Keel-Hauling The Walt Disney Co.

Mixed Martial artist Gina Carano is inflicting maximum damage on Disney, which fired her in 2021 because she said her pronouns were "beep/bop/boop" and expressed other conservative positions.

Gina Carano in “The Mandalorian”

There is a hint of desperation in a recent motion filed by The Walt Disney Co. in the case of a lawsuit filed by Gina Carano, who played Star Wars mercenary Cara Dune in The Mandalorian.

Carano, a mixed martial artist, was fired in 2021, after she used pronouns deemed unacceptable by Disney on her Twitter (now X) bio, mocked the pandemic era mask mandate, questioned voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and (last straw) shared an Instagram meme comparing the treatment of modern-day Republicans to that of Jews in the Holocaust.

In firing her, Disney’s wholly owned subsidiary Lucasfilm Ltd. stated that Carano’s “off-the-job” social media posts “denigrat[ed] people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump appointee, recently refused to dismiss Carano’s lawsuit against Disney. He rejected Disney’s First Amendment defense, that it made a “casting call” to dump Carano because Disney did not want its “art” associated with “messages Disney does not want its art to convey.” Disney is now asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to reverse Van Dyke’s ruling and dismiss the claim.

Carano argues, among other things, that Disney violated a California law prohibiting employers from terminating employees over their political speech and discriminated against her on the basis of sex.

If the Ninth Circuit refuses to intervene, Carano plans to execute an onerous course of discovery.