But Disney is now saying Piccolo’s wrongful death suit is unlawful — because he had a Disney+ subscription.

The terms and conditions of that subscription, company attorneys insist in a recent court filing, requires disputes with Disney — regardless of the underlying issue — to be settled outside court.

Piccolo and his attorneys blasted the company’s logic in their 123-page response earlier this month.

“There is not a single authority in Florida that would support such an inane argument,” they said.

In a statement released late Wednesday, after this story was first published, a Disney spokesman distanced the company from the restaurant, Raglan Road Irish Pub, while also justifying out-of-court arbitration as a cheaper way to settle legal disputes.

“We are deeply saddened by the family’s loss and understand their grief,” the statement read. “Given that this restaurant is neither owned nor operated by Disney, we are merely defending ourselves against the plaintiff’s attorney’s attempt to include us in their lawsuit against the restaurant.”

According to a wrongful death suit Piccolo filed in February, he, his wife Kanokporn Tangsuan and Tangsuan’s mother ate at the pub in October 2023.

At the pub, Tangsuan repeatedly asked her waiter whether the vegan fritters, onion rings, scallops and vegan shepherd’s pie she’d ordered could be made without nuts and dairy, to which she was severely allergic. The waiter confirmed her meal would be cooked without exposure to those foods.

When the food arrived, the couple checked again that her order was allergen-free, because there were no flags to signify it was. The restaurant staff reassured them, the suit says.

After the meal, Tangsuan began to have trouble breathing. She injected herself with an EpiPen but collapsed inside the restaurant Planet Hollywood.

Tangsuan’s mother and Piccolo, who had separated from her after dinner, learned through a phone call that Tangsuan was taken to a hospital where she died.

According to the complaint, a medical examiner determined Tangsuan was experiencing anaphylaxis because of “elevated” levels of nuts and dairy in her system.

Piccolo had signed up for a Disney+ free trial in November 2019, and according to legal papers filed Aug. 2, he doesn’t have records of paying for the streaming service after his trial ended, suggesting he let it lapse. The fine print for that account requires disputes be resolved through arbitration, not the court system.

Piccolo had also purchased tickets to Epcot last year through a Disney account, which has the same arbitration conditions as the streaming service. Piccolo said he was unaware of the conditions, and in any case, does not believe they legally would apply to his wife’s death.

But Disney’s attorneys, under the firm White & Case, said whether or not Piccolo actually reviewed the terms is “immaterial” and that legal proceedings should be stopped: “This broad language covers Piccolo’s claims against [Walt Disney Parks and Resorts],” company attorneys wrote in a May motion to arbitrate the dispute.

“We have no further comment at this time as our responsive pleading details the facts supporting our position,” said Brian Denney, Piccolo’s attorney. “There is a hearing scheduled for October 2nd where these issues will be brought before the court.”

Piccolo is seeking more than $50,000 in damages.

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.”