(Headline USA) At a small rural Missouri high school, two English teachers shared a secret: Both were posting adult content on OnlyFans, the subscription-based website known for sexually explicit content.
The site and others like it provide an opportunity for those willing to dabble in pornography to earn extra money—sometimes lots of it.
The money is handy, especially in relatively low-paying fields like teaching, and many post the content anonymously while trying to maintain their day jobs.
But some outed teachers, as well as people in other prominent fields such as law, have lost their jobs, raising questions about personal freedoms and how far employers can go to avoid stigma related to their employees’ after-hour activities.
It also raises question about whether certain positions, such as those involving young people, must necessarily have higher standards for moral conduct because of the nature of the work and the direct impact that such reputational hazards may have on their teaching ability.
This is particularly a concern in an era where the parents rights movement is growing in influence, led by groups like Moms for Liberty, as a backlash to so-called groomers in the classroom, or teachers who enter into the field of education with political activism and social engineering as their primary motives, who are actively pushing to indoctrinate students to be more sexually relaxed, often to satisfy their own prurient needs.
At St. Clair High School southwest of St. Louis, it all came crashing down this fall for 28-year-old Brianna Coppage and 31-year-old Megan Gaither.
“You’re tainted and seen as a liability,” Gaither lamented on Facebook after she was suspended. Coppage resigned.
In St. Clair, Coppage was the first to be outed after someone posted a link to her OnlyFans account on a community Facebook group. Superintendent Kyle Kruse said Coppage was not asked to resign, but she did anyway.
“I do not regret joining OnlyFans,” Coppage told the St. Louis Post–Dispatch in September. “I know it can be taboo, or some people may believe that it is shameful, but I don’t think sex work has to be shameful. I do just wish things just happened in a different way.”
Gaither, who also coached cheerleading, said she used her account to pay off student loans, although many public-school teachers who spend more than 10 years or make a defined number of payments on their loans automatically become eligible to have the balance of their loans erased.
She also was outed, although she wrote that she had an alias and did not show her face, evidently as the result of other identifying clues that made it less discreet.
Neither teacher responded to phone or email messages from he Associated Press seeking comment. But both women told other news outlets that their OnlyFans earnings soared from the publicity.
The district said little, but parents and even some students voiced concerns.
“As a society, if we’ve come to it to think that it’s OK for children to be seeing their teacher having sex, that’s outrageous,” said Kurt Moritz, the father of a 7-year-old boy in the district. “We shouldn’t be giving children an extra reason to fantasize over their teachers.”
Moritz and a former student said they were particularly alarmed when Coppage did a YouTube interview with an adult-content creator and said she would be willing to film with former students. Moritz said the remark went too far, and 17-year-old Claire Howard, who moved out of the district midway through last school-year, agreed.
“That’s something that shouldn’t be sexualized,” Howard said.
Whether fired adult content creators have a legal recourse is unclear. Employers have wide latitude to terminate employees. The question is whether firing people moonlighting in the adult entertainment industry has a disproportionate effect on women and LGBT people, said Derek Demeri, an employment law attorney at the Zeff Law Firm in New Jersey, which specializes in discrimination and civil rights cases.
Both groups are protected, and data from the Free Speech Coalition, a lobbying group for the adult entertainment industry, showed they were the ones who overwhelmingly produced adult content, he noted.
“If you have a policy that on its face is not about discrimination but ends up having a disparate impact on a protected community, now you’re crossing into territory that may be unlawful,” Demeri said, adding that this applies even in cases where the day job involves working with children.
Attorney Gregory Locke, who was fired in March as a New York City administrative law judge after city officials learned about his OnlyFans account, was contacted by a handful of adult content creators who were terminated from their day jobs. He hasn’t yet sued but said he agrees with Demeri’s legal reasoning.
Locke’s termination followed an online spat over drag queen story hours in which he used a profane remark in response to a councilmember who opposed the events. Locke, who is gay, said people need to stop treating sex work like such a big problem.
“We’re a gig economy now and millennials have more student debt than we know what to do with,” he said. “There’s all sorts of reasons why people would reach out for outside income like sex work, like OnlyFans.”
At least one lawsuit has been filed in a similar situation. Victoria Triece sued Orange County Public Schools in January, alleging she was banned from volunteering at her son’s Florida elementary school because she posts on OnlyFans.
“When you start getting the moral police involved in it, where does it stop? At what point does the school have the right to intervene in one’s private life?” asked her attorney, Mark NeJame.
In South Bend, Indiana, 42-year-old Sarah Seales said she was fired last year from her job teaching science to elementary school children through a Department of Defense youth program called STARBASE after she began posting on OnlyFans to make more money to support her twins.
A Department of Defense spokesperson said it was inappropriate to comment on matters of pending litigation.
Attorney Mark Nicholson, who specializes in revenge porn cases, interviewed Seales and hired her to work on his firm’s podcast. They ultimately decided against suing the blogger who drew attention to Seales’ side gig, he said.
“If we pay our teachers as much as we pay athletes,” Nicholson said, “maybe she wouldn’t have had to open up an OnlyFans.”
However, the argument may be a sort of chicken–egg paradox as many of the morally deviant teachers who are debasing the public’s view of the profession have led more parents to pull their children out of public schools, resulting in lower funding for the schools.
Overall, the problem may lie in teacher training and screening programs having too low a bar for allowing in teachers whose first priority is something other than the well-being and healthy development of their young charges.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
