On Blake vs. Justin

The Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni cage match wouldn’t be possible without gullible, online slactivists...like me!

The Christmas holiday turned out to be the perfect time for a deep dive down the magnificent rabbit hole that is the feud between actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. If you aren’t keeping up with this…seriously, why the hell not? It’s amazing fun.

I won’t do a comprehensive rundown of the saga. If you’re interested, you ought to be able to pick from between 9 million or so online breakdowns. The gist though is that Lively, who is uber famous, and Baldoni, who is only kind of famous, starred in a movie that I haven’t seen, based on a book that I haven’t read, that’s about romance, and also about domestic abuse. The pair did not get along (which is massively understating things), and now lawsuits, cancellation attempts, and bad feelings are flying every which way.

The news exploded when the New York Times published a lengthy lawsuit filed by Lively against Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios (his outfit) alleging that they orchestrated a smear campaign aimed at tarnishing her reputation. I promise, we’re not going to do a blow-by-blow here, but we do need to touch on the broad strokes in order to understand the cultural overtones of what’s happening.

The Claims

According to Baldoni, who is punching back with a quixotic, $250 million lawsuit against the NYT for libel, Lively was a full-on diva. She was, by his rendering, impossible to work with, wanted (and seized) more control over the project that she was due, and has now set out to ruin him as a distraction from her own, increasingly shaky public image.

To hear Lively tell it, Baldoni is a creepy man-baby with boundary issues, who spent the film shoot perving onto her, behaving generally unprofessionally, and ultimately setting out to destroy her in order to dodge facing accountability for his actions.

Who’s in the right? Who’s the baddie? You decide! It’s a classic Rorschach Test.

High-priced lawyers and PR flacks are involved on both sides. And since people who do that kind of work at this level tend to be quite good at their jobs (well, sort of…more on this soon) following this chronicle has been an exciting roller coaster for me of being outraged and disgusted at one or the other party based primarily on whose version of events I just finished reading!

Lively’s accusations include several acts of sexual harassment; Baldoni trying to add needless sex scenes to the script, improvising extra romantic acts without first securing consent, talking about his own sex life and porn addiction ad nauseam, hiring one of his buddies to fill a role that involved the guy getting to ogle Lively’s mostly-naked body, and barging into Lively’s trailer while she was breastfeeding. Lively says she insisted on a meeting at which all of this was discussed and at which Baldoni agreed to knock it all off. But the complaints themselves were still out there, just waiting for somebody to leak them to TMZ, and this is allegedly what Baldoni feared when he hired his own PR team.

Baldoni, naturally, disputes all of this. He claims the come-to-Jesus meeting never happened, and that none of Lively’s accusations ever happened either. Or to the extent that they did, that Lively is spinning innocent encounters into vile perversions. For example, the barging-into-the-trailer-while-she-was-breastfeeding episode? Baldoni says he was invited via text message to discuss a scene (and appears to have the receipts). He claims that he was forced to discuss matters related to sex directly with Lively, and to do some improvising in the film’s steamier moments, because Lively wouldn’t meet with the intimacy coordinator he hired. The friend he cast supposedly just so the dude could scope out Lively’s bod? Actually a trained actor with several credits under his belt, who hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, and has been unfairly trashed as collateral damage.

Do You Still Beat Your Wife?

Very early in Lively’s initial lawsuit (she’s now also seeking punitive damages in a separate complaint) is a juicy, 30-point catalog of Baldoni’s supposedly gross behavior. You can read it here. Lively’s team claims that this was the focus of the aforementioned January, 2024 meeting, the outcome of which was Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios agreeing to cease the offending chicanery. Every complaint begins with the words, “No more…” As in, “No more retaliatory or abusive behavior to BL for raising concerns or requesting safeguards.” (point #29). The verbiage, obviously, leaves the strong impression that the substance of each complaint was not in dispute. I.e. that Baldoni agreed that yes, he did these things, and no, he would not do them anymore.

But Baldoni says this is all horseshit. He says he was never shown the 30 point complaint, that the January meeting did not touch on those topics, and that he never would have agreed to *stop* doing things he had never *started* to do in the first place. Essentially, Baldoni’s lawyers are claiming that this is the old “Do you still beat your wife?” trick. If so, it’s a damn impressive example of it. And also if so, Baldoni might really have a point that the NYT shouldn’t have printed this without better contextualization.

