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He reiterated that promise Tuesday after Carano filed an X-funded lawsuit against Disney and its subsidiary Lucasfilm, seeking damages and to be reinstated in her role on the Emmy-winning television show.
Carano played Cara Dune in “The Mandalorian,” an addition to the Star Wars franchise that premiered in November 2019. A former mixed martial arts artist, her casting and performance initially generated positive reviews, but controversy over her activity in social networks culminated in his abandonment. she from the show in February 2021 after she posted an Instagram story that many critics took as a comparison between holding right-wing views and being Jewish during the Holocaust.
The backlash against the post sparked the trending hashtag #FireGinaCarano on what was then Twitter. In a statement at the time, Lucasfilm said Carano’s “social media posts that denigrate people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable” and that there were no plans to hire her.
Tuesday Carano denied making the comparison. The caption on his Instagram story, which was later deleted, was accompanied by a disturbing photo from the Nazi era and argued that before “soldiers could easily arrest thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them.” simply for being Jews. How is that different from hating someone for their political opinions?
In the lawsuit, Carano’s attorneys allege that she was fired in retaliation for the “lawful exercise of her right to speak and express her views.” She previously came under fire for social media activity that included Likes on posts how underappreciated the Black Lives Matter movement, mocking Wearing coronavirus masks as a Democratic Party conspiracy and echoing former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 elections.
In a statement Tuesday on X, Carano saying was “being persecuted” online because her views were not “in line with the acceptable narrative at the time” and that a lawyer hired by X had contacted her after she responded to Musk’s offer of finance legal representation.
“My words were constantly twisted to demonize and dehumanize me as a far-right extremist,” she said. “It was a campaign of defamation and harassment aimed at silencing me, destroying me and making an example of me.”
In a statement, Carano’s lawyers argued that her male co-stars were not disciplined for sharing their anti-Republican political views on social media, “even though some would find their statements abhorrent.”
X, Disney and Lucasfilm didn’t do it right away. respond to requests for comments.
Grant Kien, a professor in the Department of Communication at California State University, East Bay, who studies technology and culture, said Musk is likely funding the lawsuit to curry favor with conservatives, a segment of whom have supported the dispute in course by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. with Disney, which he has characterized as a “woke corporation.”
“Taking on Disney is kind of right-wing virtue signaling right now. …Disney is seen as a company that exemplifies what is wrong in America; it’s part of this ‘anti-woke’ idea,” Kien said. “But there’s also another part of this that’s probably closer to Musk: He has a personal motivation to fight with Disney, especially publicly since they pulled advertising for X.”
In the fall, companies including Disney, Apple, IBM, Paramount and Warner Bros. suspended advertising on X after the watchdog group Media Matters reported that the platform was placing corporate ads next to anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi posts. Musk had also tweeted in agreement with a user who blamed Jews for the rise in anti-Semitism online and said Jews promoted “anti-white hate.”
Musk responded to the report by saying presentation what he called a “Thermonuclear demand” v. Media Affairs. Since then, he has repeatedly criticized advertisers who pulled their funding, Disney in particular, and said an advertising boycott of X would “kill the company.”
Musk appears to be cultivating a public image that appeals to the far right, Kien said.
“They are the only ones who have not abandoned it,” he said. “As larger companies have left the platform, the gaps are being filled by smaller advertisers, who tend to be more extreme, and the situation continues to move in that direction.” Right-wing figures like Andrew Tate, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. They have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising money for X.
“It’s part of his public image of (calling himself) the ‘free speech absolutist,’” Kien said. “This particularly appeals to the right – the far right – because they don’t like to be silenced or told they’re wrong. Now it is part of brand X.”
Eli Tan, Herb Scribner and Timothy Bella contributed to this report.