Disney argues that it had First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano from “The Mandalorian”

The actress and former MMA star is suing the studio for wrongful termination, with the backing of tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Disney has responded to Gina Carano's wrongful termination lawsuit, arguing that the studio had a First Amendment right to fire her from The Mandalorian over controversial social media posts she made, so as "not to associate its artistic expression with Carano's speech."

In a motion to dismiss filed Tuesday (which you can read here, via Variety), Disney says that forcing the company to reinstate Carano in the role of Cara Dune, as her lawsuit seeks to do, would be a violation of its own constitutional right to free speech.

Disney's filing says that state law cannot "force entities that do create speech products to speak through writers or singers or actors whose own speech and public profile could, in the employer's view, compromise the employer's ability to express itself in its own chosen manner. Carano's suit contravenes that rule. It is an impermissible effort to invoke state power to override a private entity's decisions about what to say in its own art and how to say it. The complaint should be dismissed."

Representatives for Carano didn't immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment Thursday.

An actress and former mixed martial artist, Carano played battle-hardened mercenary Cara Dune on the first two seasons of the Star Wars series The Mandalorian on Disney+. Though the character was popular with some fans, Carano courted controversy on social media. She opposed the use of COVID-19 vaccines and supported Donald Trump's claims that he lost the 2020 presidential election because of "voter fraud," but the tipping point came in 2021 when she shared an Instagram post comparing modern American political conservatives like herself to Jewish people killed in the Holocaust.

"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," Carano's 2021 post read. "How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?"

Lucasfilm, the Disney subsidiary that oversees Star Wars, quickly distanced itself from Carano and blasted her posts as "abhorrent and unacceptable."

Carano sued Disney in February, with the backing of tech billionaire Elon Musk. Last month, she defended her 2021 post in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, arguing that the sentiment "just made sense — don't hate your neighbor. Before the Nazis were as powerful as they became, you had to make it OK to hate this person next to you. That's how we get to dangerous places. And history does repeat itself."

But Disney sees things differently. "Carano's 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," the company said in its new filing.

It's now up to Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett to decide whether Carano's lawsuit should be thrown out, as Disney argues.

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