The co-star of the Marvel film Deadpool and Disney’s Mandalorian streaming series has filed a wrongful termination suit against the Disney corporation. Billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk has picked up the tab for actress Gina Carano’s lawsuit. Musk stated last year that he would pay the legal expenses for anyone who lost their job because of opinions expressed on his X platform.
This is indeed the latest battleground in the war on cancel culture. Carano was dismissed from Disney in January 2021, and the official reason given was a now-deleted Instagram post in which she likened the divisive and intolerant nature of American politics to the conditions Jews faced in Hitler’s Germany.
Carano wrote: “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.”
Today is an important day for me–I am filing a lawsuit against @lucasfilm & @Disney
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…— Gina Carano 🕯 (@ginacarano) February 6, 2024
A spokesman for the Lucasfilm subsidiary of Disney made an official statement at the time of her dismissal which made outright false and defamatory statements about Carano:
“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
The first two seasons of The Mandalorian were viewed by fans as a bright and hopeful direction for Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise. Carano’s Cara Dune character was one of the key reasons for the show’s success. Andre Einherjar from the YouTube channel “Midnights Edge” described Carano as a “load-bearing pillar” of the Star Wars franchise. Action figures of Cara Dune are highly collectible and fetch hefty sums on eBay. Furthermore, she was universally well-liked among her co-stars.
The firing of Carano made no economic or business sense for Disney’s Lucasfilm. While the Instagram post was cited as the cause for her dismissal, the true reasons were her many right-leaning political opinions. These were unacceptable to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and her like-minded underlings. Carano had posted on X — then called Twitter — her disdain for mask and vaccine mandates as well as her opinions that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud.
But many feel the biggest factor was her failure to fall in line with LGBT culture. Notably, she refused to include pronouns in her social media biographical information. In response to subsequent online bullying by the LGBT community, she responded with: “Beep, Bop, Boop.” This snarky comment references the R2D2 droid character in the Star Wars franchise, but it was mischaracterized as “transphobic.”
What is especially incriminating for Disney is that Carano’s Mandalorian co-star Pedro Pascal posted a very similar tweet as Carano in 2020 – but comparing Trump supporters to Nazis. Pascal faced no consequences for his tweet.
Carano’s lawsuit seeks lost income and punitive damages. Elon Musk has been linked to an upcoming proxy battle for control of Disney’s board of directors. The timing of the suit — one day prior to Disney’s earnings call — is likely intentional.
Carano perhaps alluded to her future legal action in a 2021 interview with The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “Don’t try to destroy my life with lies when yours can be destroyed with the truth”
