No, the First Amendment probably won't protect you from getting fired if you have a pornographic OnlyFans for vegan cooking

• A Wisconsin state university chancellor was fired this week after his OnlyFans account surfaced.
• Joe Gow said the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse violated his free speech rights by firing him.

A Wisconsin university chancellor got fired this week over the explicit OnlyFans account he shares with his wife.

He's since accused the school of violating his free speech rights. But experts say the First Amendment probably won't save him.

Joe Gow, the now-former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, told The New York Times that the university violated his civil rights, saying they "don't seem to realize that the First Amendment would be critical in this situation."

Gow and his wife operate accounts with the handle @SexyHappyCouple and have a YouTube show, "Sexy Healthy Cooking," which features them cooking plant-based meals with porn stars — and using their actual first names.

An X (formerly Twitter) account linked to the show mentions an OnlyFans account featuring "fully explicit scenes" (we're taking their word for it on that), and their Amazon author bios under pseudonyms link to a Pornhub account, The Associated Press first reported.

Legal experts said this week that Gow and his wife are well within their rights to make porn, but it's not a civil-rights violation if they're fired.

In other words, it's the difference between free speech and consequence-free speech.

"There's no First Amendment or free speech issue," Scott Schneider, an expert in higher education law, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "That's absurd."

Donald Downs, a retired UW-Madison professor, also told the outlet that Gow doesn't have "much of a leg to stand on" to save his chancellor job.

Ken White, a founding partner at Brown, White, & Osborn, also wrote in a Substack post that courts would likely determine that the school has a "very practical and plausible concern about the reaction of the people Mr. Gow has to deal with on the job."

White also said Gow being the face of a public university "probably plays a determinative role."

"Even if a court found that Mr. Gow's pornographic videos represented speech on a matter of public concern, it would likely find that the university could fire him on the grounds that appearing in the videos was detrimental to his public role and therefore to the university," he added.

White said Gow's freedom of speech protects him from prosecution, but not from losing his job.

"In short, if Mr. Gow sues over his termination, he will probably lose," White wrote.

Meanwhile, Gow and his wife thanked their "new followers" on Thursday: "It has been an unusual day."