Disney employees sue company over canceled relocation to Lake Nona

Two California-based Disney employees are suing the company, alleging misrepresentation of a project that led them to follow work to Orlando, just to move back two years later when the project failed.

A $1 billion office space at Lake Nona was touted to bring 2,000 new jobs to the area, but Disney scuttled the campus last year amid the political feud between the company and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the two employees were among at least 250 others who thought Disney would fire them if they didn’t make the move. The suit says the worker group was “fraudulently induced” to move, and seeks class-action status on their behalf.

The complaint was filed by attorney Jason S. Lohr of the San Francisco law firm, Lohr Ripamonti & Segarich.

Lohr said that because Maria De La Cruz and George Fong, the two employees filing, still work for Disney, they would not participate in interviews. Disney did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Initially, Disney sought the move to Central Florida to take advantage of the lower cost of living and state tax credits available.

Disney told De La Cruz, Fong and other employees in August 2021 that they’d need to relocate, the lawsuit says. They had 90 days to decide what to do. By December the following year, both had sold their California homes. By this point, Disney had already delayed the opening of the Lake Nona campus to 2026, but some leaders had still asked for employees to relocate by 2024.

For Fong, who lists himself on LinkedIn as a senior design manager, leaving the state was particularly difficult, because he sold and said goodbye to his childhood home, the lawsuit says. This April, he returned to a much smaller residence after the office’s failure to open.

“Apart from Mr. Fong, other similarly situated individuals have been forced to purchase or rent less desirable housing upon their return to California,” the complaint said.

De La Cruz [is in the midst of moving back to California, though the complaint didn’t specify whether she has a home to return to.

The complaint said Disney boasted to the employees about the benefits the relocation had to offer, including Orlando’s reasonable housing market and the new, centralized office. But when De La Cruz and Fong arrived in Orlando, they worked out of a Kissimmee office until Disney officially canceled its plans in May 2023.

The cancellation came around the height of the Disney and DeSantis dispute — when the governor moved to take over a Disney-dominated local governing board for the parks’ real estate and infrastructure after then-CEO Bob Chapek criticized Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, often dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. (The two-year strife ended just this March when Disney and DeSantis settled lawsuits and signaled their intent to work more harmoniously in the future.)

For De La Cruz and Fong, pressure then began to mount to move back to California.

According to the complaint, the employees who had moved to Florida worried from the first about the long-term impact on their futures because many of Disney’s teams still operated on the West Coast.

In an email to human resources, De La Cruz asked whether there was security for those who moved to Florida. She added that the Kissimmee location she’d been working out of wasn’t intended to be a creative space.

“I don’t want to be punished for being put into a situation my company put me in,” she wrote.

By the end of 2023, employees faced the same decision they had faced earlier, from the opposite end of the country: stay or go. De La Cruz and Fong both chose to return to California because of job security, the lawsuit says.

According to the complaint, a senior leader at Disney apologized to the impacted employees at a meeting last month, saying “the situation was a mistake on Disney’s part.”