The first thing I said to my mother-in-law as we arrived at her home for Christmas—after “hi” and “how are you”—was this: “Oh my god, did you hear what Justin Baldoni tried to do to Blake Lively?!”
This was December 22, less than a day after The New York Times published its detailed and damning indictment of Baldoni, a B-list actor who directed and co-starred with Lively in the summer blockbuster It Ends with Us. The film’s release coincided with a soup of tabloid-stirred rumors that Lively was a nightmare to work with. But the NYT revealed that, according to a complaint filed by Lively, Baldoni had sexually harassed her on set and then organized a “smear campaign” against her to prevent any accusations from coming to light.
The weekend before Christmas might seem like an odd time for the nation’s most prestigious newspaper to drop what is almost certainly the juiciest #MeToo story of the year—until you realize, as the Times surely did, that the story would go instantly, wildly viral, lighting up virtual group chats and IRL dinner table conversations alike as people gathered for the holidays.
From the moment the news broke, a more or less unanimous consensus emerged that Lively had been done horribly wrong—not just by Baldoni, but by every credulous, rumor-mongering commentator who believed his lies. Shame on us! Especially when this was a story with such a familiar script. Of course he was a sexual predator; of course she did nothing wrong; of course Hollywood remains a place where evil men torture beautiful, innocent actresses with impunity, laughing all the way.
The Times story was reported by, among others, the star #MeToo reporter Megan Twohey, one of the women who exposed Harvey Weinstein. On New Year’s Eve, news broke that Baldoni, who denies the allegations and is reportedly planning to countersue Lively, is now suing the Times for libel. Soon afterward, Lively hit Baldoni with a second suit, claiming that her “decision to speak out has resulted in further retaliation and attacks,” causing her to suffer “severe emotional distress and pain, humiliation, embarrassment, belittlement, frustration and mental anguish” and lost wages.
Amid this ugly battle between two people trying to save their reputations, some online commenters are starting to pose an uncomfortable question: Is this latest tale of bad men and blameless women a bit too tidy, too familiar? What if the believability of Lively’s story makes it all a bit, well, unbelievable?
The entire saga begins with It Ends with Us, whose August release was mired in controversy that centered particularly—and peculiarly—on its leading lady. The movie is based on Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel of the same name about a romantic relationship that turns violent, a dynamic that Lively and Baldoni portray both sensitively and persuasively on-screen. But multiple media stories insinuated that Lively had been a nightmare behind the scenes, engaging in bullying and “diva-style behavior” while also displaying shocking insensitivity toward the film’s delicate subject matter.
Meanwhile, in late August, an old interview in which Lively used the word “tranny” mysteriously resurfaced, fueling allegations of transphobia. On TikTok, a consensus immediately emerged that the actress was an evil bigot overdue for her comeuppance. The narrative, which crystallized with remarkable speed in social and legacy media alike, was that Lively’s star had not just fallen, but crashed and burned in a way from which there could be no recovery. She hadn’t just lost the trust of the public. She had lost their hearts, forever.
That Lively was done as a media darling remained the common wisdom until last week, when the Times flipped the script: Her apparently self-inflicted fall from grace was actually an audacious act of character assassination, orchestrated by the same man who had so convincingly played her abusive husband on-screen.
According to reporting from Twohey, as well as journalists Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the negative coverage was all Baldoni’s doing, the result of a carefully coordinated smear campaign. The details are as titillating as they are damning. Baldoni styled himself in public as the ultimate male feminist ally, even accepting accolades this month at an event honoring men who “elevate women, combat gender-based violence and promote gender equality worldwide.” But on set, allegedly, the actor demanded additional sex scenes, ogled Lively while she was breastfeeding, made crude comments about her postnatal body, and cast his boorish best friend to play the role of Lively's character’s ob-gyn during a birth scene—which, the Times breathlessly reported, meant “the actor’s face and hands were in close proximity to her nearly nude genitalia.” And then the gratuitous cherry on top of this giant sundae of Hollywood sleaze: In a desperate attempt to keep her from going public about his hideous behavior, Baldoni hired a cutthroat publicity team to smear her in the press. The Times revealed a damning text exchange between crisis management expert Melissa Nathan and a publicist for Baldoni and his movie studio:
“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” the publicist wrote to Nathan.