Lively’s lawsuit also includes a rash of text messages among Baldoni’s team discussing their evil plans to ruin her. They’re somewhat damning. Or at least, they reflect very badly on the team, who weren’t even bright enough to avoid texting each other things like, “we should definitely not put this in writing.” Baldoni himself doesn’t come off looking too bad in these texts, mostly because he isn’t the author or recipient of any of the really unpleasant ones, and it isn’t clear how aware he was of what his team was doing on his behalf. He appears to have been genuinely frightened of what Lively might do to him, and desperate to be able to paint her as a bully in the event she went public with their feud. Still, he hired these hatchet men (actually mostly hatchet women), so he may ultimately be on the hook for what they did.

Anyway, by the end of the production process, Lively had mostly succeeded in freezing out Baldoni, who was absent from many promotional events, including the premier. Fearing that Lively was about to go truly nuclear on him, Baldoni hired a PR squad of his own (the one credited with taking down Amber Heard) to muddy the waters and collect some insurance in case she pushed the button. Word of this evidently got back to Lively, who instigated a preemptive strike, and the rest is history.

The whole thing is basically the Cuban Missile Crisis, but stupid, low-stakes, and set in Hollywood. Who shot first? Nobody knows. And at this point, it doesn’t really matter.

An Uncredited Main Character

Okay, so after saying we weren’t going to do a rundown, we sort of just did a rundown there. Sorry.

What makes this all such great entertainment is that every single complaint, in both directions, has been tailor made to incense the sea of Hollywood looky-loos (in which this author is now blissfully swimming) and to stoke one side or the other of the Great Western Culture War. Lively’s complaint is effectively a #metoo redux. Baldoni’s complaint is that Lively is exploiting #metoo in order to cover her own bullying ways. Lively is trying to paint Baldoni as an entitled, heavy-handed man (and boss), mistreating a poor, breastfeeding mommy. Baldoni is countering that Lively is a powerful, privileged A-lister, leveraging her fame and fortune to stomp an up-and-comer and take over the passion project on which he’d slaved away for 5 years.

Past that, the armies being marshaled by each side of this would not generally make common bedfellows with their chosen champion. Baldoni’s team seems to be trying to enlist the online manosphere to ride to his defense. “Here’s a powerful woman lying about lame sexual harassment nothingburgers in order to destroy a hard working man and ruin his reputation! Get her!” Except Baldoni is…kind of a wokester. His texts and public appearances indicate that he has fully appropriated the language of feminism, social justice, and therapy in an attempt to craft a public image as a Male Ally. Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate fans would fucking hate this dude if they’d gotten know him outside of this dust-up.

As to Lively, we might take a moment to examine why her public image was suffering in the first place. Until all this hoopla started, she’d become a prime target of the young, Very Online, social justice-y feminist set, who pointed to a series of bizarre, tonedeaf, and even kind of rude media appearances to justify having problematized her. You can check it all out here if you’d care to burn 18 more minutes of your life that you’ll never get back. Now, most of the sharks who were circling her have decided that she’s the poster child for victims of Hollywood chauvinism and that they need to have her back.

For the record, I find the case that Lively is some sort of Mean Girl to be unpersuasive in the extreme. The offending incidents are mostly just her gently ribbing interviewers and cracking jokes, some of which don’t land. You’d really have to have already decided that she was a mondo B-word to be troubled by any of it.

In the interest of balance, we might also note that Baldoni has some weird baggage of his own, like this 27-minute cringe-fest of a proposal video that I can’t even make it through. But the point is, Lively’s new status as the darling of downtrodden working women represents a pretty wild reversal of fortune from just a few months ago, when talk of her imminent “cancellation” was gaining considerable steam. And Baldoni getting love from the super bros is also surprising given basically everything we knew about the guy prior to this. Strange bedfellows indeed.

And that’s really why I wanted to write about this. Because there seems to be an unexamined player here: The Rabble. The fickle mob. Us. Me!

I read Lively’s whole complaint in the NYT (it was a slowww holiday in the Dennison house) and came away absolutely repulsed by what I believed to be Justin Baldoni’s bad behavior. Then I read accounts more sympathetic to Baldoni and found myself starting to turn on Lively. Now, here I sit, edge of my seat, waiting for the next shoe to drop, and for the one after that.

And of course, that’s the point. These are two very rich people, who are quite likely to stay that way, irrespective of these legal proceedings. This has little to do with what a judge’s eventual ruling may be, or what a jury decides to award either party. This is about getting us seals to clap. The winner of this fight will be the one who comes away with less mud on them. And since we’re the ones throwing the mud, we are audience, star, and director here.

None of the reputational damage that Lively alleges Baldoni was trying to inflict on her would even have been possible without the phalanxes of online rage-a-holics who don’t have anything better to do than form unhealthy, parasocial relationships with celebrities they’ll never actually meet or get to know. And perhaps what I find most offensive (and yeah, titillating) about this whole mess is the suggestion that there is any other explanation for it.

