The battle between Disney and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been heating up for months, and now, it’s starting to get petty too. Walt Disney World filed an amended version of its lawsuit in order to add quotes from the Governor himself. Now, the complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief literally opens with a pull quote that comes from a DeSantis interview over the weekend: “This all started, of course, with our parents’ rights bill.”
Let’s give a little backstory here for those of you that may be out of the loop and not get why that's a pretty big roast, at least in legal terms. Last year, the State Of Florida introduced a bill that prohibited public school teachers from discussing sexual orientation with children in Kindergarten through third grade. Governor DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers referred to it as a parents rights bill. Its opponents derisively referred to it as the Don’t Say Gay Bill.
Disney released a public comment saying it disagreed with the legislation after it was signed, and not long after, Florida said it would start investigating whether Disney’s special privileges it gets should continue. The parties have been filing lawsuits and sparring back and forth ever since.
At the heart of the fight right now is The Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is essentially the board that governs and oversees Disney World from a legislative standpoint. That has historically been run by Disney and operated without much oversight from the larger Florida Government, but in the midst of these public squabbles, Florida has installed a new oversight board and has threatened to take away Disney’s power. At the last minute, Disney tried to circumvent the new board by using an out of left field legal maneuver that cited Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. This caused the State of Florida to step in.
The new board is called The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Governor DeSantis and his lawyers have argued they have every reason to add new layers of government since Disney shouldn’t get special treatment. The Mouse House, on the other hand, has argued the current investigation is a response to the company using its First Amendment Rights and is therefore, retaliatory. The implication is Florida lawmakers don't really care about who Disney is getting approval from to build new rides or decide the capacity of certain locations, they only want to prevent executives from speaking out on political issues.
Over the weekend, Governor DeSantis sat for an interview with Newsmax, and he was, of course, asked about the Disney issue. He spoke for a few minutes about what he perceives as promises Disney never lived up to when Florida originally agreed to the current set-up in 1967, mainly that they were going to be building communities where people lived. When explaining the backstory and the government's involvement, he said “this all started, of course, with our parents’ rights bill,” and Disney’s lawyers clearly feel that admission is a big piece of evidence in their favor.
In fact, they amended their brief to start with the quote, and in the world of lawyers, that is a gigantic troll job. It's unusual to start a legal document with a quote, and it's even more unusual to start one with a quote from the person you're fighting in court. Later in the brief, which Deadline posted, Disney's lawyers made their point even clearer by dropping this line…
This is as clear a case of retaliation as this Court is ever likely to see.
At this point, it seems very likely Florida and Disney could be in court for a long time. This is an extremely complicated case involving historical rules that are very unique to Disney World. Were it just about Reedy Creek and whether Disney deserves special treatment, smart lawyers could capably argue the case from a lot of angles for many, many years. It's not often, as an example, you end up with a case where one side is actually paying the legal bills for both sides.
Once you add in the politics of it all, however, it makes the complicated situation even more complicated, as neither side seems willing to lose. We’ll just have to see how it plays out in court. Or perhaps both sides will eventually decide they have better things to do with their time and quietly find some kind of compromise position.
We’ll see. In the meantime, expect the pettiness on both sides to only grow from here.
