Disney is claiming it had every right to fire actor Gina Carano after she made a social media post comparing the Holocaust to the circumstances of American conservatives in 2021, citing First Amendment rights.
In a new motion filed Tuesday evening, the company argued that her wrongful-termination and sex-discrimination lawsuit from February should be thrown out.
“Carano’s views ‘didn’t align with Company values,’” the entertainment giant wrote, adding that it has “a constitutional right not to associate its artistic expression with Carano’s speech,” according to court documents obtained by news outlets.
Carano, a 41-year-old MMA fighter-turned-actor who starred in the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian,” was fired in February 2021 after she shared an Instagram post that compared Nazi Germany to the present-day U.S.
“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,” she said in the post. “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
The actress had already been disciplined by Disney for earlier social media posts in which she publicly challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 election, rejected COVID restrictions and mocked transgender rights, writing that her pronouns were “boop/bop/beep.”
As a result, Disney forced her to attend a meeting with the LGBTQ rights organization GLAAD. It said her later post “grotesquely trivialized the Holocaust as comparable to sharp political disagreements.”
Carano aruged in her suit that California law protects workers’ rights to engage in political activity.
Disney countered that there’s an exception for entertainment companies, which “must necessarily speak through their employees.”
Disney argued that Carano’s presence in “The Mandalorian” creates a situation in which it is inherently reflected by her beliefs and its “entitled to protect its creative speech” from things “contrary to Disney’s values.”
