NEW ORLEANS -- Andrew Okun and Erin Wilson filed a federal lawsuit on July 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana against the City of New Orleans, Mayor Latoya Cantrell and Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montano for alleged First Amendment violations.
The lawsuit challenges a city policy that stipulates its employees can be fired for speech critical of the city's operations.
According to the complaint, Okun is an employee of the New Orleans City Library System and has been since 2012. Okun engages in free speech and expressive activity in his personal time; he is a writer and an editor and engages in substantial online communications.
Wilson is an employee of the New Orleans City Library System since 2016 and maintains a robust online presence as a creator and influencer on TikTok, streams to private discord audience about art and film, and participates in other online expressive activities, the suit claims. Both were required to sign the challenged city employee policy as an employee of the Library System.
Both originally refused to sign, but were informed they had to in order to keep their jobs, the suit says.
Both Okun and Wilson seek to engage in online speech without being subjected to unlawful prior restraint by their employer. The policy has a significant chilling effect on the speech and on the speech of other government employees, as alleged by Okun and Wilson. Okun and Wilson maintain this is a violation of their individual rights and further an intrusion of their rights.
U.S. District Court Eastern District of Louisiana case number 2:21-cv-01345-NJB-KWR