For 43 years, performers at Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament venues across North America have entertained crowds as knights and ladies on horseback. Now, the company is facing allegations from former employees who say its workplace culture involves animal mistreatment, sexual harassment, discrimination, bullying and retaliation against people who speak up.
During the show, guests eat a medieval-inspired meal while watching armored knights joust on horseback and fight with swords. Medieval Times opened its first castle in Kissimmee, Florida, in 1983. It now has 10 locations in the United States and Canada, with more than 2,000 employees.
The production celebrates the chivalry of its knights, but some former workers say female cast members were treated unfairly. A former castle “queen” has sued, alleging that the workplace was shaped by gender discrimination and sexual harassment. Another former employee says she was fired after raising concerns about animal welfare.
A civil lawsuit filed in June by a former performer at the company’s Buena Park, California, location alleges widespread sexual harassment and a hostile work environment.
Kaitlyn Farrell joined Medieval Times as a queen in 2019 and resigned in February 2024, saying conditions had become intolerable. Her complaint, filed in Orange County Superior Court, describes what she calls a two-tiered workplace in which women were treated as a lower class of employee.
Farrell alleges that unwanted advances toward female staff were normalized and that gender-based misconduct was met with indifference when workers complained. She says she was asked to serve as a witness in a harassment investigation involving another employee, after which that employee openly retaliated against her. According to the lawsuit, management did not intervene.
In a separate incident described in the complaint, a manager allegedly instructed someone to remove stitching from Farrell’s costumes. She says this was deliberate sabotage intended to cause wardrobe malfunctions in front of audiences.
After workers at the Buena Park castle unionized, Farrell took part in a strike in February 2023. She alleges that she then became the focus of a severe cyberbullying and doxxing campaign. Anonymous social media accounts, which she says showed signs of being connected to employees or management, posted details about her dating life, sexually degrading captions and altered images placing her face on cartoon characters in sexualized poses.
The lawsuit also alleges that the harassment turned into physical intimidation. Farrell says Medieval Times employees went to her second job at another theme park and tried to frighten her while she was working.
After she filed formal complaints, an attorney for the company sent a letter dismissing the alleged cyberbullying and stalking as “weird allegations,” according to the lawsuit.
“We look forward to proving these allegations in court,” Farrell’s attorney, Charles Ludd Jr., said. Medieval Times did not respond to a request for comment on the case.
Bill Elliot, a former knight who worked at the same location, called Farrell’s allegations false. He left the company in 2015 after 12 and a half years and said he had no complaints about his experience.
Elliot said the company provided decent pay, full-time hours with overtime, health, dental and vision insurance, and a 401(k) plan. He suggested that people making claims against the company were seeking a larger share of its profits, despite having no responsibility for running the business.
He also argued that anyone who found the workplace toxic could have left. Elliot said female performers often sought attention from the knights, and claimed some later made false allegations when they did not get what they wanted.
Farrell’s case is not the first lawsuit to raise concerns about the company. In a 2019 complaint, former Buena Park cast member Bethany Regan said she was treated less favorably than male employees after joining the venue in 2013.
Regan’s lawsuit also raised concerns about the treatment of the horses. She alleged that the head trainer had a volatile temper and whipped horses unnecessarily, leaving large welts. Some horses, she claimed, were trained in ways that caused bleeding around their mouths and elsewhere on their bodies. The complaint also said horses were overworked and sometimes kept from resting until they were dehydrated. Regan alleged that one horse died as a result.
Before making her complaints, Regan had reportedly been warned that the head trainer was close to the company’s owner and that speaking out could lead to retaliation. She nevertheless raised concerns about the horses and what she described as dangerous conditions for female cast members.
Regan’s lawsuit says the company suspended her for spreading rumors after she made formal complaints, then later fired her. The case was settled in 2020. The settlement terms were not disclosed, and Regan’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Yvonne Barteau worked for six years as a principal trainer and director of entertainment operations at Arabian Nights Dinner Attraction, a horse-themed dinner theater near a Medieval Times venue in Florida. Arabian Nights operated from 1988 to 2014.
Barteau now runs a Florida horse rescue, Horses Without Humans. She founded it after making a documentary about theater horses in the United States. Over the years, she worked with many Medieval Times performers as they moved between dinner theater jobs in the Orlando area.
Barteau said some young performers became overly absorbed in their roles, behaving as if they were actual medieval warriors. In her view, that sometimes contributed to men treating women callously, while senior staff failed to address the behavior.
She said she met both good and bad people at Medieval Times, and stressed that nothing justifies abusing a horse. People who work with animals, she said, have a responsibility to speak up for creatures that cannot speak for themselves.
At the same time, Barteau cautioned against assuming that any performance involving horses is cruel, particularly when the person making that judgment has little experience with them. Some horses enjoy performing and being in front of an audience, she said.
Barteau has performed for years with a stallion named Papi, whom she described as a natural theater horse. She said audiences remember him, and that seeing him perform can help people develop an affection for horses.
