Wolfson campus in Miami Dade College. Photo: Aixa Montero Holt.

A former Miami Dade College professor won an appeal Wednesday to get her lawsuit reinstated — without hiring a lawyer.

Isabel del Pino-Allen persuaded the Third District Court of Appeal to reverse the dismissal of her defamation case against former communications department colleague Juan Santelises, who argued he was immune from suit as a public official.

The appeal arose from a salacious case involving the two professors' work on a communications textbook. Del Pino-Allen sounded the alarm in 2014 about potential plagiarism in the book, “The Freedom to Communicate,” which had three other co-authors. Ironically, some of the allegedly lifted passages were about plagiarism.

The college's investigation found no evidence of plagiarism. Afterward, Santelises told administrators that his colleague ”frequently” walked around topless in public, according to the slander lawsuit. Del Pino-Allen was fired.

The former professor said the indecent exposure allegation was false and retaliatory.

“I am 63 years old,” del Pino-Allen said. “When this happened, I was 60. This is outrageous. Now, if you see somebody walking down the street bare-breasted, wouldn't you call the police? … The reason he didn't report it was because it never happened.”

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jorge Cueto initially dismissed del Pino-Allen's complaint, accepting the “public official” defense. But the appellate panel found Santelises, who still works at the college, was not del Pino-Allen's supervisor or otherwise immune from litigation for his alleged comments.

“Mr. Santelises's claim of absolute immunity is not discernible from the four corners of the complaint and applicable precedent, at this procedural juncture,” ruled Third DCA Judge Vance Salter, with Barbara Lagoa and Richard Suarez concurring. “It has not been established that Mr. Santelises occupies a high-ranking, political position within a governmental entity, or that he was required by administrative rule to evaluate the job performance of Ms. [del] Pino-Allen.”

Santelises' lead attorney, Luke Savage of Allen Norton & Blue in Coral Gables, did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.

The court made no findings on the underlying allegations. Del Pino-Allen said she is energized to keep pursuing the lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, along with cases she filed against the college and the union.

There were other complaints about del Pino-Allen from her colleagues, she said, including the name she chose for an ethics scholarship established with her proceeds from the book. She called it the Charlene Olivia Jones Do The Right Thing Scholarship.

There is no Charlene Olivia Jones, she said — the joke was that C.O. Jones spells “cojones,” a Spanish term for testicles that connotes courage.

The former professor said she could not afford a lawyer who would take on a deep-pocketed defendant like the college. After she was fired in May 2015, her family struggled for a couple of years until she was eligible for Social Security benefits and a pension, del Pino-Allen said.

“It's very difficult to be a pro se litigant because the system assumes that if you are not an attorney, you are an idiot,” she said. “But apparently I did something right.”