Things are heating up in the battle between the Walt Disney corporation and former Mandalorian actress Gina Carano.
In the ongoing lawsuit, filed by Carano and which alleges the actress was illegally terminated from her supporting role in the blockbuster Disney+ show due to her political views and social media posts, the latest salvo hit on Wednesday:
Disney has filed a motion to dismiss the entire matter.
Although the dismissal in question happened in February 2021 after she publicly likened the marginalization and violent targeting of conservatives to that experienced by German Jews in the years preceding the Holocaust, the expensive lawsuit didn’t commence until Elon Musk became aware of the matter after his purchase of Twitter, and brought money and attorneys to bear on the matter. Carano filed the suit against Lucasfilm and its parent company Disney in February of this year.
In her controversial remarks on twitter, she pointed out that the Holocaust didn’t happen out of the blue, but was preceded by a years-long propaganda campaign stoking intro-community hatred, turning the Jews into an out-group even among their own neighbors. Hating someone for their Jewishness, she said, isn’t a far cry from hating a person for their political opinions.
These were not the first comments by Carano that her then-employer found problematic. She had previously questioned the 2020 presidential election results, objected to the Covid restrictions, and posted an R2-D2 gif declaring that her personal pronouns were “beep/bop/boop,” all stances at odds with the public political image Disney has aggressively cultivated since the mid-2010s. According to Disney’s dismissal motion, her comments invoking the Holocaust were the “final straw.”
In its motion, Disney asserts a constitutional right to dissociate its artistic expression from Carano’s public image, a stance which would grant it (and all media companies) immunity from the California law which protects employees from retaliation by employers for political acts and activism done on their own time.
