Disney has argued that the company had a First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano, former star of The Mandalorian on Disney+, according to Variety.
- Carano was fired from the hit Star Wars series back in 2021 after a series of her social media posts were deemed “abhorrent and unacceptable.”
- Carano the sued The Walt Disney Company in February for discrimination and wrongful termination, pointing out that Disney took no action against male actors Pedro Pascal and Mark Hamill for politically-focused social media posts.
- X owner Elon Musk, who has said he would pay the legal bills of employees who had been fired for their posts on his platform, has agreed to fund Carano’s lawsuit.
- Disney filed a motion a couple of days ago to have the suit thrown out, arguing that the company has “a constitutional right not to associate its artistic expression with Carano’s speech.”
- Disney’s lawyers also issued the following statement:
- “The First Amendment protects Disney’s decision to dissociate itself from some speech but not from other, different speech. 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.”
- Deadline shared a like at Disney’s April 9 filing, which lays out a timeline of Carano’s firing:
- “Carano’s social-media usage sunk to its nadir on February 10, 2021. On that day, she reposted an Instagram post from user warriorpriestgympodcast. The post read: ‘Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. 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?’
- “Disney had enough. The same day Carano grotesquely trivialized the Holocaust as comparable to sharp political disagreements, Lucasfilm announced that ‘Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.’ A month later, Disney’s former CEO explained that Carano’s views ‘didn’t align with Company values,’ including its ‘values of respect, values of decency, values of integrity, and values of inclusion.’”