Help Seek Justice for Disney Legend Tom Giovannini

Hi, I’m Tara. If you’re reading this, thank you for your time.

My father, Tom Giovannini, died on New Year’s Eve. His death was preventable.

Someone watched on camera as he struggled, fell, dying, and waited a day to call for help. DCF is investigating his death, and had started investigating his case two weeks before he died.

I am raising funds to launch a wrongful death lawsuit against my step-mother, who watched on camera as my father was dying and did not call for help until the next day after declaring her intention to "let him rot."

MY DAD

Tom Giovannini was a two-time Emmy award winner who helped set-up Hong Kong Disney, Disney’s Aulani Resort, and spearheaded the costumes for many parades throughout the Walt Disney World Resort in his thirty-three years there.

If you're reading this, odds are you worked there, which means you probably loved him too.

If you met him, you loved him. If you did not ever meet him, but visited Disney World in the past thirty-three years, he is at least partially responsible for how good your visit went. (Admit it, even if you hate the heat, you can’t beat the costumes.)

He was a mentor, a friend, a smiling face, and a helping hand when you were in need. To know him was to love him.

What many of even those who knew him did not know is that, starting around 2000, my father became an alcoholic. There’s a lot of reasons, none that matter now, but he became a heavy drinker, and it became much more pronounced four years ago when my mother died.

Shortly thereafter, he "broke," in his own words. Three years after her death, he re-encountered the woman he'd go on to marry after a very short whirlwind romance culminating in a wedding at the very Aulani resort he helped open.

But after the honeymoon, my father attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital, which turned into rehab, and his new wife learned about his drinking.

The first time I spoke to her, months after the wedding, as he was entering rehab, she told me she was going to cancel thank you notes and return wedding gifts. A month later, she’d tell me her mother helped pay for rehab, and my father owed her, and she was going to make my father sell his house, but she would not be moving in with him, and he would not be moving in with her.

She told me she would “let him rot” and encouraged me to do the same. And then she did.

For the first time in 55 years of life, my father spent Thanksgiving and Christmas alone, nine months after marrying his wife. One of the last times I spoke to my father he sadly told me he reminded his wife she promised to be there for him, in sickness and in health, for better or worse.

But she wasn’t.

She lives in Las Vegas, where she remained for nearly every day of their nine month long marriage. It is where she sat on New Year’s Eve, with friends, family, while she watched on camera, my father stumbling, falling, dying, and decided to not call anyone for help until the next day.

She told me she saw my father dying and waited. “I thought, what harm could one more day do?” He’d be dead, at most, hours after she last saw him.

WHAT I SAW

I worked as a caregiver for the elderly and disabled for a few years. I was taught to recognize and report mistreatment, abuse and neglect. It is my professional opinion that it is what I witnessed for, at least, the last three months of my father’s life.

When my father died, I was in the process of starting a conservatorship (or guardianship) for him as I believed his life was in danger. DCF at that point had already begun an investigation into his well-being.

Since getting remarried in March 2024, my father tried to kill himself eight times that I know of. He had cirrhosis, diabetes, and further complications involving his kidney, heart, and his immune system. He was delusional, forgetful, and harming himself. He was still drinking.

He ended up in the hospital for a month, losing sixty pounds, and discovering his liver had failed. While that happened, his wife was in his house, throwing away my family belongings to make it easier to sell.

Our family photos, his Disney commemorative statues, his Funko pops, his skateboards, his hats, his possessions were all packed and gone, because it made the house easier to sell.

In the last three months of my father's life, he slept alone on a twin bed he was gifted after all his things were cleaned out, in a house that did not have a toaster or a soap dispenser in it.

I called him nearly every day after he got out of the hospital in October 2024 because I did not believe anyone else was taking care of him. I tried to move in to take care of him, but at my step-mother’s encouragement, he did not let me. Because "no one can live in the house while it's being shown."

LEGACY

When my father told me he was in rehab, reading the new Stephen King book, I bought it to read it with him, and we talked about the messy rehab story in it. After he got out of the hospital, we talked nearly every day.

It was nice to talk to him but… it wasn’t him.

Over that period of time, I only saw the man I knew and loved maybe once. The rest of the time he was gone. He talked to me about giving cars to dead people, how he couldn’t go to the DMV because you don’t go to hospital on Mondays, he would drive and end up lost, unsure of where he was or why he was there. He was dying. He was drinking.

When I brought this to my stepmother’s attention, she blocked me. He continued to drink, and she knew. He wasn’t taking his meds, forgetting things, and dying, and she knew.

And he was left alone, with nothing but a camera to keep him company.

His legacy shouldn't be written yet. He had more to do.

NOW

His wife is now hiding his will, attempting to keep his children away from the house, blocking us from seeing his body, and has successfully kept me from coming to his funeral.

I am launching a wrongful death lawsuit because I believe his wife knowingly let him die. I am raising funds to help pay for the lawyers involved in this process, including both a probate lawyer and a wrongful death attorney, as well as raising funds for any unforeseen issues.

If you knew him, you know what he meant to everyone. If you ever smiled at Disney since 1991, you have my dad in some small part to thank. Please help him.

He didn’t have to die.