Mangum submitted an affidavit taking ownership of the posts, which an administrator deemed “not credible,” despite not having interviewed him about the posts, according to the lawsuit.

The disciplinary decision also said a professor had in the past warned Barnett multiple times about his fiance’s behavior.

The suspension drew outrage from First Amendment advocacy groups and reporters at TU’s student newspaper who covered the situation, who said the school was punishing someone for another person’s legally protected speech.

The student journalists’ reporting prompted a campus-wide email from TU President Steadman Upham last February, who said hearings are not part of the process when investigating harassment complaints and that such proceedings are bound by confidentiality.

“It feels like there’s a strong vendetta against me, and I don’t know what I did wrong to hurt these people,” Barnett told the Tulsa World last year. “My (faculty) mentor and the person I trusted the most … she decided she was done with me. So she wrote a complaint saying that we (Barnett and Mangum) were working in cahoots and that I had done all this damage to the department.”