Gina Carano Officially Rejects Disney’s Desire To Dismiss Her Discrimination Suit, Counters Mouse House’s “Carte Blanche Authority” To Fire Her

Dominic Patten
·4 min read
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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-supported 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.”

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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 and didn’t see her Mandalorian contract renewed for what Lucasfilm said were “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities,” the  actress who played bounty hunter Cara Dune for two seasons on the series sued the once again Bob Iger-run entertainment giant Star Wars division of Disney and Huckleberry Industries. The actress is looking for an injunction to get her Mandalorian gig back.

On that note, Carano and Disney do agree that the straw that seemingly broke the Mouse House’s back was when the actress shared a TikTok post in 2021 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 reweets, 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 not jive with Disney’s values, the company last month wanted the initial filing gone The basis for their argument is 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 the past couple of years with The Daily Wire’s production company. 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.

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