Disney argued that it had the right to fire Gina Carano, the actress who played a bounty hunter on The Mandalorian, following her controversial social media posts that allegedly trivialized the Holocaust.
Carano filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in February, where she claimed she was fired 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.
On Tuesday, Disney filed a motion seeking to throw out Carano’s suit, arguing it has “a constitutional right not to associate its artistic expression with Carano’s speech.”
Carano tapped Elon Musk’s lawyers following the X (formerly known as Twitter) owner’s announcement last August that he would foot the legal bills for anyone fired over their posts. At the time, X’s head of head of business operations Joe Bennaroch said, “As a sign of X Corp’s commitment to free speech, we’re proud to provide financial support for Gina Carano’s lawsuit, empowering her to seek vindication of her free speech rights on X and the ability to work without bullying, harassment, or discrimination.” Musk agreed to pay for Carano’s lawsuit against Disney.
She was fired in February 2021 after she shared posts, which related 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?”
She had received flak previously for objecting to Covid restrictions, questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, and refused to support trans rights. Per the lawsuit, she was compelled to have a meeting with GLAAD, the LGBTQ rights organization, after she posted her pronouns as being “boop/pop/beep.”
Per the motion, her Nazi post signified the breaking point. Disney argued in the filing 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.”
A rep for Carano did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
Amidst Disney’s arguments via their lawyers against Carano’s complaint, where she also alleged sexual discrimination, since her costars Pedro Pascal and Mark Hamill appeared to not suffer consequences for their respective social media posts likening Trump and his supporters to Nazis, Disney cited the First Amendment.
“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.”
