Disney Attempts To Dismiss Gina Carano’s Wrongful Termination Lawsuit, Argues First Amendment “Provides A Complete Defense” Against ‘The Mandalorian’ Actress’ Claims
Spencer Baculi
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In offering their first official response to former The Mandalorian actress Gina Carano’s wrongful termination lawsuit, Disney has moved to dismiss her legal action on the grounds that, in their opinion, the First Amendment of the US constitution provides them the “right to dissociate its own artistic message from Carano’s outspoken ‘political beliefs.’
As previously reported, thanks to financial and legal assistance from Tesla company founder Elon Musk, the former Cara Dune actress announced first announced her intent to take the House of Mouse and its subsidiary studio to court (the full filing of which can be read here) on February 6th via a lengthy post made to her official Twitter account.
“After my 20 years of building a career from scratch, and during the regime of former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, Lucasfilm made this statement on Twitter, terminating me from The Mandalorian: ‘Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm & there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural & religious identities are abhorrent & unacceptable,'” recapped the actress of the chain of events which led to her being completely excised from the Star Wars franchise.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” she countered. “The truth is I was being hunted down from everything I posted to every post I liked because I was not in line with the acceptable narrative of the time. My words were consistently twisted to demonize & dehumanize me as an alt right wing extremist. It was a bullying smear campaign aimed at silencing, destroying & making an example out of me.”
“Look with your own eyes at what I posted [seen below] and ask yourself, for example, where did I compare Republicans to the Jewish people in the holocaust?” Carano asked of the public. “I didn’t. Ask yourself why they were calling me a racist, was there any merit behind that or history of it whatsoever? No.”
“Look at why I was called a transphobe–for making droid noises from Star Wars?” she further invited. “‘Beep, bop, boop’ [seen below] was obviously directed to the online bullies and did not in any way denigrate transgender people.”
“Hollywood says they support female representation & equal rights,” the actress continued. “Why then were my male co-stars permitted to speak without harassment & re-education courses or termination [an ostensible reference to The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal’s own post-election behavior online], but I was not afforded the same right to exercise my freedom of speech.”
“Artists do not sign away our rights as American citizens when we enter into employment,” she added. “I have spoken to all my co-stars since I was fired & there is nothing but care and kind words between us. I respect their right to free speech & do not have to think the same on every issue to be their friends & work with them & I know they feel the same towards me.”
Interestingly, it is this same constitutional American right to free speech that Disney has pointed to in defense of their cutting ties with Carano.
Filing a motion to dismiss Carano’s lawsuit on April 9th, the House of Mouse’s attorneys argued that “Disney has a constitutional right not to associate its artistic expression with Carano’s speech, such that the First Amendment provides a complete defense to Carano’s claims.”
“As Carano’s own fame rose with her character’s, Carano began engaging with show fans and the public in a manner that, in Disney’s view, came to distract from and undermine Disney’s own expressive efforts,” recapped Disney of their side of the story. “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.”
“Carano’s claims are all barred by the First Amendment,” they then asserted. “As the Supreme Court held in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the First Amendment embodies a core principle of “speaker’s autonomy” that bars the state from dictating to expressive enterprises what to say, how to say it, and whom to say it through. As the Court further held in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, that principle means that a state cannot force an employer engaged in speech to speak through an employee whose own views or public profile could compromise the employer’s own message, even if the employee does not express her views on the job.”
To this end, Disney then affirmed, “State law can protect employee political activity ‘without violating the employer’s free speech rights’ [this quotation being cited from a 2012 paper by UCLA law professor and constitutional attorney Eugene Volokh].
“What state law cannot do, however, is force entities that do create speech products to speak through writers or singers or actors whose own speech and public profile could, in the employer’s view, compromise the employer’s ability to express itself in its own chosen manner,” they declared. “Carano’s suit contravenes that rule. It is an impermissible effort to invoke state power to override a private entity’s decisions about what to say in its own art and how to say it. The complaint should be dismissed.”
Drawing their argument to a close, Disney ultimately posited that “the First Amendment protects Disney’s decision to dissociate itself from some speech but not from other, different speech.”
“Carano evidently believes the other actors’ statements were sufficiently similar to hers to warrant identical concern from Disney, but under the rule of speaker’s autonomy, that determination is not for her—or a jury—to make,” they explained. “Rather, 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’ [this quotation being cited from the aforementioned Supreme Court devision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale]. Carano thus cannot stake out a discrimination claim by alleging that Disney accorded different treatment to different statements by different actors.”
As of writing, the US Central District Court of California Judge overseeing the case, the Hon. Sherilyn Peace Garnett, has yet to rule on Disney’s request.
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