Like a crappy Rebel Alliance, Gina Carano is working with Elon Musk to sue Disney

It’s been almost exactly three years since Disney officially fired Gina Carano from The Mandalorian over “social media posts denigrating people based on their culture and religious identities,” which the company said in a statement at the time were “abhorrent and unacceptable.” That seemed to be that, with Mandalorian executive producers Rick Famuyiwa and Dave Filoni saying just last year that they didn’t really feel any need to ever acknowledge her character (Rebel soldier Cara Dune) again—whether that meant bringing her back or canonically killing her off. The show, and Star Wars in general, had simply moved on without her.

But now Gina Carano is trying to reverse that, filing a lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm for “discrimination and wrongful termination” that The Hollywood Reporter says is being bankrolled by none other than Elon Musk, self-described champion of what he thinks “free speech” is (this is apparently part of Musk’s promise to fund any legal action from Twitter users who claimed they were fired for what they posted). Carano says she was fired for sharing her right-wring opinions on social media, and she’s asking the court to force Lucasfilm to pay her at least $75,000, cover various other damages, and rehire her for The Mandalorian—a show that might not ever even come back for another season now that it’s spinning off into a movie.

Actually, simply sharing right-wing beliefs isn’t quite how Carano’s lawsuit puts it. In her introduction, it says she was fired because she “dared voice her own opinions, on social media platforms and elsewhere, and stood up to the online bully mob who demanded her compliance with their extreme progressive ideology.” The suit is also packed with Star Wars references, referring to Disney as an “empire” and saying that Carano was fired from The Mandalorian “as swiftly as her character’s peaceful home planet of Alderaan had been destroyed by the Death Star in an earlier Star Wars film.” The suit also questions why she was the one targeted like this and not any of her male co-stars, who she says “took equally or more vigorous and controversial positions on social media”—which is a reference to Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal sharing social media posts that were pro-LGBTQ+, pro-Black Lives Matter, pro-choice, and critical of Donald Trump, as well as tweets from Star Wars’ Mark Hamill in which he compared Trump supporters to Nazis.

The text of the suit, which you can skim through on The Hollywood Reporter if you’re so inclined, actually contains dozens of tweets, mostly from regular people, as evidence of the “online bullying” Carano endured. It also reveals that Disney tried to get Carano to meet with a representative from GLAAD and to release a statement admitting to “mocking or insulting an entire group of people” (which the suit says “Carano had never done”), and when she refused, she was asked to meet with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and a number of employees who identify as LGBTQ+. When she refused to do that as well, she was fired.

In a statement, Carano said that, “Some of us have been unjustly singled out, harassed, persecuted, and had our livelihoods stripped away because we dared to encourage conversation, asked questions, and refused to go along with the mob.” She also referred to Musk’s social media platform that used to be called Twitter as “one of the last glimmers of hope for free speech in the world.”

The A.V. Club has reached out to representatives for both Gina Carano and Lucasfilm for comment, but neither has responded as of publication.