Charlie Kirk comments

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Ball State University must pay a former employee $225,000 after it fired her last fall over comments she made following political activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

The parties settled nearly two months ago, but hadn’t finalized the details of the agreement. As of late last week, the case has been concluded.

Swierc, formerly Ball State’s director of health promotion and advocacy, said she has complicated feelings about the settlement.

“I don’t think that there is a dollar amount that you could put on this that would in any way make up for what happened, and really the last eight months and the trauma that I have experienced,” Swierc said in a virtual press conference Tuesday morning.

When she signed the final draft of the agreement, she said it felt like closing a coffin’s lid.

“A chapter of my life is ending, and it’s a chapter in which I had no control over the damage and wreckage that it had caused,” Swierc said. “Despite that chapter reaching some kind of conclusion, that damage is still there for me, and I’m still picking up the pieces of my life.”

Not long after Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10, Swierc, as with many others, took to social media to offer her thoughts on the matter.

In a 140-word supposedly private Facebook post, Swierc said Kirk’s death was “a reflection of the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed. It does not excuse his death, AND it’s a sad truth.”

She also wrote that if someone thought Kirk was a “wonderful person, then we can’t be friends.”

A couple of days later, the post went viral after Libs of TikTok, a right-leaning social media account known for reposting liberal-leaning content to garner reactions, got hold of it.

In the following days, university officials fielded a deluge of school-critical calls and messages, which University President Geoffrey Mearns said was “extraordinarily damaging” to the university’s reputation and image and “exceptionally disruptive” to the school’s mission, according to a lengthy message Mearns sent to senior university leadership Tuesday morning, which Ball State spokesperson Greg Fallon provided The Indiana Lawyer.

Mearns has consistently cited the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals 2025 ruling in Hedgepeth v. Britton as justification for Swierc’s termination. In that case, the court ruled against a high school teacher who was fired after she posted inflammatory messages on her private Facebook account following the killing of George Floyd.

The federal court applied the Pickering balancing test, which stems from the 1968 case Pickering v. Board of Education, to weigh a public employee’s interest in speaking on matters of public concern and the government’s interest in an efficient, disruption-free workplace.

The Hedgpeth court ruled that because the school district’s interest in addressing actual and potential disruption outweighed the teacher’s interest in free expression, the First Amendment did not protect her posts.

“In reviewing the facts of [Hedgepeth], it was clear to me that the disruption caused by Ms. Swierc’s statement was much more extensive and severe than in that case,” Mearns said Tuesday.

So Mearns fired Swierc on Sep. 16, 2025.

Swierc filed her lawsuit in federal district court less than a week later.

In his message, Mearns called the finalized settlement a “modest monetary payment.” He said he authorized the payout because it was “substantially less” than the expected cost to defend the case.

Mearns has not retreated from his decision to terminate Swierc. The settlement does not require the university to accept wrongdoing.

Joshua Bleisch, an attorney with the ACLU of Indiana, said that even though there’s no court ruling in this case, he believes they got the best result for Swierc.

“We hope that this sends a message to, not just all public employees, but everybody out there that people who work for the government still have a First Amendment right to speak,” Bleisch said. “Just because they take a job with a public employer doesn’t mean they give up that right.”

Aside from the monetary payout, the settlement permits Ball State employees to serve as job references for Swierc. It also provides that, if asked, Swierc’s supervisors “will acknowledge her positive contributions to health and promotion and advocacy work at the university.”