The ‘free speech’ Avengers are attempting to assemble for one of the higher profile cases in recent Hollywood history. Actress and former MMA fighter Gina Carano has taken up Elon Musk on his recent offer for him to foot the bill for anyone fired because of political tweets on Twitter (now X) as per what he believes is a free speech crusade.
Gina Carano is suing Disney after she was fired from her role as Cara Dune in The Mandalorian in 2021. One of the cited posts in question said the following:
“Most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Naxi [sic] 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?”
Past that, Carano shared anti-mask sentiments during the COVID pandemic and was a supporter of the idea that there was anti-Trump fraud in the 2020 election. She has also been accused of transphobic comments in the past, mocking gender pronouns.
The suit is…something. Carano is suing not just for damages, $75,000, but is actually seeking a court order that would force Disney to recast her in the show. This has led many fans to wonder how if forced to do just that, somehow, Disney would concoct any number of creative ways that Cara Dune could reappear and then be killed off in The Mandalorian universe, rather than just being written out the way she’s been now.
Carano’s name has come up more often lately in the wake of the allegations against, and now conviction of, Jonathan Majors on assault charges. The idea was that Disney fired Carano over mere comments, but they waited until Majors was convinced of literal assault before firing him from playing Kang in the Marvel universe. Carano also claims that the opposite side of the coin wasn’t met with the same response, like Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal comparing Trump to Hitler in 2017.
The counter-argument, of course, is that Disney as a private company, and they are allowed to do exactly what they did. And Carano’s issues are a conflagration of things. Separate from the “Nazis rounding up Jews” comparison, it was her apparent anti-LGBTQ positions that caused Disney to ask her for a statement about “mocking or insulting an entire group of people, which Carano had never done,” says the lawsuit. She refused, but was then asked to meet with 45 LGBTQ employees plus Katheen Kennedy. She didn’t do that either, and was then fired. Carano is suing for wrongful discharge and also sex discrimination.
The general sense is that this will end up being a case that may not go very far, and the idea that she’s seeking a court order to actually be recast in The Mandalorian seems on its face, absurd. It is certainly true that Carano’s career has tanked in the wake of her Mandalorian firing, now making movies with conservative website The Daily Wire as opposed to Hollywood features or series.
As for the Elon of it all, he’s promised infinite money for cases like this, though originally this was thought to be for more average users fired for inflammatory tweets to potentially take action against employers. Carano’s situation is about as high profile as we’ve seen in recent years in the “fired for tweets” category. We’ll see what happens, but I would not expect to see Cara Dune mandatorily jammed back into The Mandalorian any time soon.
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