Disney filed a motion to dismiss Gina Carano’s lawsuit, which alleges that the politically conservative actress was wrongfully fired from her supporting role on The Mandalorian Disney+ show for posting a series of social-media posts.
With the help of Elon Musk’s funding and attorneys, Carano sued Disney and Lucasfilm in February on the grounds that she faced unlawful retaliation for expressing her political views on social media. Disney fired Carano in February 2021 after she compared the treatment of modern-day conservatives to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust.
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors . . . even by children,” Carano posted.
“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,” she wrote. “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Carano had previously objected publicly to Covid-19 restrictions and questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. She also posted that her pronouns are “beep/bop/boop” with a GIF of R2-D2 from Star Wars; this tweet drew outrage from transgender activists. But the Holocaust post was the “final straw” for Disney, according to its court motion filed Tuesday.
“Disney had enough,” the company’s lawyers wrote.
Disney argued that it “has a constitutional right not to associate its artistic expression with Carano’s speech,” citing the First Amendment. The entertainment conglomerate compared itself to a newspaper, which “is entitled to broad deference in choosing which writers to employ to express its editorial positions.” Because Disney is similarly engaged in speech, it too, Disney said, has the authority to employ whoever embodies its “artistic messages.”
“Disney thus was entitled to protect its creative speech in the ‘Star Wars’ series from association with views Disney and many viewers (and potential viewers) considered offensive and contrary to Disney’s values,” the motion states. “Carano’s presence as a prominent actor on ‘The Mandalorian’ interfered with Disney’s choice not to produce a show associated with her beliefs.”
In the lawsuit, Carano’s lawyers cited a California law that forbids employers from retaliating against employees over political activity. The actress and former mixed-martial artist also claimed that Disney engaged in sex discrimination by treating her differently than her male co-stars, who often expressed political views.
For example, Pedro Pascal and Mark Hamill — who respectively play Din Djarin and Luke Skywalker — repeatedly likened former president Donald Trump and his supporters to Nazis. Unlike the views held by Pascal and Hamill, Carano’s opinions didn’t align with Disney’s progressive ideology.
Still, Disney rejected the comparison made between the two male stars’ posts and Carano’s.
“The First Amendment protects Disney’s decision to dissociate itself from some speech but not from other, different speech,” the motion reads. “The First Amendment mandates deference to the speaker’s own decisions about what speech to associate with, even if others might consider those decisions ‘internally inconsistent.'”
“Carano thus cannot stake out a discrimination claim by alleging that Disney accorded different treatment to different statements by different actors.”