Ingo Rademacher, who appeared on “General Hospital” for 25 years, is suing ABC after he was fired from the television soap opera last month for his refusal to get vaccinated for COVID-19.
In a complaint filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Rademacher, 50, alleged that the network refused to accommodate his religious objections, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Rademacher said he requested a religious exemption to the mandate, but was subjected to a “half an hour of cross-examination about his religious beliefs,” the complaint alleged. He claimed he has a right to “bodily integrity” as well as a right to “informational privacy.”
Rademacher played Jasper “Jax” Jacks in 1,299 episodes of “General Hospital” from 1996 until he was fired in November 2021, according to IMDb.com.
Rademacher is represented by John W. Howard, an attorney who has filed several lawsuits challenging vaccine mandates, Variety reported.
“I am entitled to a religious exemption against mandatory vaccination for COVID-19 on the basis of my deeply and sincerely held moral belief that my body is endowed by my creator with natural processes to protect me and that its natural integrity cannot ethically be violated by the administration of artificially created copies of genetic material, foreign to nature and experimental,” Rademacher wrote in an Oct. 11 email to Disney’s HR department, according to Variety.
‘General Hospital’ Actor Sues ABC Over Vaccine Mandate https://t.co/8GzIqDWY6m
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 13, 2021
ABC has not commented yet about the lawsuit, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Steve Burton, another “General Hospital” star, confirmed to Variety on Nov. 23 that he, too, had been fired from the show for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate. Burton wrote in an Instagram post that he had applied for religious and medical exemptions, but that ABC had denied them.
“This should not be a political issue,” Rademacher’s lawsuit states. “There is no need for everybody to get the COVID-19 shot, even if the president demands it.”
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