Hours after the assassination, Anna Kenney opened Facebook and wrote the words that would make her a cautionary tale.
Those words are still reverberating. Some people found them despicable. Strangers sent Kenney menacing text messages. A congressman threatened Emory University’s federal funding. Emory terminated Kenney’s employment.
Within Kenney’s household, a modest town home in Avondale Estates she shares with her husband, two dogs and four cats, the cost of those words is high and steadily rising.
Her husband has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He coughs and gags so violently that he recently tore a muscle. The loss of his wife’s job meant that both of them lost their health insurance.
Kenney’s sudden departure from Emory also weakened the collective effort to cure pediatric cancer, the single most deadly disease among American children. Kenney was a leader in that fight for decades, a researcher probing the vulnerabilities of brain-cancer cells and looking for better ways to destroy them.
One day in September, her work came to a halt. Her office was cleaned out. Some of its contents were stuffed in a cardboard box that once held SkinnyPop popcorn. GRAB & GO, the box said.
Now it was a Wednesday morning in October. She was 56 years old and it had been more than three weeks since she stopped going to work even though she was a distinguished scientist with a Ph.D. from Yale and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Kenney sat on her deck near a grove of towering pines and went through the box, looking at microscopic images that had appeared on the covers of scientific journals.
She picked up a toy, something like a stuffed animal, a woolly gray creature she had won as a prize in a trivia contest on a retreat with her Ph.D. students at Emory. It represented an untreated cancer cell. Kenney turned it inside out, and it became a treated cell. It looked happier.
A visitor asked how it felt to look through her souvenirs.
“It’s sad,” she said, “but I mean, I can’t blame Emory for what happened.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
And then she was telling the story from the beginning, Sept. 10, when someone in Utah fired a gun and the leader of a movement fell silent. Kenney was in the car, listening to the CNN channel on SiriusXM radio, when she heard that Charlie Kirk had been killed.
She didn’t know much about Kirk — in fact, she says she’d never heard of him before that day — but at home she began doing some research. The more of his political statements she read, the less she liked him. And so, when a friend posted something on Facebook about the assassination, Kenney commented on her friend’s status. She wrote, in part,
“Should I feel bad that I don’t feel bad about Charlie Kirk? Reading his sayings, he seems like a disgusting individual.”
There was another comment, too, even more pointed. Two words she would later claim not to remember writing.
Kenney still doesn’t know how two comments on a friend’s Facebook page reached such a wide audience. A day or two after writing them, she was driving a cat to the vet when a friend texted her about her social media. Kenney checked her Facebook page to find many vitriolic comments from people she did not know. Word reached Emory colleagues. Anna Kenney was going viral.
On the social media platform X, early on the morning of Sept. 12, an account called Leftism posted a picture. It combined Kenney’s Facebook comments with a screenshot from her own Facebook page that listed various jobs she’d held over the years, including her job as an associate professor at Emory. It also had a picture of her smiling and holding up a glass — a picture that Kenney says was taken from a date with her husband at Longhorn Steakhouse before Kirk’s assassination. On X, alongside the combined pictures, the text of the post said this:
Meet Anna Kenney.
Here she celebrates Charlie Kirk being murdered, and attempts to justify his murder.
She is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at @EmoryMedicine.
The Leftism account says it is dedicated to exposing leftism, leftists, and fake Republicans. It has more than 200,000 followers. According to X, the post drew more than 4 million impressions. One account that amplified the post belonged to Rep. Buddy Carter, Republican of Savannah. The congressman’s X account added this commentary:
ENOUGH. It’s time to stand up to dangerous, radical hate. Our federal government shouldn’t be sending hundreds of millions to places that employ people who say this. Either hate-filled professors like this are fired, or those funds are GONE.
Emory takes pride in its federal research grants. The university recently announced it had received nearly $500 million from the National Institutes for Health last year. Some grants have been canceled under the Trump administration, which is threatening to cut funding further at many prominent universities over issues including diversity policies and alleged antisemitism.
Four days after Carter delivered his ultimatum, Kenney got a phone call saying she’d been fired. Other schools and corporations, including here in Atlanta, have suspended or fired employees for social media posts that appeared to condone Kirk’s killing.
It’s not clear whether Carter’s threat played any role in Kenney’s termination, even though Kenney says she believes it did.
In an email, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond if there was any connection. Diamond declined to answer the question. But Kenney’s termination letter gave other reasons for her dismissal.
