Disney has filed to throw out Gina Carano’s wrongful termination suit, according to court documents obtained by The Daily Beast, in which the company said it has every right to “decide which performers to employ to express its artistic messages.”
Carano, a guest actress on the first two seasons of Disney’s The Mandalorian, in which she played Cara Dune, was not asked to return for the show’s third season after she posted several messages to her social media profiles that Disney’s CEO (at the time) Bob Chapek, said “didn’t align with company values.”
After posting that suicide and murder rates were somehow related to widespread pandemic closures and vaccine mandates, questioning Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, and mocking people for displaying their pronouns (she posted that hers were “boop/bop/beep,” according to the filing), Disney said her post “trivializing the Holocaust” was the “final straw.”
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“Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews,” Carano wrote online at the time, “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Disney's side wrote in the filing that Carano’s decision to compare “criticism of political conservatives to the annihilation of millions of Jewish people—notably, not ‘thousands,’” was the last time she’d be allowed to represent the company. Lucasfilm denounced her statement and publicly stated that the actress wouldn’t be returning to the show, and she was dropped from her agency, UTA.
Carano sued Disney two years later, saying the company “violated California labor laws prohibiting employers from taking adverse employment actions on the basis of an employee’s political activity.” Disney is fighting back against that claim in court, saying in the filing that having to continue employing Carano would be a violation of its own First Amendment rights.
“[State law cannot] force entities that do create speech products to speak through writers or singers or actors whose own speech and public profile could, in the employer’s view, compromise the employer’s ability to express itself in its own chosen manner,” the company’s counsel wrote in the motion filed this week.
“It is an impermissible effort to invoke state power to override a private entity’s decisions about what to say in its own art and how to say it,” Disney also said, “The complaint should be dismissed.”
As for Carano, she appeared on The Sage Steele Show this week, where she told the host: “Every once in a while, a corporation needs to get straight up kicked in the nuts—and I did.”
