A federal appeals court ruled that Bonneville International had every right to fire Sacramento Kings announcer Grant Napear over a three-word tweet, a decision his attorney says he will fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the dismissal of Napear's lawsuit on Thursday, siding with his former employer and ending, for now, a legal battle that began after the veteran broadcaster lost both his jobs in the span of 48 hours during the 2020 protests following George Floyd's death. A three-judge panel concluded that Bonneville acted within its rights because Napear's social media activity fell within the scope of his professional role, the New York Post reported.
Napear had spent 31 years as the Kings' play-by-play voice. He also hosted a show on Bonneville-owned KTHK radio in Sacramento. All of it vanished over a single tweet, one that said nothing hateful, threatened no one, and expressed a sentiment that most Americans, asked cold, would probably agree with.
The sequence of events was swift. In May 2020, former Kings star DeMarcus Cousins, then playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, asked Napear on Twitter, "What's your take on BLM?" Napear, off work and watching protest coverage at the time, replied that he was glad to hear from Cousins and wrote: "ALL LIVES MATTER... EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!"
Bonneville suspended him the next day. One day after that, the company fired him from both positions, his radio show and his Kings announcing role. Two days from tweet to termination, after three decades on the job.
Napear sued, arguing the tweet was personal political expression made on his own time, on an account he personally owned, outside any broadcast or work assignment. His attorney, Matthew Ruggles, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the firing punished private speech, not professional misconduct:
"Grant Napear actually owned that Twitter account, had published approximately 38,500 tweets before he tweeted 'All Lives Matter...Every Single One,' and that tweet was not made on-air, during work, or as part of any radio show. It was Grant's personal expression, and that issue should be decided by a jury, not the court."
The lower court never let a jury weigh in. U.S. District Judge Dale Drozd, an Obama appointee, dismissed the lawsuit without a trial. Napear appealed to the 9th Circuit.
The appeals panel, Judges Bridget Bade, Danielle Forrest, and Lawrence VanDyke, all appointed by President Donald Trump, ruled unanimously against Napear. The panel pointed to language in his employment contract that required him to maintain "a high standard of care and level of responsibility" on social media because his posts could affect the company's "public image and reputation."
Because Napear was a public figure whose Twitter presence was tied to his broadcasting career, the court found that his activity on the platform "involved his celebrity persona such that his statement fell within the scope of his professional capacity." In the panel's reading, the tweet was not purely private speech, it was speech by a well-known broadcaster whose online identity and professional identity were inseparable.
The court went further, concluding that California law does not appear to "prevent employers from limiting employees' political expression undertaken within the scope of their employment such that it impacts the public reputation" of the employer. That framing gave Bonneville broad latitude. If a broadcaster's personal Twitter account counts as professional conduct, then the employer's authority over that speech is effectively unlimited.
Ruggles disputed the ruling and said he plans to seek a rehearing before the full appeals court. If that fails, he intends to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case.
After his firing, Napear spent five years podcasting, locked out of the industry where he had built his name. He returned to radio last August as a daily host on Fox Sports Radio in Sacramento, but the court fight over his termination continued.
Napear's career was not without controversy before 2020. He had previously drawn criticism for defending former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and for calling his former broadcast partner, Doug Christie, a "coward" for not standing by him after the firing. But none of that was the basis for his termination. Bonneville fired him over three words: "All Lives Matter."
The ruling carries implications well beyond one broadcaster in Sacramento. If an employer can fire a public-facing employee for expressing a mainstream political opinion on a personal social media account, and a federal court will uphold that firing by classifying the employee's entire online presence as professional conduct, then the practical free-speech protections for anyone with a recognizable name are vanishingly thin. The contract language Bonneville relied on is boilerplate in media companies across the country.
The case also sits in an uncomfortable spot for conservatives. Three Trump-appointed judges reached this result. The legal reasoning was grounded in contract law and employer prerogatives, principles the right typically defends. But the practical effect was to validate a firing that looked, to many observers, like a company caving to political pressure during a period of intense ideological conformity.
Ruggles framed the core issue as one of jury access, not just legal doctrine. His argument was straightforward: whether a tweet posted off the clock, on a personal account, about a matter of public concern counts as professional conduct is a factual question, one that twelve citizens, not a panel of judges, should decide. The courts so far have disagreed.
The 9th Circuit's reasoning hinged on the idea that a well-known broadcaster cannot separate his public persona from his employer's brand. That logic could apply to any employee with a meaningful public profile, reporters, coaches, professors, executives, doctors with media appearances. If your name recognition traces back to your job, your employer owns your speech. That is the principle this ruling endorses.
Napear's case is not the first time a broadcaster lost a job over social media. In 2010, former major league pitcher Mike Bacsik was fired by a Dallas radio station after posting a disparaging comment about "Mexicans in San Antonio." But Bacsik's post was an ethnic slur. Napear's was a political statement that offended no one outside the narrow ideological window of summer 2020.
The difference matters. "All Lives Matter" was not a slur. It was not a threat. It was not obscene. It became a firing offense only because the political climate of that moment demanded it, and because an employer decided that appeasing that climate was worth more than a 31-year employee.
If Ruggles follows through on his promise to take this to the Supreme Court, the justices will face a question that millions of American workers already know the answer to from experience: in corporate America, the wrong opinion at the wrong moment can cost you everything, and no contract clause is too vague to justify it.
When "All Lives Matter" is grounds for termination and a federal court agrees, the problem is not the tweet, it is the standard.