Revisiting Depp vs. Heard

The firm enlisted to run Baldoni’s damage control is The Agency Group PR, which is run by a woman named Melissa Nathan. As referenced earlier, Nathan’s niche appears to be helping out famous men who’ve been accused of bad behavior by women. Drake was a former client, and so, of course, was Johnny Depp, who came out, shall we say slightly ahead of Amber Heard in their own, vicious, public feud.

For those who just crawled out of the cave, Depp and Heard went toe-to-toe in a series of bitterly ugly lawsuits following the breakdown of their marriage in 2016, with accusations of domestic abuse flowing in both directions. Depp was ultimately awarded $15 million to be paid from Heard, whose reputation was so thoroughly torched that she was literally run out of town. She now lives in Spain and is unlikely to ever again grace the silver screen.

It’s natural that Melissa Nathan would tout her reputation as The Woman Who Took Down Amber Heard in order to drum up business from other alleged-deviants. And it’s natural that Blake Lively would point to Nathan’s machinations to claim foul play. But is any of this, you know…real?

Is Melissa Nathan actually that good? Is anyone? Certainly the woman’s got some impressive notches on her belt, but I can’t help but wonder if casting her as some sort of hypnotizing sorceress isn’t letting the rest of us off the hook here.

Nathan is accused, on Justin Baldoni’s say-so, of quarterbacking an unfair smear campaign. She’s accused of planting unflattering stories about Lively in friendly media outlets and manipulating social media - maybe even through the use of bot armies - to cause negative coverage of Lively to trend. What she is not accused of - so far as I am aware - is spreading actual libel or slander. The charge is that she helped push malinformation, not disinformation. That she tried to get folks upset over Lively’s weirdo interviews, or remembering the time she scandalized the world by failing to instantly put on a friendship bracelet made for her by a fan. And this all seems plausible since these are supposedly the tactics that took down Amber Heard.

But Amber Heard wasn’t taken down by *tactics,* even if there was a concerted effort to see her image dirtied - which by all accounts, there was. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. And on Depp vs. Heard, people apparently have very short, very selective memories. Memories that only begin in 2022, a full six years after that saga began. This narrative that spin wizards harnessed the innate misogyny of western society to support an abusive man and destroy an innocent woman isn’t accounting for those six years during which Depp’s guilt was largely taken for granted.

History glazes over this, but the absolute circus of Heard-hatred and Depp-love that followed the ex-couple’s 2022 court appearances was the final battle of that war, not its opening shots. Before those recordings of Heard taunting Depp, admitting to having hit him, and sneeringly mocking the suggestion that anyone would believe his claims of abuse victimhood, Depp was hardly feeling the public love. He got axed from Fantastic Beasts and Pirates of the Caribbean, watched the offers dry up, and mostly got buried as a deserving casualty of the #metoo era.

I dare say, Johnny Depp probably had access to publicists and PR firms even then. So if all this is really as easy as paying people to ruin your enemies, what was stopping him from doing that right off the bat? Why sit still for six years of career destruction and reputational ruin, only to finally play his ace as the curtain was closing?

Could it be that, in actuality, the spin doctors and PR sharks had little to do with it? That observers and commentators weren’t being manipulated by some cadre of shadowy puppet masters as much as having genuine, emotional reactions to a very public showdown?

Remember: in the wake of Heard’s 2016 accusations of domestic violence, the sun began to rapidly set on Depp’s career, while Heard’s star was rising. She had the DC movies, the remake of The Stand, and was honored as an ambassador for women’s rights by the ACLU. What undid all that for her was not some backroom team of internet tricksters, it was her very own words that listeners found impossible to un-hear.

For better or worse (probably worse) people tend to have a particular image in their minds of what domestic violence looks like. It’s the meek woman cowering in terror before a dangerous, volatile man who treats her like a punching bag, and who might kill her at any moment. To be sure, that picture is real. It exists, and is sadly all too common. But it is not the only form domestic violence can take, and as the Heard recordings made clear, it wasn’t the picture that precisely fit that pair’s inarguably disastrous marriage.

Bidirectional violence is still violence, and people who engage in it deserve condemnation. Also, maybe I’m old fashioned, but by my reckoning, a man who raises his hand to a woman is guilty of a vastly more serious crime than is a woman who raises her hand to a man. They are not the same. But by virtue of our stereotypical, probably Hollywood-informed picture of what DV should look like, Heard claiming the mantle of a DV survivor, only to be revealed as an at least occasional participant in the violence herself, left her vulnerable to a savage backlash. When people listened to those tapes, Heard lost the presumption that she was an innocent victim. She became a woman who “gave as good as she got,” and our society simply has less sympathy for women in that mold than for the more traditional damsel in distress.

