A month after Disney and Lucasfilm filed paperwork to have Gina Carano’s wrongful-discharge and sex-discrimination suit tossed out, the fired Mandalorian star has kicked back to keep her Elon Musk-backed legal action off the mat.
“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,” says the May 9 response to defendants motion to dismiss from Carano’s Schaerr Jaffe lawyers filed in federal court here in LA (read it here). “Defendants are incorrect.”
Tugging the Constitution out of the Mouse House’s hands, the reply adds: “Neither the First Amendment itself nor the few cases applying the First Amendment in the context of casting give employers the right to control or punish the personal speech of employees. None of Carano’s comments reference Defendants, Star Wars, or The Mandalorian, or had anything to do with Defendants. Carano’s claims do not seek to impose any message on Defendants or to change Defendants’ speech in any fashion.”
“Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss should be denied,” Carano’s team states, noting “the First Amendment does not give Defendants the carte blanche authority to terminate Carano for expressing her personal beliefs.”
A hearing on the dismissal motion by Disney and the other defendants against former MMA star Carano has been set for June 12 in DTLA before Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett.
Just a touch under three years after Carano was pink slipped by Disney for what Lucasfilm said were “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities,” the bounty hunter Cara Dune actress sued the once again Bob Iger-run entertainment giant Star Wars division of Disney and Huckleberry Industries. Looking for an injuction to get her Mandalorian gig back Carano he straw that seemingly broke the Mouse’s back, Carano in 2021 shared a TikTok post that looked to compare the current divided political climate in America to Nazi Germany.
In his own ongoing dust-up with Disney, who pulled their ads from portions of X over ill-considered rewets, Musk came out pretty quick to admit he was paying Carano’s legal bills. As a part of her action, Carano called out what she saw as a sexist double standard by the so-called progressive Disney to allow the likes of Pedro Pascal and Mark Hamill to post on social media over and over comparing Trump to Hitler.
As always in these things, there was some accompanying sparring on social media.
Last month, things moved back to the courts last month.
On April 10, Disney, Lucasfilm and Huckleberry filed their motion to dismiss.
In that document, the defendants proclaimed that Carano lost her Star Wars series job in 2021 because of her social media choices “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.” Stating that Carabo’s posts and tweets, did jive with DIsney’s values, the company last month wanted the initial filing gone “noted on the grounds 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.”
A stance Carano disagrees with, no suprise.
“As to the specifics of Carano’s Complaint, and contrary to Defendants’ assertion, Carano did not disparage anyone, and she certainly did not ‘publicly trivialize the Holocaust,’ let alone ‘grotesquely’ do so,” the response filed this week says.
Judge Garnett will hear arguments from both sides next month.
No longer packing on the Disney dollars, Carano has had a good run with The Daily Wire’s production company. ever since. Linking with the conservative media outlet, she has appeared in Terror on the Prairie and as a Secret Service agent in the Breitbart News-distributed My Son Hunter.
A fourth season of The Mandalorian seems to be paused for the time being as a Jon Favreau-directed feature The Mandalorian & Grogu has been set for a May 2026 release.