Disney asserts its constitutional right to get the hell away from Gina Carano

It’s not every day that we find ourselves feeling sympathy for The Walt Disney Company, a corporate leviathan that owns huge swathes of the entertainment industry, with a yearly revenue that’s roughly on par with the gross domestic product of Luxembourg. Still, there’s something about a court filing asserting the company’s constitutional rights to no longer hang out or be associated with actor Gina Carano that does get a small flicker of relatable feelings burning in our black little hearts.

Said claim came as part of Disney’s latest efforts to get Carano’s Elon Musk-supported lawsuit against it—rooted in her firing from Star Wars series The Mandalorian over statements she made on social media back in 2021—dismissed. Noting that a 2021 repost by Carano that “grotesquely trivialized the Holocaust” was the final straw for the company, it’s making the case that, as a company that generates speech, having that speech filtered through someone with Carano’s stated views would be a violation of its own First Amendment rights.

Hilariously, some snarky bastard on Disney’s legal team was careful to cite one of Carano’s own lawyers, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, in the dismissal request, citing a legal review backing up their claim. Per Variety, Volokh wrote in 2022 that “Employers that speak must necessarily speak through their employees; and when an employee or prospective employee says things, even off the job, that would undermine the employer’s message, the employer must be able to distance itself from the employee.” Said distancing came pretty unambiguously in Carano’s case, when Disney announced in 2021 that it would no longer be working with Carano, stating at the time that “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano, for her part, gave an interview today in which she hextupled down on her statements, saying she was merely “asking questions” about things like vaccine mandates, pronoun usage, or potential parallels between Republicans being shamed on social media and the Holocaust, stating, “I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry for what I said. For what I posted. For what I was standing for. For what I was screaming for, or trying to scream for. I’m not sorry.”