I am not in any position to tell if this is a slam-dunk or not. I was mainly responding to your initial assessment that the case for Carano was specious at best.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that, while no company is obliged to continue business with anybody, Disney, in their public statement about Carano acted as the engine for this lawsuit. Implicit in that statement is their prior intent to have kept Carano for future projects as well as their reason for change being retaliatory in nature.
Kinda.
I think the record's been muddied through the passage of time.
Here's a link to the Hollywood Reporter article wherein LFL announced her filing.
The precise satement, issued on Feburary 10, is "Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future." It's
later in that statement that they say "Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable."
Now, first, I need to say that I have not read the entirety of her initial filing, so I haven't dug into the facts. I might change my attitude if I did. I've shifted my views on whether she has a case on its face, given the nature of the laws in CA. She
may have a case based on those laws, or at least she can say "Court, please give me my job back" and it's
less absurd given the content of the CA law. But as I said, a
lot depends on how those laws get interpreted.
So, what's that all gonna mean?
For starters, she'll have to survive a motion to dismiss. This is a pretrial motion that will basically argue "The thing you're asking for doesn't work like that/can't be given by this court/isn't properly pled" or something along those lines. These are decisions that are purely ones of legal and procedural construction. In other words, they don't analyze the facts at all. With a motion to dismiss, the parties are basically saying "Forget the facts. The case just isn't there." Like, if I sue you for winning an ebay auction I wanted and I claim that you engaged in fraud by sniping me, I can file a lawsuit, but it won't survive a motion to dismiss because you can just say "Without regard to the facts, ebay sniping doesn't constitute fraud as a legal matter."
Without knowing how CA law treats the kind of work that Carano did/was doing with LFL, it's hard to say whether the case gets bounced on a motion to dismiss. For example, if the law doesn't define
any contract work as "employment" then she's hosed. In other words, if I hire a general contractor to repoint my bricks and fix a leak, that's not "employment" under the law at all. Or maybe the law treats it as employment
while the job is ongoing, but doesn't treat it as "employment" once the job is finished. So you fix the leak, repoint my bricks and...then we're done. Are you "employed"? No? Well then I can't have "fired" you if I didn't hire you to do another job down the road. If that's how the laws work in CA, then she'd fail on a motion to dismiss and that'd be the end of the case.
But if the law treats "employment" to
include some potential discussions about future jobs, then it becomes a question of fact:
was she in fact employed when the alleged "termination" happened? If the discussions of future projects might, in some instances, be treated as "employment," then we now have to investigate the specific facts as to the nature of those talks, and whether they meet whatever the definition of "employment" is. And then that gets you to the next question, which is, if she was employed, can it be shown that, in fact, she was terminated because of the tweets or was it because of something else.
After discovery is done, you'd file motions for summary judgment, which basically says to the court "Look, there is zero way that any reasonable jury could reach any other conclusion apart from deciding I win, so there's no need for a trial," and the judge evaluates the facts in the light most favorable to the opposing party, and then decides. Maybe she'd survive that, maybe she wouldn't. We don't know because that's all very fact-specific.
And, of course,
all of this presumes that the case doesn't get bounced on a separate motion: motion to compel arbitration, in which case the only facts and law that matters are whether the contract had an arbitration clause sufficient to put it under the Fed. Arbitration Act, and if so, whether the conduct was something that fell within the scope of the arbitration clause. Under arbitration, parties can still be bound by state laws (for purposes of deciding an outcome), but again the whole thing is private and not a matter of public record.
