Disney heiress slams great-uncle Walt: ‘He bordered on rabid fascism’
Disney heiress Abigail Disney ripped her great-uncle Walt Disney for being “fascist” and stoking anti-Semitism and racism when he ran the company he co-founded with her grandfather Roy O. Disney.
“He bordered on rabid fascism,” the 62-year-old heiress said of Walt Disney on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast last week.
The wealthy film producer and activist spoke with Maron about her new documentary that takes aim at her family’s company, called “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” as well as her family’s battle with addiction.
Disney told Maron that while her great-uncle Walt was a “chaotic genius,” he and his brother played up prejudices of the time.
“They weren’t shy about delving into the stereotypes if it served them,” she said.
The Post reached out to the Disney company for comment.
The heiress noted that Disney positioned the wolf from “The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf” as a “Jewish peddler” and named one of the wisecracking black crows from “Dumbo” Jim Crow.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called out Disney when he made “Song of the South,” a 1946 film set in the Reconstruction-era American South that reinforced racist stereotypes.
“When they made ‘Song of the South,’ people from the NAACP came to the studio and they said, ‘Please don’t do it this way. Please talk to us,'” she said, noting that her family pushed ahead anyway.
“In some enclosed way, Disney is an American fascist fantasy,” Maron said.
“Well, yeah, that’s what it is — and it isn’t,” she replied. “They were men of their time but that’s not an excuse … they knew.”
In recent years, the company has worked to scrub any traces of its controversial past, removing racist themes from “Song of the South” and updating “Splash Mountain,” the ride inspired by the movie.
It also took its Jungle Cruise out of operation to update and get rid of negative racial stereotypes of native people — and it even removed Walt Disney’s iconic opening day speech, which it has featured every year since 1955 at Disneyland, much to the dismay of Disney die-hards who have branded the Mouse House “woke.”
Aside from criticizing her family’s business, Abigail Disney also revealed the similarities of her family to other American dynasties like the Kennedys, explaining that while the Disney family didn’t have many tragedies, it did have addiction.
“We have our share of drugs. Drugs happened to all of us,” she said. “If you talk about drugs and addiction and all that kind of thing in any family where there’s resources, you’ll see that actually it’s harder to get sober, much harder to get sober when you have money.”
Disney backpedaled, saying she realized how hard addiction is when you’re “abjectly poor,” too, before doubling down: “It’s so hard when you’re trapped in a family and can’t really get out of it because you rely on it for money.”
The heiress admitted that she was speaking from personal experience, but when Maron asked if she was sober, she paused.
“I’m complicated. I’ll just say that,” she said, before adding that she takes part in Al-Anon meetings.
