The Free Press
The fiftieth anniversary episode of Saturday Night Live, which aired this weekend, included a surprising bit: The Hollywood power couple Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively laughing about the controversy that’s engulfed them for months—reportedly leaving her in a state of “grief, fear, trauma, and extreme anxiety.”
“Ryan Reynolds, how’s it going?” Amy Poehler asked Reynolds on SNL.
“Great—why, what have you heard?” Reynolds replied.
Here’s what we heard.
Just before Christmas, Lively had accused Justin Baldoni, her co-star in last summer’s blockbuster It Ends with Us, of sexual harassment—and that last month he fought back with his own lawsuit, accusing her of extortion and releasing reams of evidence to back up his claims.
None of which is something worth laughing about.
It all began with a New York Times story, published December 21, which broke the news that Lively had filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, his production company, and a host of PR agents. And the details were shocking: Lively said Baldoni improvised unwanted kissing on set and discussed his sex life. She said he watched her, topless, having her body makeup removed. She said he entered her trailer uninvited while she breastfed. Her husband apparently said he fat-shamed her, by asking an on-set fitness trainer how much she weighed. Finally, when she complained, Baldoni set a team of reputation destroyers on her, who set out to “bury” her with various negative stories.
This seems to be Lively’s explanation for the fact that, around the time of the film’s release, various unflattering statements she’d made in the past mysteriously resurfaced—including an interview from 2016, in which Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa congratulated Lively on her baby bump, only for Lively to shockingly retort, “Congrats on your little bump,” pointing to Flaa’s stomach, seeming to imply that she’s carrying excess weight.
The Times story was co-written by Megan Twohey, one of the journalists who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct in 2017. It read as a textbook #MeToo tale, made all the more ironic by the detail that Baldoni has very much cast himself as a feminist ally, man bun and all. Indeed, he built a career around being one, writing books entitled Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity and Boys Will Be Human.
This is how the blurb for Man Enough reads:
Writing from experience, Justin invites us to move beyond the scripts we’ve learned since childhood and the roles we are expected to play. He challenges men to be brave enough to be vulnerable, to be strong enough to be sensitive, to be confident enough to listen.
After the Times article went live, Baldoni was hit with a barrage of outrage. So much for redefining masculinity! This “feminist” man had ogled Blake Lively, kissed her without her consent, and then tried to stop her speaking her truth with a smear campaign that had, according to the Times, “branded” her as “tone-deaf, difficult to work with, a bully.” The story continued: “Sales of her new hair-care line plummeted.”
In other words, we had failed the number-one mandate of the #MeToo era: We had not believed all women. Or at least, we had not believed this one woman.
And then came the twist—the first hint that Baldoni, and not Lively, could be the victim of this story. On December 31, he sued The New York Times for $250 million for libel, accusing the paper of accepting a “self-serving narrative.” He followed up two weeks later by suing Lively and Reynolds for defamation. (He’s seeking $400 million in damages.)
The damning evidence landed on January 31, when Baldoni published a 168-page timeline of events, which includes numerous text messages he exchanged with Lively that support his claims that the actress had waged her own smear campaign against him.
In their communiqués, Baldoni comes off as sensitive to the point of self-effacing. Meanwhile Lively appears to be flirty, self-regarding, and something of a bully. Lively repeatedly asked to rewrite crucial scenes of the movie; yet when Baldoni—the director—resisted her rewrites, she made what reads like a veiled threat. “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,” Lively texted, according to Baldoni’s timeline. “My dragons also protect those I fight for. So really we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. You will too, I can promise you.” Baldoni alleges that, a couple of days before this text was sent, Lively had her friend Taylor Swift show up at the tail end of a meeting with him—one of Lively’s dragons allegedly sent to defend her.
In response to the text, Baldoni followed up with a groveling, seven-minute voice note apologizing for not being more sensitive. “I’m a very flawed man,” he said, “as my wife will attest. But I will always apologize and then find my way back to center. That is one thing I can assure you of.”
The text messages dropped like an epic plot twist, reminding the reader that a man can be the victim of a woman’s harassment, despite what she said. A man can be endlessly harassed, continuously forced to grovel and beg.
She said Baldoni was a voyeur who had ogled her while breastfeeding, yet he published a text from Lively that read, “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines”—showing she was obviously comfortable with him seeing her in a state of dishabille.
She said he improvised an unwanted kiss during a scene—but when Baldoni’s legal team released an extended cut of it, you can see that she seems comfortable, teasing Baldoni about the size of his nose and laughing about getting fake tan on his skin.
And then there’s the alleged fat-shaming. Baldoni says he has several slipped discs, and his personal trainer needed to know how much Lively weighed, so that he could prepare to lift her in a scene without getting injured. Baldoni says that when Lively’s husband found out, Reynolds summoned him to their apartment and said: “How dare you fucking ask about my wife’s weight?”
The story that emerges from Baldoni and his legal team is that, in an attempt to rescue her reputation, Lively tried to cast herself as the ultimate victim: a #MeToo victim. But unfortunately for her, she miscast the role of her alleged oppressor, choosing a man-bun feminist who’s spent his life “believing all women,” anxiously validating every word that comes from the fairer sex. He was just the kind of man most likely to be vindicated by the evidence.
The entire episode reveals the flaws of the #MeToo movement. Believing all women are vulnerable to the predations of all men fails to account for the real-world messiness of how sexuality actually intersects with power. But it also reveals the flaws of the man-bun feminism Baldoni has personified for his entire career. He quite literally wrote the book on beta maleness, buying into the idea that masculinity itself is a crime that must be “undone.” Perhaps he convinced himself that women can’t be bullies but only bullied. And so he accepted Lively’s takeover of the film, which is what ultimately led to the demise of their relationship.
Legally, the two have entered a stalemate of sorts. Lively has sued Baldoni; he has sued her back; their cases have been consolidated, with the trial set for March 2026. But whoever wins, both have already lost. She might be grinning on SNL, but Lively has clearly failed in her attempt to mend her reputation using the old #MeToo script. Meanwhile, that script has also failed Baldoni. Long before Lively tried to present herself as the perfect victim, he tried to present himself as the perfect “male feminist.” And now here he is, taking his accuser to court—trying to remind the world that you can’t believe all women.
