A Phone-Sex Memoir Tests the Limits of Free Speech Rights
An appellate court sidesteps the key First Amendment issue in a case about a National Guard employee who lost her job for writing an explicit book.
Salacious books have a long history of getting their authors into trouble
Photographer: Derek Berwin/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesCan a public employee be fired for penning a memoir about her days as a phone sex operator? That’s no law classroom hypothetical. It’s a serious question, answered in Harnishfeger v. United States, a decision handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit earlier this week. The court supported the employee, but the panel’s struggle to reach that outcome helps elucidate the difficulty of government workers’ free speech rights.
The case involved one Amy Harnishfeger, author of a pseudonymous volume entitled “Conversations with Monsters: 5 Chilling, Depraved and Deviant Phone Sex Conversations,” self-published in 2016 as an e-book on Amazon. The monsters of the title, the court tells us, are the men (and one woman) who were her clients. The book is evidently a sharp critique of the phone-sex industry. Writes the court: “Harnishfeger was horrified to hear what some of the callers would fantasize to her about, including sexual abuse of children.”