The Fallout of a Charlie Kirk Campus Scandal

On the day of Kirk’s murder, Fisher was scheduled to work in the school’s criminal-defense clinic, which enlists law students to serve as public defenders in Lubbock County. As she walked into the clinic’s offices, her phone chimed with messages and news alerts. Fisher would later say that she could only recall one Kirk quote at the time, a defense of the Second Amendment in which he said its protections were worth the cost of “some gun deaths every single year.” But, during the conservative activist’s many appearances on podcasts and college campuses, he regularly expressed views designed to offend people with Fisher’s political sensibilities, including that “there’s a war on white people in this country” and that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” As Fisher passed the office of Joe Stephens, who ran the clinic’s program for rural defendants, she called out, “Hey, Joe Lew!” Her voice was full of energy. “Have you heard the news?” she asked. “They shot Charlie Kirk.”

Stephens didn’t immediately recognize the name. “There’s video,” Fisher said. “It looks bad.” The clip was “all over the internet,” she continued, waving her phone. Stephens gently chided her, saying, “Don’t do that.”

Down the hall, her supervisor, a tenured professor named Patrick Metze, was in his office with two students. Metze had taught at Texas Tech for nearly two decades and served as the director of the criminal-defense clinic. That morning, the two students in his office had met with prosecutors at the courthouse for the first time, a rite of passage for any aspiring defense attorney. The mood in the room was jubilant. “I mean, the girls were fired up,” he said. “It’s a big moment.”

After Fisher walked in, the conversation turned to Kirk. Ashanty Wilson, one of the other students, didn’t know who he was. “Oh, he’s a racist,” Metze answered. “A conservative racist, and a misogynist.”

“I was hoping we could get more out of him than just a scathing book review.”

Cartoon by Frank Cotham

“O.K.,” Wilson said. “So what’s the big deal?” With their permission, Metze began playing a video of Kirk’s shooting on his phone. The room reeled. “Look at his head!” someone exclaimed. Another asked, “Do you think he survived?” Metze cut in. “My daughter’s a nurse,” he said. “There’s no way you could survive that.”

Terri Morgeson, the director of the clinic’s family-law practice, could hear the discussion from her office, next door. “I call myself the noise monitor of the clinic,” she would tell investigators. “Everything echoes down that hallway.” She approached Metze’s door and saw Fisher on a couch, talking animatedly. She later said that Metze apologized for the noise, telling her, “I’m sorry. My students are just in a very good mood.” (Metze does not remember saying this.)

Morgeson briefly addressed the room before returning to her office. “Hey, y’all,” she said. “Just so you know, Trump announced that he’s dead.”

Later, in one of the clinic’s conference rooms, Fisher joined a discussion about Kirk with a group of students. A conservative classmate named Tristan Perez later recalled Fisher saying that she thought Kirk’s death was “a good thing.” (Fisher denies saying this.) Perez reminded her that Kirk had a family. He also noted that political violence was an assault on everyone’s free speech, liberals included. Fisher fell silent. “Yeah, I understand all that—I’m not happy he died,” she finally said. “But I still think he was a Nazi.” The discussion was “respectful,” Perez later said. “Nobody was yelling. Nobody was fighting. It was just a conversation.”

The following week, Fisher received an e-mail from Dwight McDonald, a law professor who served as Metze’s deputy at the clinic. He wanted to discuss “an incident that occurred in the clinic last week.” Later that day, Fisher met with McDonald and the law school’s dean of student life, Sofia Chapman, who informed her that she was facing allegations that she “announced Charlie Kirk’s death” in “a manner that was overexuberant.” Morgeson had reported that Fisher shouted, “They shot that motherfucker,” while marching through the hallway. Chapman later recounted that Morgeson was “visibly upset” that “Fisher was celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death.” Morgeson also said that two of her students had requested to leave early because they were “upset and bothered.”

At the meeting, Fisher suggested that there was a misunderstanding: it was Metze who had played the video in his office, she explained, and Morgeson had announced Kirk’s death. A month passed, and Fisher assumed that the situation had resolved. Then, on October 14th, Kirk’s birthday, Fisher received an e-mail from the law school’s administrators, informing her that she was under investigation for violating the school’s honor code. The notice wasn’t a complete surprise. Earlier that day, Fisher had stopped by Metze’s office. “They’re pushing me into retirement,” he’d told her, adding, “They’re coming for you.”