A Tennessee man who was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post he shared after the killing of Charlie Kirk agreed on Wednesday to a $835,000 settlement with the sheriff’s office that detained him, his lawyers said.
The fatal shooting of Mr. Kirk, the conservative activist, last September set off an avalanche of social media commentary across the country. With it came firings, resignations and a debate about the boundaries of free speech. But Larry Bushart, the man arrested in Tennessee, was perhaps the only person charged with a felony after his posts about Mr. Kirk’s death.
In the posts, he shared memes that accused Mr. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, of perpetrating hate and another that included past comments from President Trump about moving past a school shooting. The sheriff’s office in Perry County, Tenn., claimed that with those posts, he had threatened violence.
His bail was set at $2 million and he remained in jail until the charge against him was dropped.
In a statement, Mr. Bushart said he had been vindicated. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy,” he said. “I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”
Mr. Bushart, a 61-year-old retired law enforcement officer, is not the only person to successfully seek compensation after being penalized for comments about Mr. Kirk’s death.
In January, a professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee reached a $500,000 settlement with the school that also gave him his job back. In Iowa, the state recently agreed to rehire and pay $125,000 to a public defender who had been fired.
Mr. Bushart’s settlement appears to be among the largest so far.
“No one should be hauled off to jail in the dark of night over a harmless meme just because the authorities disagree with its message,” Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech legal advocacy group that represents Mr. Bushart, said in a statement. “We’re pleased that Larry has been compensated for this injustice, but local law enforcement never should have forced him to endure this ordeal in the first place.”
Mr. Bushart filed a federal lawsuit in December against Nick Weems, the sheriff in Perry County, asserting that sheriff’s department had willfully misinterpreted a post that Mr. Bushart made on a community Facebook group’s page as threatening violence, and had then infringed on his constitutional rights.
Mr. Weems did not respond to a request for comment.
In an interview last year after his release, Mr. Bushart — a rare outspoken progressive in his deeply conservative pocket of central Tennessee — described himself as a “Facebook warrior” who relished confronting acquaintances and strangers alike online over their political opinions.
Like many, he jumped into the social media fray after Mr. Kirk was killed at an event at a university in Utah. He noticed that a group in Perry County, about 30 miles from his home, was organizing a prayer vigil to memorialize Mr. Kirk, and he posted a flurry of memes created by others on a community Facebook page advertising the event.
One of the memes quoted President Trump saying, “We have to get over this,” after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024. “This seems relevant today….,” the original poster had written.
Mr. Weems said that some in Perry County, Tenn., had perceived Mr. Bushart to be threatening the local high school. Mr. Bushart was charged with recklessly threatening mass violence at a school.
The sheriff’s department asked the police department in Mr. Bushart’s hometown to dispatch an officer to visit Mr. Bushart. Body camera footage from the exchange showed that both Mr. Bushart and the officer were perplexed by the sheriff’s request and even made light of the situation. Mr. Bushart told the officer he had threatened no one and refused to take down the post.
The police returned later that night and arrested him.
In an interview in October with a local television station, Mr. Weems acknowledged knowing that the meme had been circulating before Mr. Bushart shared it, and that he knew it was referring to the school shooting in Iowa. Yet the sheriff claimed that Mr. Bushart had wanted to incite hysteria with his post, and that it had caused alarm.
In the suit, Mr. Bushart’s lawyers said that the sheriff’s office had ignored public records requests seeking evidence of anyone interpreting the post as a threat. The lawyers also noted that the local school district had “no records at all” relating to Mr. Bushart or the post.
A few months after his release from jail, Mr. Bushart said in an interview that he had regretted the turmoil the ordeal had caused for his family. But he did not regret the post, he said.
“I could have been more dignified, classy,” he said. “But, hell, we all could be.”
He did promise his wife that he would stay off Facebook.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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