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Blake Lively’s Suit Exposes the Twisted World of Hollywood MisogynyThe complaint revisits the same gaslighting tactics in the Amber Heard case, and has produced much the same social media fallout.
December 31, 2024
Here we go again. The typical social media scroll at the end of 2024 eerily resembled that of mid-2022: A blonde bombshell’s reputation and life were virally upended by a targeted smear campaign. This year, it was Blake Lively; in 2022, it was Amber Heard. In both cases, the basic narrative is all but identical, leaving us with only one question: Who will be the next victim alleging domestic abuse or workplace sexual harassment who will summon forth the same online army of vengeful defenders of patriarchal impunity? Our society is clearly not ready to face up to the predations of the actors portraying beloved characters on screen—so we rally instead to the fictional alibis they peddle in their own defense.
On December 21, Blake Lively filed a complaint against Justin Baldoni, her costar in the anti–sexual abuse film It Ends With Us. Lively also sued Baldoni’s crisis PR publicist, Melissa Nathan, as well as several other players in what she alleges to be a smear campaign that targeted her throughout the film’s promotion. The basic claim at the heart of the suit involves a mind-bending bid to create a discourse around the film’s flawed treatment of the sensitive themes of domestic violence and coercive control of women in intimate partner relationships exclusively to benefit Baldoni. After the film’s release, Lively and other cast members were slammed for avoiding the topic of domestic violence or preventing the marketing campaign for It Ends With Us from engaging with similarly complex and dark material. After the cast—particularly Lively—faced the brunt of a backlash, Baldoni’s social media pages and promotional work for the film almost exclusively featured content promoting domestic violence awareness.
According to Lively’s complaint, she and other cast members were contractually obligated to follow the marketing plan approved by Sony Pictures, the studio that released the film. Sony officials instructed them not to focus on domestic violence but instead portray the film as a story of “hope.” Baldoni’s own efforts to engage these issues, meanwhile, cast Lively in dark contrast as someone who was, at best, sidestepping the difficult questions raised in the film. In communications cited in Lively’s complaint, Baldoni and his team described this public makeover as “social manipulation” designed to “destroy” Lively’s reputation. Documents in the complaint also show Steve Sarowitz, the multibillionaire cofounder and cochair of Baldoni’s production company, Wayfarer Studios, saying he was prepared to spend as much as $100 million to do so.
Lively’s complaint also alleges that Baldoni, the self-styled brave truth-teller in the sphere of domestic violence, was systematically harassing her and other performers on the set of It Ends With Us. Lively and several others working on the film complained of a hostile work environment manufactured by Baldoni.