The first woman of colour employed as a head of health and safety on a Walt Disney series is suing the production company for unfair dismissal after being sacked for referring to a colleague as a “white man”.
Sadi Khan, a single mother from Nottingham, was employed by the production company Blue Stockings, which is owned by the Disney subsidiary Lucasfilm, making the television series The Acolyte, part of the Star Wars franchise.
She had previously worked as health and safety co-ordinator on Disney’s remake of Snow White, filmed at Pinewood Studios.
Khan, who is of Pakistani heritage, had received an MBE in 2018 for services to cultural and religious awareness and training and services to the vulnerable.
She is suing Blue Stockings for unfair dismissal, sex and race discrimination, harassment and victimisation after she was summarily dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2022.
In her witness statement, Khan claims that she was sacked after blowing the whistle over “unsafe practices” on film sets at Shinfield Studios in Berkshire and Arborfield Studios in Wokingham, including “dangerous working at height activities” that “could have resulted in a fatality”, scaffolding with no inspection tags and forklifts and other machines with no inspection logs.
Giving evidence to an employment tribunal hearing in Reading, Khan said: “If it was Tom Cruise saying they have to take health and safety seriously, they’d have listened to him, but they took no notice of me.”
Rebecca Henderson as Vernestra Rwoh and Lee Jung-jae as Sol in The Acolyte
She added: “I took the view that everyone who came onto the film set was my son — that’s why I worked so hard.”
Khan said that, after she had raised concerns, “safety meetings became an intimidating and hostile environment for me. Every time I spoke I was belittled by comments saying ‘this is the film industry’ … I felt ignored and not taken seriously”.
She claimed there was a “campaign” against her and that the production company hired a man to a more senior role than hers. Khan was sacked for referring to him as a “white man” and for “making inappropriate comments” to her colleagues, the tribunal was told.
• Snow White: how the fairytale became a nightmare for Disney
Khan said she had spoken to the site doctor on a confidential basis, saying she felt she had been discriminated against because the man had been put in a more senior role than hers.
She said she had not initially stated that the man was white and that when she used the word it was not in a derogatory sense, but as a factual description. “My first response was that they’ve brought in an Englishman. They’ve bought a white man in above me when I haven’t done anything wrong … It wasn’t said in a derogative way — it was taken out of context.”
She added: “I was saying that the optics didn’t look right — he was an Englishman, I was the only woman of colour — he’d been brought in above me when I hadn’t done anything wrong and he was coming in to take over my position.”
Asked why she had not raised an official grievance about her alleged treatment, Khan said: “I wanted it off the record. I was told, ‘you’re the first woman of colour in this position ever for Lucasfilm in the UK’ — that is a milestone.
“I wanted to do a good job. This is my dream job … I didn’t want to become an issue. I wanted to do the work that I loved … I didn’t want to ruin my career in the film industry.”
Katherine Taunton, for Blue Stockings, told Khan: “There isn’t a single piece of evidence before the tribunal that anyone ever made discriminatory comments about your race or sex.”
Adam Teeuw, the vice-president of physical production at Lucasfilm, denied minimising the health and safety concerns she raised, and told the tribunal he believed that he had supported Khan and given her team extra resources to do their job.
In her witness statement Kahn said that her dismissal has caused her “mental, emotional, financial, physical and reputation harm”.
She said: “The respondent’s removal of my screen credits and defamation of my character with other productions I believe has lost me my career. I have been humiliated, disrespected, embarrassed to my core and feel like I have been physically abused.”
Blue Stockings denies the allegations, but declined to comment. The case continues.