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On December 8, 2025, Judge Elihu M. Berle of the Los Angeles County Superior Court granted final approval of a $43.25 million class action settlement in Rasmussen v. The Walt Disney Company, Case No. 19STCV10974, resolving equal pay claims brought on behalf of women employed by Disney-related companies in California between April 1, 2015 and December 28, 2024.
In April 2019, LaRonda Rasmussen and eight other current and former Disney employees filed a class action against The Walt Disney Company and related entities, alleging that Disney paid women in salaried, full-time positions below the Vice President level less than men performing substantially similar work, in violation of the California Equal Pay Act, the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), the Unfair Competition Law, and the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA).
Plaintiffs challenged Disney’s centralized compensation system, including its architecture of job families and job levels, starting-pay practices, and annual percentage-based raises that plaintiffs alleged carried initial pay disparities forward year after year. Plaintiffs’ labor economist, Dr. David Neumark, analyzed Disney’s payroll and human resources data and estimated statistically significant gender pay differences even after controlling for job level, job family, tenure, and other factors. Disney denied all of the allegations and disputed that any pay shortfall existed.
The case was litigated intensively for more than five years. Class discovery alone spanned over four years and included reports and depositions from four experts, depositions of 22 of Disney’s “person most qualified” witnesses and all nine named plaintiffs, and 111 defense document productions totaling more than 82,000 pages, along with voluminous payroll and HR data.
On December 8, 2023, the Court certified plaintiffs’ California Equal Pay Act claim and derivative claims for a class of women employed in covered positions. Plaintiffs’ motion for class certification and the supporting expert evidence were later unsealed by order of the Court. After three earlier mediation sessions failed to produce a resolution, the parties reached a settlement in principle following a fourth mediation in July 2024 with mediator Hunter R. Hughes, III.
Under the settlement, Disney paid $43.25 million into a non-reversionary fund. Class members did not need to submit claim forms. Every participating class member automatically received a payment, calculated using Dr. Neumark’s statistical model, with a guaranteed minimum payment for each member. The settlement also allocated $250,000 to resolve PAGA claims, shared between the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency and PAGA group members.
Beyond the monetary relief, the settlement requires meaningful changes at Disney:
In granting final approval, the Court found the settlement fair, reasonable, and adequate, and noted that it was the product of years of informed, arm’s-length negotiation.
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