By the way, I believe everything that Amber Heard says Johnny Depp did to her. For that matter, I think I mostly also believe what Depp says Heard did to him. None of it is okay. And it’s true what Heard’s defenders say: “there’s no such thing as a perfect victim.” But that adage has limits, and Depp vs. Heard surpassed them. That case shattered the notion that imperfect victimhood could or should trump what people see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears.

In a very real sense, the Depp/Heard standoff was the first time a prominent #metoo case had been tried in the court of public opinion and seen the accuser found guilty. So for folks who’d maybe already been skeptical that *Believe Women* was a appropriate way to adjudicate these matters, it was a time to have a fucking parade. And parade they did.

So what’s more likely? That Amber Heard lost her good name because of powerful cultural winds converging into a media megastorm? Or because some PR flacks made dummy accounts and used them to say mean things about her? Did a magician really make the thunder rumble, or did an ordinary mortal just wait for the clouds to grow dark then claim credit?

Blake & Justin Are Both On Shaky Ground

I think a reasonable accounting of the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni match is that Lively handily won the first round and that Baldoni is on his way to winning the second round. Lively’s salvo in the NYT stanched the bleeding her public image was suffering, made Baldoni look like 10 cents, and flipped her public persona from powerful bully to sympathetic victim. But now that Baldoni is credibly challenging that narrative, the winds feel ready to shift.

Both are in a precarious situation. Lively’s initial bruising of Baldoni was so severe because the public hates few things more than a hypocrite. Or maybe it would be better to say that the public loves few things more than a hypocrite, provided it has the means to lash out against them. Justin Baldoni has taken great pains to style himself as a Male Feminist. An ally. A champion of women, who used his art and his talent to center and lift up survivors by stepping into a starring role as an abusive man and showing moviegoers an authentic face of darkness. The revelation that his sheep costume was disguising a real-life wolf was about as devastating a blow as a public figure can suffer. So yes, Round 1 goes to Blake Lively.

But her team would do well to remember the Tale of Amber Heard. Not the bogus version, in which supernatural media spinmeisters brainwashed the public into casting out an otherwise sympathetic woman, but the real version in which real people formed real opinions and finally reached the critical mass to express them. Because if there’s one thing the crowds revile more than a two-faced man, it’s a false woman.

Blake Lively may have landed a haymaker, but she’s exposed now. If Baldoni’s counterpunch succeeds in painting her not as a victim but as a pretender at victimhood, she could be sunk. She could face a media firestorm that will make Friendship Bracelet-Gate look - my God - almost trivial!

It’s also worth noting that there’s rarely an actual winner in these spats. Yeah, Depp may have technically come out on top of his squabble with Amber Heard. He won some money and, at least he didn’t have to move to Spain. But the guy once helmed an insanely popular adventure franchise as Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s played Sweeney Todd, Gellert Grindelwald, the Mad Hatter, Edward Scissorhands, John Dillinger, Ichabod Crane, fucking Willy Wonka.

Now? His latest iMDB credit, and only this year, is as the voice of Johnny Puff in Johnny Puff: Secret Mission. So…not looking good for him making it to the podium this Oscar’s season. Lively or Baldoni could well suffer the same fate, win or lose, if studios decide that they sound like trouble better avoided. Both are hot, and both are talented. But hot and talented are not rarities in Hollywood, where everyone is replaceable. At the end of the day, victories in these melees tend to be pyrrhic.

Anyway, appealing as it is to believe otherwise, the mobs we join today are just as fickle as they’ve always been. Even if the Agency Group PR really did cross ethical lines in manipulating the media into an anti-Blake frenzy, they still needed us to make that work. Social media and the internet have not made us any less gullible than our ancestors in antiquity, and it does not take occult, public relations alchemy to persuade us to believe things without solid evidence. We’re pretty much all still just the extras from Gladiator, and by God, we are entertained.

I don’t really even lament this. Forming knee-jerk impressions of public figures based on dubious information is one of the great joys of being non-famous. But ultimately, if we decide we ever do want to end this cycle of celebrity whack-a-mole, and spare some of the potentially innocent targets it knocks out, we can probably do that. But it won’t happen by blaming it all on corner suite PR flacks who are likely no better or worse at their jobs than they’ve ever been. We’re going to have to show some restraint ourselves.

In other words, you might say that (sorry!) It Ends With Us 😛