Abigail Disney: The Philanthropist

Abigail Disney hasn’t been in a room since the election where wealthy people aren’t whispering about what to do next. She thinks it’s time they stopped being so polite.

“We have to fight like hell,” says the 65-year-old heiress to the Disney fortune. “You don’t get to do this without breaking some expensive eggs.”

As the Trump administration targets progressive organizations and cuts programs serving vulnerable people, Disney is convinced that wealthy Americans can no longer afford to stay on the sidelines. In the weeks after the election, Disney’s Daphne Foundation announced it would be spending down its entire multimillion-dollar endowment in the face of “rising threats of white nationalism and anti-democratic forces.”

That was never part of the plan when Disney and her husband began funding New York City nonprofits 30 years ago. “But this is an emergency,” she says, and traditional philanthropy’s 5 percent annual giving requirement “is just not going to do it.”

Disney, who is also a longtime film producer and peace activist, has been giving away large swaths of her fortune since her early 20s. The granddaughter of Disney co-founder Roy Disney has become what she calls a “class traitor,” going viral advocating for a tax increase on the 1 percent and criticizing working conditions at the company that made her family rich.

“The irony of people with resources is they’re the least inclined to take risks,” she says. Not Disney. In recent years, she has redirected her philanthropy almost entirely toward advocacy work and policy fights. Her personal advocacy has become even more important, she says, because she’s already given away much of her $120 million fortune.

Today she’s leveraging her “weird voice and weird position” as a Disney heiress to challenge wealthy Americans who “may not necessarily want to see their democracy go down the tubes but are a little afraid to step up.”

She recently watched the satirical film Mountainhead and recognized her wealthy peers in the billionaire characters who obsess over losing everything and ending up in soup kitchens. That paranoia is exactly what’s keeping her class from embracing a little necessary discomfort, she says, when democracy needs defending.

“The more you have,” she says, “the more you’re afraid to lose.”