Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Banished Forever
February 13, 2025 at 12:48AMSometimes the happiest places on Earth can also be the loneliest. For Vulture, Justine Harman goes Great Mouse Detective on Club 33–Disneyland’s “secretive, invitation-only private club”–and the couple whose memberships were revoked following a contested claim of public drunkenness. Her account is a brisk procedural, dotted with details of the club’s history and reputation (“It’s like Fight Club”) and the couple’s efforts to regain access. While a few other reporters have had some fun with the same story, none, to my knowledge, have joined their lead character, post-expulsion, for lunchtime wine at the Magic Castle.
A member of Club 33 has to abide by certain rules, and Anderson had been allegedly drunk in public. Game over. It had taken him and his wife nearly a decade to get into the club in the first place, and since then, they’d spent about a third of every year in Disneyland. They celebrated nearly every holiday at the club, their son’s 21st birthday and others, a handful of marriage anniversaries. And so instead of going quietly, the Andersons decided to sue to get back in, claiming breach of contract and slander. Anderson wasn’t drunk, he said — he’d had a vestibular migraine. And furthermore, he was being targeted.
The case dragged on for over seven years — through six judge reassignments, a pandemic, and a successful summary-judgment appeal by the Andersons, who argued that Disney was being permitted “to terminate a membership for any reason at all — good, bad, or indifferent,” which allowed the case to go to trial. Finally, on August 5, 2024, the Andersons were able to present their case before a judge. And from the outset, it didn’t go their way. The judge rejected Scott’s idea to have jurors simulate the walk from 1901 to the Grand Californian to prove it couldn’t be done drunk. It took a jury only 45 minutes to reject the claim that the Andersons had been improperly ousted. “Orange County is fucking Disney’s neighborhood,” Scott says — everyone has a connection to Disneyland.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/12/yesterday-tomorrow-and-banished-forever/
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