A federal judge denied Disney’s attempt to dismiss Gina Carano’s wrongful termination lawsuit against the company, with a trial now imminent between the Mandalorian actress and her former employer.
In February, Carano (backed by Elon Musk) sued Disney after she claimed she was booted from the Star Wars series after a slew of social media posts that allegedly “trivialized” the Holocaust.
In the lawsuit, Carano claimed that she was fired in February 2021 for sharing her conservative opinions on social media, while other costars — such as Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal, were not reprimanded and kept their jobs after voicing their liberal views.
Carano’s controversial tweets compared the treatment of today’s conservatives to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, writing, “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. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Two months after the lawsuit was filed, Disney petitioned in April to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that “Carano’s decision to publicly trivialize the Holocaust by comparing criticism of political conservatives to the annihilation of millions of Jewish people — notably, not ‘thousands’ — was the final straw for Disney.”
“The First Amendment protects Disney’s decision to dissociate itself from some speech but not from other, different speech,” Disney’s lawyers wrote. “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.”
However, in her hearing Wednesday, Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett denied Disney’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit, The Hollywood Reporter writes, setting the stage for a trial if the two sides don’t reach a settlement before then.
“Defendants are not members-only, nonprofit organizations. Instead, Defendants are for-profit corporations who, as relevant to this lawsuit, employ actors such as Plaintiff, as well as administrative staff, to create television series and films.” Judge Garnett wrote in her decision Wednesday, adding that Disney had “not identified any evidence—in the Complaint or otherwise—to substantiate a claim that they employ public-facing actors for the purpose of promoting the ‘values of respect,’ ‘decency,’ ‘integrity,’ or ‘inclusion.’ Accordingly, Defendants’ invocation of the supposedly detrimental effects of Plaintiff’s ‘mere presence’ as one of Defendants’ employees lacks constitutional import.”
