A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling and reinstated a jury’s retaliation award to a former college athletic department employee who was fired after he supported a co-worker’s sexual harassment claim.

Shortly after Jackson State University in Mississippi appointed Vivian Fuller as its new athletic director, a department secretary, Lolita Ward, claimed Ms. Fuller “gave her looks and gestures of a sexual nature,” according to Monday’s ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans in Frederick L. Robinson v. Jackson State University et al.

Ms. Fuller fired Ms. Ward in October 2011, and Ms. Ward filed a retaliation charge with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After the termination, the college president told the department she would terminate anyone who opposed Ms. Fuller, according to the ruling.

Mr. Robinson, an athletic department employee, corroborated Ms. Ward’s charges to an EEOC investigator in the presence of two university attorneys. One month later, Ms. Fuller fired both Mr. Robinson and another employee who had supported Ms. Ward.

Mr. Robinson filed suit against Jackson State and Ms. Fuller in U.S. District Court in Jackson charging retaliation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment.

A jury awarded Mr. Robinson $7,100 in lost income, $25,000 for emotional pain and suffering, and $75,000 in punitive damages. The court granted Jackson State’s motion for judgment as a matter of law, concluding Mr. Robinson “lacked sufficient evidence of decisionmaker knowledge,” according to the ruling.

A three-judge panel unanimously reinstated Mr. Robinson’s award. “Robinson’s evidence gave the jury a more-than-adequate basis to infer decisionmaker knowledge,” the ruling said.

“At bottom, the jury could have accepted as mere coincidence that Dr. Fuller unknowingly (indeed, fortuitously) happened to eliminate the sole dissenting employees shortly after they spoke up.

“But given the totality of the record, the jury was not obligated to do so, and for that reason we leave their decisionmaker-knowledge finding intact,” said the ruling, in reversing the lower court’s decision, remanding the case for further proceedings and ruling the case should be reassigned to another District Court judge.

Last month, a federal appeals court reinstated a retaliation claim against a Virginia school board for allegedly refusing to remove a letter of reprimand from an employee’s file.