Unless there is a shift in the legal Force or a big-bucks settlement, the Disney and Gina Carano will go head-to-head at trial next year over the former mixed martial artist’s 2021 firing from The Mandalorian.
That trial will start September 29, 2025, to be specific.
After having beaten the Mouse House and its Daniel Petrocelli-led legal team’s move earlier this year to get her Elon Musk-backed sex-discrimination and wrongful-dismissal suit tossed, Carano this week scored another winner, with a federal judge denying Disney’s desire for a stay of proceedings and interlocutory appeal.
“Having considered the parties’ submissions, the relevant law, and the record in this case, the Court DENIES the Motion,” U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett wrote earlier this week. In refusing to give the green light to Disney’s hopes of taking the matter to another court and overturning her July 24 decision rejecting their motion for dismissal, the ruling has set the clock ticking on the trial.
In fact, with her previous ruling being challenged by the very nature of Disney’s latest motion and desire for an appeal, Garnett made sure to knock down any notion Disney and its outside counsel may or may not have had of getting the upper hand.
“Defendants do not, however, explain how a Ninth Circuit opinion affirming the Court’s Order would alleviate the burden of responding to the discovery Plaintiff has propounded to date, nor is it apparent to the Court how such a decision could provide such relief,” Garnett writes in the 10-page order. “In any event, arguments regarding discovery — which, the Court notes, were not at issue in the Order — do not appear to have any bearing on the termination of the litigation and do not persuade the Court that certification is appropriate here.”
In other words: Don’t waste my time, we’re all adults here.
In fact, the judge may have tipped her hand to her take on all this last month when she decided there would be no need for oral argument on either the appeal certification or the stay by the lawyers. On September 19, the case docket said “no appearance necessary.”
With this new order from Garnett allowing discovery to move forward, it means Carano and her lawyers will be getting a look soon-ish at what went on internally at Disney three years ago in the lead-up to the firing of the on-the-rise actress, who played Rebel shock trooper Cara Dune on The Mandalorian, over views she expressed on social media and otherwise.
Whether that leads to the injunction that will get Carano her job back is a whole other matter. Still, in also seeking a variety of unspecified damages, Carano was taking the win today.
“I am obviously very pleased with the opportunity to keep moving forward with the judicial process and into discovery,” she wrote Thursday on social media of the October 15 order. “While I wish this was not necessary as it is not my desire to be in this battle in court, I will not shrink away from it because it is hard or uncomfortable.”
Disney had no comment on this latest turn in the Carano case when contacted by Disney.
In its April 9 dismissal motion against Carano’s suit over being fired from The Mandalorian, Disney insisted, as it had before, that the ex-martial arts fighter lost her high-profile Star Wars series gig three years ago because of her 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.”
After portraying fan-fave bounty hunter Cara Dune for two seasons, this all came to a breaking point when Carano shared a TikTok post in 2021 that looked to compare the current divided political climate in America to Nazi Germany.
Responding in May, Carano’s Schaerr Jaffe lawyers said: “After admitting that they discriminated against Carano for her personal political beliefs and subjected her to disparate treatment from her similarly situated male co-stars, The Walt Disney Company, Lucasfilm LTD, and Huckleberry Industries (collectively, “Defendants”) assert that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives them absolute immunity.”
“Defendants are incorrect.”
Clearly, to some small degree at least, the judge in the case agrees.