Gina Carano's Trollsuit Against Disney Lives To Fight Another Day

But convincing a judge that your employer can't fire you for comparing yourself to a Holocaust victim is going to be a heavy lift.

If I were to apply for a job at a right-wing nutjob outfit like The Daily Wire or The Federalist, I would not expect to get hired. After all, I just called them nutjobs. And while it is my personal belief that no one should read the garbage those weirdos crank out, they clearly have the right not to affiliate themselves someone whose public positions are diametrically opposed to their own.

Conservatives have wholeheartedly embraced this principle when it comes to their own safe spaces. Indeed, they’ve gone all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure that religious employers can refuse to bake gay wedding cakes or cover women’s health care in employee insurance policies. But at the same time, they demand that the government protect them from “discrimination on the basis of their political beliefs,” forcing liberal employers to hire and retain conservative employees, even when those employees say things the employers and their customers find objectionable.

In 2017, right-wingers rallied behind James Damore, a low-level Google engineer who wrote an unsolicited memo decrying Google’s diversity initiatives and suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in tech leadership is because they’re more “neurotic” than men and less suited for the “long, stressful hours” those positions require. Unsurprisingly, that asshole was fired, after which he enjoyed a brief run on the Republican grievance circuit. He even hired Trumpland lawyer Harmeet Dhillon to file a performative discrimination suit against Google, before quietly dismissing the case in 2020.

But in a sense James Damore walked so that Gina Carano could run … to the courthouse. 

Damore II: Damore Harder

On February 6, 2024, actress Gina Carano sued the Walt Disney Company, claiming that she was fired from the “Star Wars” spinoff series “The Mandalorian” for her conservative political beliefs. The suit is being financed by Elon Musk as part of his plan to “save” free speech, and the former MMA fighter demands that Disney reinstate her and potentially revive a defunct spinoff called “Rangers of the New Republic” that might have featured Carano as a lead actor.

The complaint alleges two counts of wrongful discharge for “participating in politics” plus one count of sex discrimination. Her claims were brought under California law, but the case is being heard in federal court in California on the basis of diversity jurisdiction. (Carano lives in Montana.)

Two months later, Disney moved to dismiss, arguing that even if Carano’s allegations were true, the company had a First Amendment “right not to associate” with the actress, which protected their decision not to bring her back.

Last week Judge Sherilyn Garnett denied Disney’s motion, meaning that the case will proceed to discovery, with a tentative trial date of September 29, 2025. The ruling is being hailed as a victory by Carano over the evil empire of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

It is no such thing, and claims that this lawsuit establishes political affiliation or expression as a protected class or characteristic are flat-out wrong as a matter of California law.

Cara … No.

From 2019 to 2020, Carano appeared as Cara Dune in seven episodes of “The Mandalorian.” But in the fall of 2020, Carano made several social media posts opposing COVID safety measures, mocking and insulting trans people, and contesting the legitimacy of the 2020 election. 

Facing online backlash from the show’s fans, including a trending hashtag #FireGinaCarano, she whined to Meghan McCain’s husband in a fawning interview that she’d been canceled for tweeting the hilarious and entirely original joke, “My pronouns are boop bop beep.”

HAW HAW.

In February of 2021 Carano likened her plight as a poor, benighted American conservative to that of Jews in Germany during the Holocaust:

Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors… even by children. 🙁

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?’ 

That was finally a bridge too far for Disney. 

“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” Lucasfilm said in a publicly released statement. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

CEO Bob Chapek added that Carano’s posts “didn’t align” with Disney’s “values of respect, values of decency, values of integrity, and values of inclusion.”

Neither Carano nor her character returned for Seasons 3 or 4 of “The Mandalorian.” And the actress, who looked destined for stardom just months earlier, was reduced to playing roles in rightwing cope shows like the unintentionally hilarious Biden hit piece “My Son Hunter” and a low-budget Western produced by Ben Shapiro entitled “Terror on the Prairie.” (To say that is a precipitous career drop-off for someone who was in on the ground floor of the multi-billion-dollar “Deadpool” franchise is considerable understatement.)

The Dispute and the Motion to Dismiss

Like Damore, Carano claims that she was terminated for her political beliefs. She also alleges that she was discriminated against on the basis of sex because Disney didn’t fire her male co-stars Pedro Pascal and Mark Hamill, who also posted about politics. Disney counters that Carano was a guest star on The Mandalorian, and, since she was never hired for work beyond those seven episodes, she couldn’t have been fired either. The company vigorously denies that she was “treated differently than her similarly situated male co-workers.” 

