fired from his job as a coach at Edison High School following criticism from Epting and others on social media<\/a> regarding Kluwe\u2019s civil disobedience arrest at a Huntington Beach City Council meeting in February as a protest of a plaque at the city library in support of MAGA.<\/p>\nSchool officials cited a civility policy that\u00a0Kluwe\u00a0\u201chad never seen,\u201d Sasse said.<\/p>\n
Kluwe\u2019s attorney said that even though\u00a0Kluwe\u00a0was an at-will employee, he still had First Amendment rights.<\/p>\n
Bresee said the school\u2019s policy was one \u201cyou\u2019ll see all over the state.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt appears the plaintiff has a long history of activism for civil rights issues for years,\u201d Slaughter said of Kluwe\u2019s speaking out, dating back to public support of legalizing same-sex marriage in 2012. And yet Edison officials did not discipline or fire him before this year, he noted.<\/p>\n
Sasse said his client was told he was being fired because of the positions he was taking against Huntington Beach decisions. Epting is accused in the defamation suit of framing a social media post of the former punter\u2019s as espousing violence, which\u00a0Kluwe\u00a0denied.<\/p>\n
Bresee said the fact that\u00a0Kluwe\u00a0was never fired before due to his activism would show that he was discriminated against this year for exercising his free speech rights.<\/p>\n
Bresee also argued that Kluwe was the one who went public with the reasons for his termination. Sasse argued Kluwe reposted Epting to make the case his statement was \u201cfalse and defamatory.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slaughter said he would issue a ruling later.<\/p>\n
Originally Published: October 24, 2025 at 2:32 PM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By PAUL ANDERSON A federal judge in Santa Ana this week asked an attorney defending writer Chris Epting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,1312,138,588,100,611,338,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-22228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-anaheim","8":"tag-anaheim","9":"tag-anaheim-headlines","10":"tag-anaheim-news","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-courts","13":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","14":"tag-huntington-beach","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-orange-county","17":"tag-santa-ana","18":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}