The university boss fired for making and posting porn videos with his wife says education officials overreacted and he may file a First Amendment lawsuit.
“Some people go off on a trip and play golf. We go off on a trip to Los Angeles, Las Vegas or Phoenix and shoot our show,” Joe Gow, the former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, told the Wisconsin State Journal.
Gow, 63, has been making X-rated content with his wife, Carmen Wilson, for almost a decade.
ADVERTISEMENT
But it wasn’t until he started posting the racy videos in the last few months that his secret side hustle—which included explicit OnlyFans and PornHub accounts, two pseudonymous books, and a series of vegan cooking videos with adult film stars—became known.
Someone tipped off the university system and the Board of Regents moved quickly to terminate him, just months before he was scheduled to step down and transition back to life as a professor.
“I think that they’ve come up with this notion that this is conduct unbecoming of a chancellor,” Gow told WISN on Thursday. “I would come back with...well, promoting free speech and really living it is certainly conduct becoming of a chancellor.”
“My wife and I live in a country where we have a First Amendment,” he added. “We’re dealing with consensual adult sexuality. The regents are overreacting. They’re certainly not adhering to their own commitment to free speech or the First Amendment.”
Gow said he was denied due process and that he is contemplating legal action.
“I wish I would have had the opportunity to have a hearing. When reasonable people understand what my wife and I are creating, it calms them down,” he said.
Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said he also wants Gow stripped of his tenure—and he doesn’t think he can use the First Amendment as a fig leaf.
“Good judgment requires that there are and must be limits on what is said or done by the individuals entrusted to lead our universities,” Rothman said in an email to the Associated Press.
