Gina Carano filed a lawsuit against Disney because they fired her for offensive posts on social media. Diving into her claims, it is clear that her cries of “sex discrimination” mean nothing because she repeatedly throws women under the bus to try to get her old job back.
In the lawsuit, the introduction states, “Even though ‘the Force is female,’ Defendants chose to target a woman while looking the other way when it came to men.” She then goes on to submit tweets from both Mark Hamill (you know, Luke Skywalker) and Pedro Pascal as “evidence” for how she was discriminated against for being a woman. While that is complete nonsense, what really is truly frustrating is how Carano then throws women under the bus to try to cry wolf.
“Looking the other way when it came to men” was seemingly forgotten when Carano complained about Lucasfilm’s support of Krystina Arielle amidst racist and horrific attacks, from websites like Bounding Into Comics and the GamerGate community, over Arielle’s statements about racism. But for Carano and her legal team, the racist and sexist attacks on Arielle weren’t the real problem—no, it was that Lucasfilm supported her and but not Carano. Right? The lawsuit states that when Carano posted an interview about her own problematic and harmful tweets, Lucasfilm was “publicly supporting ‘Krystina Arielle and her declaration that all white people are racist.'”
The link that serves as their “evidence” leads to a Bounding Into Comics article. The site is labeled as a “mixed” representation of factual information by Media Bias/Fact Check, so not exactly a website you want as your main source on a court case. Besides that, Arielle’s situation had nothing to do with Carano outside of Carano’s own disparaging posts about the Black Lives Matter movement, but Arielle did not comment on Carano’s social media.
Carano is seemingly asserting that it’s unfair that Arielle wasn’t penalized by Disney for … speaking out about racism, which, it should go without saying, is not at all the same as the statements that got Carano in trouble. Not only that, but it’s strange to specifically point out another woman who received different treatment when trying to argue that Carano’s gender was a factor in how she was treated.
Beyond the absolutely baffling inclusion of Arielle, the lawsuit also names Leslye Headland as being part of the Lucasfilm Zoom call where they tried to reason with Carano, stating that Headland donated to an “anti-Carano GoFundMe account.” It also asserts that the GoFundMe in question was started by “a Lucasfilm creative.”
It is public knowledge online who started the GoFundMe. Maggie Lovitt, Candace Kaw, and Eric Eilersen all publicly stated that they were behind the GoFundMe account. Not one of them works for Lucasfilm, and yet, the lawsuit stated that Carano went to “donate” to the organization: “When she opened the link, she read that the fund was supposedly created by a Lucasfilm creative and was directly targeting Carano, defaming her by accusing her of being a ‘bigoted’ actress.”
Nowhere on the GoFundMe page does the word “bigoted” exist. The description of the GoFundMe reads, “Recently, the hype around the second season of The Mandalorian has been colored by the unfortunate ignorance of one of the major castmates. Their rhetoric has included, amongst other things, the dismissal of pronoun importance—particularly in the trans community.”
A lot of the lawsuit includes posts that Mark Hamill and Pedro Pascal made, the majority of which said that the rise in Nazi ideology in America was bad. Carano is angry that those statements were deemed “okay” but her posts were not. So … what exactly is this saying? That pushing back again Nazi ideals is a bad thing? That her terrible posts were the same as standing up against Nazism? I just want clarification on why their tweets were included. The lawsuit also includes Mark Hamill liking a J.K. Rowling tweet and then clarifying that he did not realize its transphobic meaning, apologizing to Star Wars fans, and Carano somehow things that’s the same thing as her mocking of pronouns.
While, yes, they did include posts from two male Star Wars actors, Carano and her team still brought up women that had absolutely nothing to do with her own case, including demonstrably false information. So, she took on multiple women in a case alleging discrimination for her gender …
You’re just using women in your “sex discrimation” case…
Take your own feelings out of this for a moment. Ignore the Mark Hamill and Pedro Pascal of it all. What Carano is doing with her lawyers is using examples from women and claiming that if Lucasfilm treats her differently, it’s sex discrimination, right? How does that make sense? Lucasfilm was, in this case, defending women and having other female employees talk to Carano about her posts and why they were offensive.
So she is using women to try to better herself? That’s not a case of gender or sex discrimination. Her male co-stars were treated differently than her because her employer did not object to their posts and ask that they stop. They did, however, ask Carano to stop, and she refused, so she was then let go—all within their rights.
To then turn around and throw multiple women under the proverbial bus because she is throwing a fit is disgraceful and tacky. She’s a white woman who has enough money to waste with Elon Musk to try this case, and yet none of them (Carano or her legal team) did the due diligence to fact check who started a GoFundMe? And instead threw two women who are not part of the Lucasfilm team into this yet again because she couldn’t simply get someone to look into it?
They thought it was a great idea to not only use a website that has little to no credibility as a source but to then bring in a Black woman who has faced racist abuse from Star Wars fans, and for what? To just bring more hate her way because Carano doesn’t agree with her? It was smart on the legal side of things to randomly throw out Headland’s name, when she is in charge of a show coming out in the Star Wars universe, because she donated to the transgender community?
Full disclosure, I know these women. I see their beauty and their strength displayed every day, and I see how they have worked hard to ignore the noise constantly thrown at them by the men that Carano has in her fanbase. They have all faced sexism and/or racism at the hands of people who claim that Carano is some beacon for them. So to see that hatred yet again thrown their way because of Carano’s claims of discrimination is beyond frustrating.
All of the women that Carano used as examples in her lawsuit completely negate her “sex discrimination” accusation, but it also shows exactly who she is to let her team use other women for her potential benefit.
(featured image: Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage)
