Blake Lively appears at the SNL50: The Anniversary Special at Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Feb. 16, left, and Justin Baldoni appears at a special screening of The Boys in the Boat in New York on Dec. 13, 2023.Evan Agostini/The Associated Press
Even if your celebrity gossip IQ is far from Mensa-level, you probably know that Blake Lively (the actor from Gossip Girl who is married to Ryan Reynolds) and Justin Baldoni (the guy from the Blake Lively legal drama) are involved in a high-stakes celebrity smackdown.
What began with a bad filming experience on the set of their movie It Ends with Us – released in August, 2024 – has since spawned a slew of overlapping, multimillion-dollar lawsuits while exposing the odious inner workings of the Hollywood PR machine. Insiders are saying it will change the way the game is played. Outsiders aren’t sure what to think. (Part of the plan, per Lively’s lawsuit, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves).
At the crux are two conflicting narratives: Lively alleges that she experienced sexual harassment and a hostile work environment on the set of It Ends with Us. Included in her complaint are allegations that Baldoni, her co-star and the film’s director, and other executives created an uncomfortable and sexually charged work environment. Lively believes that the steps she took to address the situation during filming led to Baldoni and his PR team plotting a retaliatory smear campaign. Baldoni, meanwhile, says that Lively is the bad guy: an A-list bully who used her “dragons” to take control of his project.
Both actors are due to appear in the U.S. District Court in New York on Monday, and eventually a judge will rule on the pertinent matters. But let’s leave that to the legal eagles and the courts while we dig into the juiciest side plots. Could Taylor Swift testify? What on earth is astroturfing? And why may Baldoni’s man bun end up on the legal record?
Bring on the smut, but where does this story start?
Scandal was brewing behind the scenes for months but the public narrative kicks off in the summer of 2024: Lively and Reynolds, a Hollywood golden couple, are riding high on their proximity to Taylor Swift as well as their own high-buzz projects, which just happen to be premiering on back-to-back weekends. “Can Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively Pull off Barbenheimer 2.0?” asked a headline from the Hollywood Reporter. The answer: Yes, they can.
Both movies did gangbusters, with Deadpool & Wolverine taking the number one spot at the box office and It Ends with Us at number two – the first time a husband-and-wife duo had earned this distinction since Bruce Willis and Demi Moore back in 1990 (with Die Hard 2 and Ghost).
On the red carpet, Lively explained that Reynolds had actually helped her write one of the movie’s key scenes. “He works on everything I do; I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his,” she gushed, while flanked by her famous hubby, her co-stars and IEWU author Colleen Hoover. But wait? Where was Baldoni, the movie’s director?
Where was he?
Baldoni says he was deliberately segregated, forced to hang out in the theatre’s basement because of bad blood with his leading lady. But nobody knew that yet and so it just looked weird that the movie’s two co-stars weren’t being photographed together. Enter the sleuths of TikTok who caught a whiff of drama and ran with it, noting that Lively, Reynolds and Hoover had all unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram – a smoking gun in the internet era.
Within days, the rumours had made the leap from TikTok to the trade pubs with The Hollywood Reporter saying the on-set tensions and creative differences led to two different versions of the movie: The “Baldoni cut” by the movie’s director and the “Sony cut,” commissioned by Lively and edited by Shane Reid (an editor on Deadpool movies). The studio ended up going with Lively’s cut, which obviously didn’t go down well with the movie’s director. But whatever victory Lively experienced was short-lived.
Why did the internet turn on Blake Lively?
Well, isn’t that the $400-million-dollar question? At the time it just felt like your typical social-media pile on: TikTokers called out Lively for promoting a movie about domestic violence like it was a rom-com. Old, incriminating videos of Lively resurfaced and suddenly the Daily Mail was asking: “Is Blake Lively set to be cancelled?” At this point, Lively stepped back from the spotlight, but when she came back, she was ready to rumble.
