Victoria Alonso hits back at Disney’s official reason for firing her from Marvel, claiming the company fired her for not following a ‘reprehensible’ instruction.
As we’ve seen all too often over the last few years that the public relations team at Disney is engaged in a situation where it is attempting to seize the narrative and limit the damage to the company’s reputation, this time following the abrupt exit of Marvel Studios executive, Victoria Alonso.
Alonso had been part of Marvel Studios’ success since the very beginning, being involved from 2008’s Iron Man onwards. Disney cited the reason for her sudden sacking as ‘breach of contract’, due to ‘her work on the Oscar-nominated feature Argentina, 1985, which was made by Amazon.’
However, Alonso is publicly disputing this reason through her legal representatives and there’s a growing sense that this one could be headed to court, something the House of Mouse will be keen to avoid.
When Disney’s reasons were made public a couple of days ago, Alonso’s lawyer put out a reply stating that ‘Victoria, a gay Latina who had the courage to criticise Disney, was silenced. Then she was terminated when she refused to do something she believed was reprehensible.’
Naturally, that carefully-worded final phrase has caused something of a stir as not only does it dispute the reason for Alonso’s sacking but also hints at some sort of untoward behaviour from the company. The Hollywood Reporter is offering a breakdown of the so-called ‘reprehensible’ request allegedly made by Disney, citing sources that claim Alonso refused to make key visual changes to the recently-released Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, digitally removing rainbow decorations from background sequences for the film’s release in Kuwait.
Disney has not commented on the allegation.
It’s a very different narrative to the one put forward by Disney and it’s also worth noting that other stories have surfaced in the past week on both sides, which make figuring out the exact details very difficult. What is certain though, is that Disney won’t want to this story to get as far as a courtroom, especially given the controversies the company has already faced over its handling of LGBTQ+ issues in the last couple of years. Still, in one form or another, it looks set to continue for a while yet and we’ll see how far Alonso and her representatives intend to push things in the coming days.
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