Newly obtained documents indicate that the cash-strapped University of Wisconsin System spent a six figure sum investigating its former chancellor, Joseph Gow, after discovering that he was producing and performing in pornographic videos with his wife.

Mr. Gow’s months-long battle with the university, which he argues is a freedom of speech dispute, has garnered national interest as the outspoken academic has been unrepentant for his side hustle — which includes cooking vegan food with porn stars while clothed on his YouTube channel, “Sexy Happy Couple,” as well as creating sexually-explicit OnlyFans content.

The university, upon discovering the content last year, immediately fired him from his position as chancellor of UW-Lacrosse but had to engage in a long and expensive process to establish grounds to terminate him from his tenured job as a professor of communications. In September, the UW System’s Board of Regents unanimously voted to terminate him from that position as well, claiming it had “cause” to fire him for disciplinary reasons  unrelated to free speech

An invoice — obtained by Mr. Gow’s legal representation, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, through a Freedom of Information Act request — is the latest chapter in the battle between Mr. Gow and the university. The documents indicate that the university spent more than $130,000 hiring a law firm to investigate Mr. Gow for misconduct and establish legally defensible cause.

To build a case to legally rid itself of Mr. Gow, the university ended up accusing him of various disciplinary infractions that would not be protected by tenure. The university claimed that Mr. Gow violated school policy by referencing his university job in his pornographic videos; hiring “sex workers” within an hour of campus and creating a conflict of interest when he invited a “sex worker,” porn star Nina Hartley, 65, to speak on campus.  Based on this dossier, the regents fired Mr. Gow from his tenured job, leaving him reliant on the modest subscriber income he gets from his OnlyFans account.

The university system has faced well-documented financial issues in recent years, amid declining student enrollment, increasing costs, and state budget cuts, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported, and the UW System closed out the 2023 fiscal year with a whopping $33 million budget deficit. This summer, the universities asked the state for an additional $855 million in the 2025-2027 state budget, a 10.8 percent increase. 

The tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars investigating Mr. Gow were “wasted funds,” FIRE’s faculty legal defense counsel, Zach Greenberg, tells the Sun, noting that it was “definitely more” than he would expect the university system to spend, given its financial difficulties. He says the $130,000 invoice is for only one part of the investigation, up until April of this year, and that the university likely spent additional “time and resources” on the issue afterward.

“We think this speech is clearly protected, and even $1 more would have been too much, but it’s clear the university spent a lot of time and money investigating Joe Gow, going on a fishing expedition, seeing what they can do to potentially fire him,” he says. “We think this is a large amount of money, really larger than the salary of many professors at the university, perhaps.”

Mr. Gow tells the Sun that the “expensive” investigation makes it clear that the “UWSystem leadership knew they couldn’t fire me from my tenured faculty position based on my books and videos, so they had to try very hard to find some other reason.”

“This was a conspicuous waste of state taxpayers’ dollars,” he adds. 

The University of Wisconsin did not return a request from the Sun for comment. The school has been vocal in condemning Mr. Gow’s behavior, as the Sun has reported. In a hearing ahead of firing Mr. Gow, the UW System’s attorney, Wade Harrison, said his “behavior has been unethical, hypocritical and unacceptable.” 

The saga is likely far from over, as Mr. Gow tells the Sun that he has decided to sue the Board of Regents and that his lawyer hopes to file the lawsuit by the end of the month — any day now.