In December 2024, The New York Times was named in a libel suit by “It Ends With Us” actor and director Justin Baldoni. The newspaper was accused of publishing an investigation that alleged a smear campaign was orchestrated by Baldoni against his co-star Blake Lively. On March 4, a federal judge granted the Times its request for a stay of discovery, citing the publication’s motion to dismiss the case as the primary consideration. Far from over, the nature of the legal battles between Lively and Baldoni might herald the decay of Hollywood’s #MeToo movement.
Last summer, Lively underwent a micro-cancellation over the course of promoting the film. Audiences pointed to a number of fishy things, including how Baldoni never joined the entire cast for the duration of its marketing campaign, as well as the discrepancies between how he and Lively promoted their film.
Adapted from controversial author Colleen Hoover’s novel, the film explores themes of domestic violence, assault and abusive relationships using its central romance. Mystifyingly, Lively began to promote the film as a lighthearted romance, emphasizing a cutesy floral theme to honor her character who owns a flower shop and using the film’s buzz to launch a new hair care brand, Blake Brown.
This led to ample backlash. Fans were especially indignant at Lively for promoting her beverage brand, Betty Booze, citing statistics about the impact of alcoholism on domestic violence. Amid a rising slew of bad press and “tone-deaf” branding, old interview clips and content of Lively then began to resurface on the internet, painting her in an even more negative light. By the end of the summer, Lively’s public likeability had been wrecked.
Baldoni, on the other hand, received substantial praise and support for promoting the film in the opposite manner. His marketing was mostly solitary, skipping premieres and media appearances with the cast to appear in small-scale podcasts and interviews. He openly discussed the movie in the light of its themes of violence and abuse, as well as the importance of being a male ally to women.
Then came the New York Times piece, throwing the lid open on how and why Lively’s reputation took such a hit. On Dec. 21, 2024, an investigative report was published, revealing evidence of a calculated and strategically devised PR campaign by Baldoni to “bury” Lively.
The report largely aimed at spotlighting Lively’s legal complaint, the action which launched the watershed legal battles between her, Baldoni and the Wayfarer studio — which Baldoni owns.
In the complaint, Lively alleged sexual harassment and retaliation from the defendants and went on to reveal the log of communication that had occurred on set between Lively, Baldoni and the studio. Lively had demanded safety protections on set from the very beginning, asking for intimacy coordinators, for properly scripted and choreographed scenes regarding sex or nudity, and more. Fearing that Lively might go public with her complaints, Baldoni preemptively hired a crisis PR team to discredit her over the course of promoting their film.
Through subpoenas, her team obtained chains of text messages and conversations between Baldoni and his publicists that revealed how targeted the campaign was. Baldoni had been sending his team “sample” social media thread posts to use as a template for tarnishing Lively, with one of his publicists writing, “He wants to feel like she can be buried.”
The Times reported that Baldoni’s newly hired publicist, a crisis management expert, had assured him, “You know we can bury anyone.” So they did.
The Times’ piece also went on to reveal that all the marketing for the movie had been designed by the studio and Baldoni, instructing Lively and the rest of the cast to promote the “uplifting aspects” of their film. Once the negative fan reactions began pouring in, Baldoni dedicated his personal campaign to speak on domestic violence and the plight of women, leaving Lively and the cast looking intentionally insensitive for following the studio’s promotional plan.
The investigation at large revealed what Baldoni’s publicist herself had said about the turning tide on Lively: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you people really want to hate on women.”
Social media cancellations rarely seem to follow a traceable path. On the one hand, all the content that fed into illustrating Lively’s “history” of bad behavior is real. Still, it had existed all this time and a targeted resurfacing of all that content — of collecting “instances” to build a narrative that a beloved celebrity was always problematic — suggests an inclination of assuming the worst of them. In mass culture this is disproportionately done to women, with a terrifying intentionality to parse their behavior and disparage them.
Nearly all of Lively’s valid criticisms had a male contributor or offender as well: from her plantation wedding to her insensitive promotion. No one gave her husband the same level of criticism or felt that the entire cast of “It Ends With Us” distancing themselves from the male director negatively reflected on him in any way.
The success of these narratives can be attributed in huge part to the reputation Baldoni curated for himself as a feminist ally and champion of gender equality. When the original #MeToo erupted in 2016, he joined the ranks of men who supported the movement and uplifted women’s stories in Hollywood. In recent times, the faux-feminist male has become a recurring revelation: men who identified the untrustworthiness of other men’s behavior now sitting accused of the very same private misconduct.
Lively’s tarnishing was successful not just because Baldoni seemed to be doing the kind of promotion that fans expected of this movie, but also because it appeared entirely consistent with his image as a critic of patriarchy and misogyny. Establishing a history of good and bad was the focus of this smear campaign, and it relied on putting together a narrative built from deeply out-of-context, isolated clips of past interviews that painted Lively as a mean girl.
Even if we say that Lively is actually a mean girl, these facts remain: The esteemed male feminist sues the woman who has accused him of sexual harassment, even though she has a recorded paper trail. The woman, on the other hand, gave some clipped responses to invasive pregnancy questions. Who’s pop culture’s true villain?
It also cannot be a coincidence that Baldoni hired the same publicist who once represented Johnny Depp in the takedown of a woman who also named her abuser and paid a price.
The original #MeToo burgeoned out of a growing backlash against Trump’s first term, with the Times’ investigation into Harvey Weinstein as the main catalyst. Eight years later, more insidious perpetrators have emerged in Hollywood, exposed and protected under exactly the same circumstances as before. Yet, it was Lively who was witch-hunted out of fame and favor while Baldoni weaponized feminist politics to build his fortress of sympathy.
Maryam Qazi is an Arts and Entertainment Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at qazimf@uci.edu.
Edited by Lillian Dunn and Grace Tseng.