Actor Gina Carano has filed a lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm three years after she was dumped from The Mandalorian for social media posts that Lucasfilm considered to be “abhorrent and unacceptable”.
Gina announced the suit, which alleges wrongful discharge and sex discrimination, on Tuesday in a lengthy post on X, formerly Twitter.
In the post, she accused the two entertainment companies of engaging in “a bullying smear campaign aimed at silencing, destroying & making an example out of me”.
She added that Elon Musk is helping her fund the suit, which The Hollywood Reporter confirmed to be the case. Last year, Elon, the owner of X, agreed to fund legal action for users who claimed they had faced discrimination by employers over posts they had made on the platform.
Lucasfilm did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on Gina Carano’s lawsuit.
The actor and former MMA fighter became a breakout star after the Star Wars spin-off debuted on Disney+ in 2019 (it began streaming in the UK the following year). However, she was canned in February 2021 after she shared an Instagram story with some very problematic comments about the Holocaust.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted, Gina was never an official cast member on The Mandalorian and was paid $25,000 (£19,800) per episode as a guest actor, along with a one-time $5,000 (£3,960) bonus.
In her complaint, Gina alleges that she was harassed and defamed by both Disney and Lucasfilm for her cultural and religious beliefs ― and for not toeing the company line on issues like Black Lives Matter and preferred pronouns.
In one case, she ridiculed a request to add pronouns to her social media accounts and instead added the words “boop/bop/beep” to her bio on X, according to The Independent.
She also claimed the companies had double standards and didn’t go after Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal for a 2017 post on X that compared former president Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Gina is seeking at least $75,000 (£59,390) in damages, as well as a court order that would force Lucasfilm to recast her.
You can read the court filing below.