For purposes of a motion to dismiss, the court must accept the plaintiff’s version of events and decide whether she’s alleged a redressable injury as a matter of law. And because Disney’s defense is largely that Carano’s allegations are not true, the company was cabined to a very narrow First Amendment argument in its motion. Essentially, Disney argued that, even accepting the premise that Carano “adequately states claims for wrongful discharge motivated by her political activity and for unlawful sex discrimination,” the First Amendment would still protect Disney’s right not to associate with someone who makes public political statements with which it profoundly disagrees.

As Disney put it, Carano’s arguments:

[W]ould allow states to compel news outlets and other expressive entities to speak through employees whose publicly-stated viewpoints contradict their employers’ messages, so long as their comments are made off the job. Conservative newspapers thus could be forced to hire outspoken liberal writers. Feminist book publishers could be forced to hire loudly misogynistic editors. And film and theater producers could be forced to hire proudly racist or anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim or anti-Christian actors and directors.

Disney may yet prevail, but at this stage, Judge Garnett ruled that the company failed to introduce evidence that the company hires actors for the purpose of promoting the progressive values it invoked in its motion to dismiss.

Judge Garnett wrote:

Here, although Defendants indisputably engage in expressive activity—including, but certainly not limited to, producing and disseminating The Mandalorian—they have failed to establish that they engage in expressive association. …

Defendants are not members-only, nonprofit organizations.  Instead, Defendants are for-profit corporations who, as relevant to this lawsuit, employ actors such as Plaintiff, as well as administrative staff, to create television series and films. … Defendants have not identified any evidence—in the Complaint or otherwise—to substantiate a claim that they employ public-facing actors for the purpose of promoting the “values of respect,” “decency,” “integrity,” or “inclusion.”

In other words, at this stage in the litigation, the court held that it was premature to conclude that Disney (1) had a valid interest in publicly associating or disassociating with actors who supported or contradicted its asserted values of tolerance, and (2) that continuing to employ and publicize Carano would undermine those values.

So, Now What?

Carano’s lawsuit will now proceed to discovery. The parties will exchange documents and depose the relevant witnesses to, among other things, establish that Disney does in fact promote respect, tolerance, and inclusion in its productions and that promoting Carano would undermine those values.

Critically, from this point forward, Disney will no longer concede for the purposes of argument that Carano’s complaint “adequately states claims for wrongful discharge motivated by her political activity and for unlawful sex discrimination.” The onus will now shift to Carano to prove her factual claims, and that will be a heavy lift, particularly because California law does not recognize political beliefs or affiliation as a protected class like race, gender, and sexual orientation. 

Indeed, in 2021, Republican state Senator Melissa Melendez proposed Senate Bill 238 (the so-called “The Diversity of Thought Act”) to add political affiliation as a protected class in order to “fight cancel culture.” That bill died in committee on a 9-2 vote.

Instead, California Labor Code § 1101 sets out a much narrower set of delineated protections, stating that:

No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:

(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. 

(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.

Assuming that Disney was, in fact, Carano’s “employer,” the question will shift to whether Carano can prove that, by not bringing her back, Disney made or enforced a policy forbidding Carano from “participating in politics” otherwise “tended to control or direct” her “political activities or affiliations.”

California’s protections for political activity almost certainly do not encompass “saying offensively stupid shit on Twitter and Instagram.” And while the law does define “activity” broadly, it clearly differentiates between protected activities (running for office, attending rallies) for which an employee cannot be fired, and offensive speech, which an employer may legitimately refuse to be associated with.

Moreover, Carano’s theories of the case are in tension here. She claims that she was singled out by Disney for disparate treatment because she is a woman. But she herself admits that Hamill and Pascal’s posts “were interpreted to attack Republicans,” and that Disney cut her loose because her posts were conservative. And those two things can’t both be true.

Carano hopes to depose Lucasfilm PR executive Lynne Hale, who inadvertently sent her an email about how the company was monitoring the #FireGinaCarano hashtag on social media — something which it would have been malpractice to ignore. Carano also hopes to gain access to Lucasfilm CEO Kathleen Kennedy, former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, executive producer Jon Favreau, and Pascal. We’ll see.

Perhaps Carano will unearth a smoking gun that proves that Lynne Hale and Kathleen Kennedy really did fire her because she’s a woman. But barring that, this mission would appear to be doomed. Because being Republican is not a protected class in California, and your employer can and almost certainly will fire you if you publicly compare yourself to a victim of the Holocaust when people on the internet called you a bigot.