Gina Carano, the actress who was fired from The Mandalorian for offensive and antisemitic posts, is now suing Lucasfilm and Disney for discrimination and wrongful termination. And because her comments were made on X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk is funding the lawsuit as part of his initiative to cover costs for users who faced discrimination for activity on his site.
“I would like to express my deepest gratitude & thank you to @ElonMusk & @X for giving me an opportunity to bring my case to light,” Carano said in a statement shared to X on Tuesday.
Carano is hoping to get a court order that would force Lucasfilm to recast her as her Mandalorian character, the bounty hunter Cara Dune, whom she played for two seasons of the Disney+ show. She is also seeking at least $75,000, plus punitive damages.
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Carano was fired in February 2021 after she shared, and then deleted, an antisemitic Instagram Story in which she compared today’s divided political climate to Nazi Germany. That was just one of many inflammatory posts she’d shared around that time; she also made statements deriding COVID-19 mask mandates, mocking pronoun usage, and criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement.
Lucasfilm claimed Carano was axed from the Star Wars series over posts that “denigrat[ed] people based on their cultural and religious identities.” But according to Carano’s lawsuit, obtained by The Daily Beast, she thinks she was fired because she is a woman.
“Even though ‘the Force is female,’ [Lucasfilm and Disney] chose to target a woman while looking the other way when it came to men,” the lawsuit states. “While Carano was fired, Defendants took no action against male actors who took equally or more vigorous and controversial positions on social media.”
Her suit continues: “Carano has returned to demand that they be held accountable for their bullying, discriminatory, and retaliatory actions—actions that inflicted not only substantial emotional harm, but millions of dollars in lost income.”
As for what that “lost income” might entail, Carano’s suit claims that Disney and Lucasfilm refused to hire her for roles already promised to her, “including but not limited to Season 3 of The Mandalorian, the new series Rangers of the New Republic, and planned future Stars Wars full length feature films (which have recently been announced)—all because of her political beliefs.”
A representative for Disney did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
