Her thirties were spent raising her children. Disney said that, when she was in her mid-forties, “I thought, I have no résumé. Why would anyone ever take me seriously? I understood myself to be a person who had no value.” She tried to start a career as a filmmaker, but no one gave much consideration to a Disney heiress. In 2007, she started a production company, Fork Films, which makes movies with a social-justice focus, and the following year she produced her first documentary, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” about a group of women who helped bring an end to the Liberian civil war. The film won several awards, including Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. One of its lead characters, Leymah Gbowee, won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Last year, Disney put together a bid to buy what was left of the Weinstein Company as it prepared to file for Chapter 11 protection. The deal didn’t go through, and instead she co-founded a company called Level Forward, which funds film, theatre, and TV productions led by women and people of color; the company’s first projects included investments in critically acclaimed Broadway shows like “What the Constitution Means to Me,” the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!,” and “Slave Play.” She said that she is working on a documentary “about economic inequality and the relentless march over the last fifty years toward treating workers incredibly badly.” When I asked her whether the Disney Company would be a part of it, she declined to answer.

When Erica Payne tracked Disney down one day and urged her to join the Patriotic Millionaires, Disney said to herself, “That’s exactly how I want to use the currency that I have.” She has become one of the group’s most outspoken members. In December, 2017, she appeared in a video attacking the Republican tax bill. In July, 2019, she hosted, with the minister and activist William Barber, a Patriotic Millionaires media conference call to celebrate the passage of the minimum-wage bill in the House.

She sometimes exaggerates. In an interview with Yahoo News this past July, she said that Disney employees had been so underpaid that they were forced to “forage for food in other people’s garbage,” a claim that she later retracted. At a time when political activists are expected to live according to their values, Disney’s role as an ultra-wealthy spokesperson for the underclass makes her a target of vitriol. In late September, someone tweeted at her, “Boy do I despise virtue signaling rich liberal hypocrites living off the money earned by their far better ancestors. Bet you live in a luxury apt in NYC! Why don’t you renounce your corporate grandad’s money and give it ALL away! You never will . . . HYPOCRITE!”

Disney and I discussed another Patriotic Millionaires member, Chuck Collins, the Oscar Mayer heir, who, in 1985, at the age of twenty-six, gave his inheritance away to various environmental and civil-rights organizations. In Disney’s twenties and early thirties, she had considered doing the same. “Honestly, the only reason I didn’t do it was that I was chicken,” she said. “I wish I was a more courageous person.” Over time, she told me, her wealth has grown, and she’s been able to give away much more than she would have if she’d donated it all back then. (She said that her net worth is a hundred and forty million dollars, and that she has given away around sixty-five million dollars. The number is hard to verify; she said that much of it was in the form of grants to social-justice-oriented filmmakers and to organizations that work with low-income populations.) She pointed out that her name and wealth are what enable her to talk about poverty in the first place. If she were an unknown person with less money, she said, TV networks wouldn’t invite her on the air.

I asked her how she felt about the pledge that billionaires such as Buffett and Bill Gates had signed, promising to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. “I’ve given away much more than fifty per cent of my net worth, and I don’t intend to stop,” she said. “And, frankly, if you’re a billionaire and only want to give away half of your fortune, something is wrong with you.” Disney is wary of the idea that the generosity of individual rich people can solve society’s problems. Anand Giridharadas, the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” has argued that much philanthropy does far more to boost the reputations of the donors than it does to help create a more just society. Such gifts also tend to come with generous tax breaks, meaning that taxpayers are underwriting the donations that get hedge-fund moguls’ names put on wings of art museums and hospitals. Instead, Disney wants to convince more people that systemic change is needed. “I get messages like ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ve never worked a day in your life!’ ” she told me. “And I’m, like, You’re making my point! I’ve never worked a day in my life, and look at me! I’m sitting here in total comfort. You can work all your life and you will never find yourself where I am today.” She said that she doesn’t blame people for being resentful: “I will always be sort of an alien anthropologist looking at poverty from my very rarefied air.”

In September, I joined Disney at a dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit, co-founded by Chuck Collins, that works on economic-justice issues. The dinner was held in the community room of the Old South Church, on Boylston Street, in Boston. After a guided meditation and a rap-and-saxophone performance by the trans activist and musician Jay-Marie Hill, Disney was to be presented with U.F.E.’s inaugural Class Traitor Award.

For most of the evening, Disney sat at a table near the front of the room, her brow furrowed, scribbling notes on a stack of papers that contained the text of her speech. She wore a navy-blue dress with white skulls printed on it, her tortoiseshell glasses sliding down her nose. Others in the room were helping themselves to rice and beans, but Disney told me that she was too nervous to eat. Instead, she drank a few glasses of Chardonnay. Finally, shortly after 9 p.m., three hours into the proceedings, she was introduced by Mike Lapham, a tall, wiry man who heads U.F.E.’s Responsible Wealth project. Lapham spoke about Disney’s support for preserving the estate tax, and how she had helped push for a millionaire tax in New York. “She’s passionate, she’s fearless, she’s fierce,” Lapham said. “She’s an inspiration to so many other rich people to become class traitors.”

As the audience applauded, Disney climbed onstage, clutching her notes. “I love every single person in here,” she said. “I came from a place that shouldn’t have led me here, and, every time I find myself being led here one way or another, it feels so good to be alive. I just want to thank all of you for the work that you do, and the way that the work that you do gives me meaning.” For a moment, the room was quiet, and there was a sense, as there sometimes is when Disney is talking about her wealth and her ambitions, that she might have misread the room. But Disney, who is mostly aware of the unease she causes, tries to use it to her advantage. She looked into the crowd and said, “Now I’m going to start the official part of my speech, and I want to watch you all squirm when I say it. Are you ready?” She paced in a small circle, then leaned toward the audience. “I’m riiiich,” she intoned. She paused before asking, “Did I make you all really uncomfortable?” The shame attached to such an admission, she said, has motivated rich people to isolate themselves from the rest of society: “In their hearts, they know that something is inherently wrong with what they have, as compared with what everybody else has.” She said that she was hopeful that the country was finally waking up from a “fifty-year fever dream” of market-driven economic policy. After her speech, Lapham presented her with a plaque bearing a quote attributed to the aboriginal artist Lilla Watson: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”