The letter, which Kenney shared with the AJC, said Kenney had violated “Emory’s conduct expectations and applicable policies.” It cited two statements Kenney had made about Kirk’s death, including these two words:
Good riddance.
In the interview on her deck, Kenney tried to clarify.
“I didn’t mean good riddance to the man,” she said. “I meant good riddance to the ideology.”
But the ideology was not gone, of course, and Kenney’s reluctance to admit writing this comment did her no favors with those deciding her fate. The termination letter told Kenney she had “adamantly denied making the ‘good riddance’ comment and insisted that your account was ‘hacked’ during two separate interviews with School of Medicine leadership,” and that even after technology experts found no evidence of tampering she still claimed not to remember writing those two words.
The “hacking” claim may have involved a miscommunication. Kenney says she meant that her own Facebook page was set to private, meaning only friends could see it, so she didn’t understand how strangers had been able to comment on her page and how the Leftism account had gotten access to text and a picture from her page. In any case, Emory administrators were not pleased.
“Your social media statements concerning the murder of another human being were inflammatory, inappropriate, and wholly inconsistent with Emory’s values and mission,” the letter said.
“Among the many complaints Emory has received about your social media posts, your statements have resulted in threats and unwanted attention to individual members of the Emory community who do not know you and who had nothing to do with your comments. In addition, patients have expressed distrust in receiving care at Emory due to your words. Similarly, your actions have resulted in parents questioning Emory’s ability to educate their students. For these reasons, your relationship with Emory must end.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Four nights after the assassination and three days before she was fired, Kenney received a text message from an unfamiliar number. It contained a picture of homes in her neighborhood. The message said,
Sleep tight professor. “Good Riddance.”
In a brief telephone conversation, Kenney had told a reporter she wouldn’t have written the Facebook posts if given the chance to decide again. On the deck, three weeks after her firing, she was asked to talk more about that feeling. Did she regret writing what she wrote?
Now, two days after the phone call, it seemed as if she’d changed her mind. She said something about freedom of speech, about feeling shocked, about not having said anything to glorify Kirk’s death. The reporter asked again: Do you wish you had done it differently?
Kenney paused. She was still trying to formulate an answer when her husband, Tony, a retired chef, walked outside.
“Made lunch for you guys,” he said.
It was a small thing he could do for her after all she had done for him: staying at his bedside when he was in the hospital on a ventilator, taking time off work to care for him at home, walking their 120-pound black Lab because he was too weak to do it himself. He said he was a shell of his former self, but he could still make a caprese salad for the one he sometimes called Wonder Woman.
“Oh,” she said, “thank you, love.”
Kenney dug into the salad and continued with her answer.
“I would hate to say that in this country, you shouldn’t be able to say what you believe. And I am proud to say that although I was fired, it’s not because I was a bad scientist. I didn’t fake data. I didn’t abuse students. I was fired for exercising my right to freedom of speech.”
As a private institution, Emory says it is not subject to the First Amendment. Nevertheless, it does have an Open Expression Policy that protects some speech. The policy gives “broad latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn,” and notes that “Listeners’ feelings of offense or the unpopularity of the view expressed are not sufficient bases for regulating speech on campus.”
Noëlle McAfee, president of Emory’s faculty senate, said she believes Kenney’s termination violated this policy. A preliminary investigation by a senate committee reached the same conclusion. But administrators are not bound by this ruling, and Kenney’s case has had a chilling effect on the Emory faculty.
“People are afraid,” McAfee said.
On the deck in Avondale Estates, Kenney was complaining about the picture on X that made it inaccurately seem as if she were raising a glass to Kirk’s death. A reporter pointed out that the quotes were not fabricated.
“Yeah,” Kenney said faintly.
“No,” her husband said, “she didn’t write ‘good riddance.’ She wrote—”
“I did, Tony,” she said.
“Oh,” he said, “you did?”
“It’s out there on the internet,” she said.
It all seemed like an unnecessary loss: the job, the paycheck, the health insurance for her ailing husband, the research that could help find a cure for pediatric brain cancer. The reporter tried once again to ask the question the right way. To help Kenney imagine an alternate universe in which, instead of typing a few provocative words on her iPhone, she had gone outside and taken a walk.
Did she wish she had done that instead?
“I really can’t say,” she said, still searching for the right words.
“I — you know.”
“I said what I said. And these are the consequences.”
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