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Disney announced today that it’s settled a long-running wrongful termination suit from former Mandalorian co-star Gina Carano, awarding Carano what is presumed to be an undisclosed sum of money, and an extremely disclosed sum of getting her ass publicly kissed by the House Of Mouse. Disney would, for instance, like you to know that Carano—who was fired from the Star Wars series in 2021 after drawing parallels on social media between the treatment of people with right-wing political beliefs in modern-day America to Jewish people living under the Nazi regime—is a lovely person and “Was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff, and she worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect.” Also, great news for the near future, because, uh, “We look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”
This is, of course, much nicer language than Disney used for Carano during the lawsuit, when it accused her of making online statements that “grotesquely trivialized the Holocaust,” and argued that being forced to filter its ideas and scripts through an actor with her stated views would curtail its own freedom of expression. (In case it’s been a minute, other tracks from Gina Carano Plays The Hits included “questioning whether the results of the 2020 election were real,” “loudly complaining about mask and vaccine mandates during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns,” and that old easy listening favorite, “People having preferred pronouns is stupid.”) Attempts to get the suit thrown out, though, were shut down by the courts, and the case was set to go to trial next month. Now, not so much.
We’re probably never going to find out what was specifically in that settlement—although we’d be shocked if Disney’s not-quite-apologies today weren’t part-and-parcel of the agreement. Interestingly, the part about working together “in the near future” was pretty much pulled straight from Carano’s list of damages sought, which included having her re-hired onto The Mandalorian. (She was also looking for at least $75,000 in damages.) So, yeah: Please look forward to whatever project Carano—who’s mostly appeared in right-wing indie stuff like The Daily Wire‘s Western Terror On The Prairie since her firing—ends up filming for Disney under what we can only assume will be the most obvious duress imaginable.
In a Twitter post about the decision, Carano thanked Elon Musk for bankrolling the suit, calling him “a man I’ve never met, who did this Good Samaritan deed for me in funding my lawsuit.” Musk has previously said he’d pay the legal bill for users who claim they have been discriminated against due to their activity on Twitter/X.
[via THR]