“You know we can bury anyone,” Nathan replied.
The effect was instant. Media figures who had attacked Lively over the summer ritualistically flagellated themselves for their credulity. “I’m ashamed of what I said about Blake Lively. Her allegations should shock us all,” reads a representative headline from The Guardian. The horror was palpable: Imagine fancying yourself a social justice warrior, only to find yourself the unwitting accomplice to the scheming of a misogynist wolf in a “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt!
At no point did it seem to occur to the media class that their newfound skepticism should, perhaps, be extended to the narrative that inspired it. Instead, its been left to random iconoclasts to unpack the idiosyncrasies of this story—which, like all juicy things, has a few soft spots that might collapse the whole narrative if you poke it too hard.
The most intriguing of these, as a small number of media-critical independent commentators have noted, is the precise nature of Baldoni’s role in the scheme to destroy Lively’s reputation. For a guy who’s supposed to be playing the chief antagonist, he has surprisingly few lines. Instead, the evidence against him mainly consists of things other people say he said, with the most damning text messages and emails coming not from Baldoni but two female publicists who were representing him. It was publicist Jennifer Abel who sent the inflammatory text about “burying” Lively that made the story go viral.
Here, the plot thickens: As one enterprising X user noted, Abel recently parted ways with Jonesworks, the firm where she worked as a member of Baldoni’s PR team. The circumstances of her departure are hard to parse, but it appears that Abel had a falling-out with Jonesworks’s notoriously hardcore founder, a woman named Stephanie Jones—who in turn appears to have retaliated by leaking Abel’s text messages, which were stored on her company-issued phone, to Lively’s legal team. (Also worth noting: Despite being the owner of the firm where the campaign to smear Lively originated, Jones is curiously not named in either the Times story nor in the complaint Lively filed with the California Civil Rights Department.)
In other words: If this is a story about men behaving badly, it’s also a story about the women who make their living in the attention economy, where gossip is a weapon. It’s that famous quote from The Wire: “You come at the king, you best not miss,” but in the world of Hollywood reputation management, the kings aren’t kings; they’re queen bees, masters of social aggression who can hone a narrative as fine and glittering as a needle—and then slide it gently right between your ribs. It is worth remembering that Lively has a publicity team, too: one savvy enough to evoke the image of the star as vulnerable and beautiful and suckling a newborn infant while Baldoni leers from the corner, while also putting that image in the hands of a reporter who specializes in toppling bad men from their perches of power.
This story may or may not be entirely true, but what matters is, it’s compelling. It’s a whole other kind of Hollywood magic, a silent arm of the machine that makes names instead of movies, that massages narratives instead of telling stories. What filmmakers accomplish with lighting and music, and carefully scripted scenes, publicists do by harnessing the most powerful force of all: the delusion that celebrities are knowable. That stars, they’re just like us.
But stars are not just like us. And if you think they are, it’s only because someone else was handsomely paid to make them seem that way. The Hollywood process by which names are made, and managed, and sometimes dragged through the mud, is a thing so finely tuned and so well-oiled that you couldn’t detect the sound of its massive gears turning even if you wanted to . . . and of course, you don’t really want to. We like these tidy narratives, which feel true while also being satisfying in a way that reality rarely is.
The attempted character assassination of Blake Lively was a juicy bit of fiction, but that’s not why it succeeded. It succeeded because a team of skilled storytellers made it seem like the fiction was a rare, exciting glimpse of the truth, one that made it easy to know whose team to be on. When journalists profess shame at the part they played in smearing Lively, it’s less because they believed a lie than that they believed the wrong lie—and in doing so, chose the wrong side.
They’re also sure they’re on the right side now, even though this new narrative—the one that paints Lively as a victim of Baldoni’s evil manipulations—is just as much a carefully constructed means of reputation management as the one that nearly sank Lively this summer. Is it true? Perhaps; perhaps not. But either way, the story is certainly better. More exciting. More sordid. More compulsively repeatable. In short: Whatever the outcome of Lively’s lawsuits, in the court of public opinion, she’s already won.
