Flamboyant heat on social media can be very expensive. As much as it costs the job. Tell that to Gina Carano, a 41-year-old Texan actress, who lost one of the great professional opportunities of her life because of an ill-advised tweet. Her comparison between the hatred of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust and that which, in her opinion, American Republicans suffer “because of her political ideas” cost her her role in the Disney series. The Mandalorian. Now, exactly three years after that episode, Carano has decided to sue the audiovisual company and ask it to reinstate her and pay her at least $75,000 in damages. After Elon Musk announced a few months ago that X would help finance the reinstatement of anyone who was fired for using the right of expression on the platform, they will now collaborate on Carano’s legal representation.
Hence it is not surprising that the interpreter has used that network to publicize this lawsuit, filed in federal court in the State of California. “After 20 years building my career from the bottom, and during the regime of former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, Lucasfilm released this statement on Twitter, saying goodbye to me. The Mandalorian: ‘Gina Carano does not currently work for Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to do so in the future. However, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identity are abhorrent and unacceptable.’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” she claimed, assuring that she had been “persecuted” by everything she posted and everything she marked as liking her: “Because she was not in line with the accepted narrative then. My words were consistently twisted to demonize and dehumanize me as if she were a right-wing extremist. “It was an intimidating smear campaign aimed at silencing me, destroying me and making an example of me.”
The message shared by the actress The Mandalorian —appeared in eight episodes of its first two seasons playing field marshal Cara Dune—it was deleted shortly after she wrote it, but many followers of the series saved it and spread it on networks. It read: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors… even by children. Because the story is edited, most people don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is this different from hating someone for their political beliefs?” In the previous months, in the hardest moments of the covid pandemic, she made fun of those who wore masks. He also criticized the Black Lives Matter movement. Furthermore, he went so far as to suggest, following in the wake of Donald Trump, that the 2020 presidential elections were fraudulent, a theory frequently repeated by the extreme right and one of the triggers for the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
She claims that she never used violent language, but rather images, memes, phrases and sometimes his words, “not aggressively but respectfully and occasionally in a comedic way to maintain a light tone in dark times.” She denies that in her 2021 phrases she compared Republicans to the Jews who suffered the Holocaust, she defends that she was never racist or transphobic, and that her frequent comments on networks in which she questioned “masks, confinements and forced vaccines” only They sought to “go further and expose the facts to the light.” In addition, she accuses the entertainment industry of being false in its supposed support for women: “Why were my co-stars allowed to speak without harassment or reeducation courses or layoffs, but I was not granted the same? right to exercise my freedom of expression?” She states that she has spoken to many of her colleagues and that she has received words of support from them.
Now, Carano is only looking for continuity for her career in the world of entertainment — which began about 15 years ago; He has participated in a dozen titles, most of them action, such as the saga Fast&Furious and in movies like Unstoppablethe Steven Soderbergh, y Deadpool, by Tim Miller—something that is not being easy for him. “It is difficult to move forward with all those lies and labels supported and encouraged by the most powerful entertainment company in the world,” he says. “I am grateful that someone has come to my defense in such a powerful way seeking to clear my name.”
Elon Musk and the platform that the tycoon bought in October 2022 have become her allies and have helped her obtain legal representation. Musk himself has declared himself a staunch defender of freedom of expression, although he does not allow criticism against him personally and has fired some platform employees for speaking badly of him. The self-declared “freedom of speech absolutist” wrote in X a few months ago, as Carano now recalls, that if someone was fired for using
That was in August, and Carano replied: “A noble offer, but never in my dreams would I have imagined that someone would take on my case against Disney and Lucasfilm. Still, I responded that I thought I might fit in, and thousands of people agreed, but I wasn’t expecting anything. To my surprise, a few months later I received an email from a lawyer hired by X to review my case and many others. It turns out that after sending them all the information I was able to gather in those last few months, my now lawyers and X wholeheartedly believe in my case and are moving forward.” Musk himself has not missed the opportunity and has retweeted Carano’s message to her more than 171 million followers: “Please, if you want to join the lawsuit against Disney, let us know.” In another message He said he was “proud” to provide financial assistance to Carano and to “support her in asserting her rights to freedom of expression in X and the ability to work without intimidation, harassment or discrimination.”