In a legal complaint, she alleged that the backlash against her was not just the fickle whim of the internet, but a deliberate smear campaign orchestrated by Baldoni’s PR team. And she had the receipts (read: dozens of text exchanges between Baldoni and his crisis management team) to back up her claims of deliberate retaliation and astroturfing.
What the heck is astroturfing?
Astroturfing is spin-doctor speak for when an explicit strategy to influence public opinion is disguised as organic social-media content (that is, fake grass made to look like the real thing).
Around the same time It Ends with Us premiered, Baldoni retained Melissa Nathan, a crisis-management expert who worked with Johnny Depp during his trial. At various points, the group texted and e-mailed about putting a “social combat plan” into motion; “social manipulation;” “proactive fan posting;” and efforts to “boost” and “amplify” content that was anti-Lively and/or pro-Baldoni.
How did the guy from Jane the Virgin become an A-list director anyway?
For Baldoni’s full backstory, check out this L.A. Times story on his “tumultuous road to the centre of a Hollywood scandal.” Certainly, Lively is the more powerful person in this fight, but Baldoni, who founded Wayfarer Studios in 2013 with his friend and billionaire business partner Steve Sarowitz, is not without a war chest.
As an actor, he is best known for his role on Jane the Virgin, but just as notable: his side hustle as a crusader against toxic masculinity and a man-bun enthusiast (more on that later). Baldoni’s 2017 Ted Talk called “Why I’m done trying to be ‘man enough’” was a viral hit (nine million views), which led to a best-selling memoir (Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity) and a podcast (Man Enough).
So, while Lively was taking heat for her “tone deaf” promotion strategy, her co-star/director was giving interviews on the importance of supporting survivors and accepting a Male Ally award from a women’s non-profit, Vital Voices. The award was rescinded after Lively went public in her legal action. Baldoni was also dropped by his agency WME. In January, he filed the US$400-million defamation lawsuit against Lively and Reynolds.
What does Game of Thrones have to do with any of this?
Per Baldoni’s lawsuit, “This is a case about two of the most powerful stars in the world deploying their enormous power to steal an entire film right out of the hands of its director and production studio.” To back up his version of events, he shares a text he got from Lively early on in filming after she showed him a reworked version of one of the movie’s major scenes: “If you ever get around to watching Game of Thrones, you’ll appreciate that I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons …”
In response Baldoni texted back: “I really love what you did. It really does help a lot. Makes it so much more fun and interesting. (And I would have felt that way without Ryan and Taylor),” seemingly confirming the identities of the dragons.
As in Taylor Alison Swift??!!
The one, the only. Swift is godparent to three of Lively and Reynolds’s four children and obviously a member of the inner circle. According to Baldoni’s lawsuit, she was privy to certain events that may be relevant to the legal proceedings. So, of course the Swift-o-verse is now salivating about whether she might be subpoenaed to testify. During an appearance on a podcast last month, Baldoni’s lawyer indicated this could be a possibility, but now Lively and Reynolds are fighting to keep their famous friends out of court.
You mentioned a man bun –
Ah, yes. As far as spicy side plots go, this might be the winner: In January, Baldoni’s lawyers sent a letter to Disney and Marvel executives, including Bob Iger and Kevin Feige, asking them to preserve relevant documents relating to the creation of Nicepool, a character in Deadpool & Wolverine. He is a man-bun sporting, virtue signalling, man bro who can’t make a move without an intimacy co-ordinator and brags about being a feminist.
Baldoni’s team is alleging a “deliberate attempt to mock, harass, ridicule, intimidate or bully Baldoni through the character of ‘Nicepool.’” It’s unclear if this accusation will end up in court or it’s just another example of the DARVO strategy.
DARVO?
Lively’s legal team says Baldoni’s lawsuit is just another example of a PR strategy that has gotten one heck of a workout in the post #metoo era: “A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim [and] Offender.”
