It turns out Blake Lively isn't a perfect victim. So now we don't believe her? | Opinion
Why do women have to be likable to be believed? It's something I struggled with while reading about the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni accusations.
When “It Ends With Us” premiered last August, fans noticed something was amiss after lead actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni failed to promote the film together. It turns out that this was a small glimpse of a much larger legal battle brewing between the two.
Now, TikTok is ablaze with videos summarizing the legal challenges both actors have made. The videos and comments, which have taken over the actual movie, skew heavily in support of Baldoni, who also directed the film.
“This is mean girl Blake coming out,” Talk TV commentator Samara Gill said in a video summarizing Baldoni’s lawsuit against The New York Times. “It didn’t go her way. She tried to fight it, but Baldoni is showing he’s not going to back down.”
Seeing these videos fills me with the same sense of dread I had watching the discussion of the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial, and it’s depressing to see this story follow the same narrative. It’s another instance of a woman needing to be “the perfect victim” to have her concerns taken seriously.
I am not Lively’s biggest fan. I didn’t enjoy “Gossip Girl”; I’ve never seen “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” I don’t care about her marriage to Ryan Reynolds or her friendship with Taylor Swift. Her repeated public gaffes have made me less likely to watch her filmography.
What I feel about Lively, however, is not relevant to whether her co-star and director sexually harassed her. A woman shouldn’t have to be liked to be believed. Sexual harassment allegations should not be ignored just because you dislike an actor.
How the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni saga reached this point
Last month, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, producer Jamey Heath and others who worked on the film, alleging sexual harassment and retaliation.
In the complaint, Lively alleges Baldoni improvised kissing scenes, entered her dressing room while she was naked, added sex scenes to the script, talked about his past pornography addiction and described his genitalia: all things Lively says she did not consent to. Lively says she brought these issues up during filming. Wayfarer, the studio co-founded by Baldoni and Heath, responded by hiring a full-time intimacy coordinator and implementing other safeguards.
After filming, the men hired Melissa Nathan, a crisis management expert who has worked with Depp, Drake and Travis Scott. In her legal complaint, Lively alleges that the public relations strategy was to damage her reputation.
Adapted from the Colleen Hoover book of the same name, “It Ends With Us” is a story about domestic violence. In the movie, Lively’s character, Lily Bloom, falls for Baldoni’s character, who is physically abusive.
When the movie came out, people criticized Lively for neglecting the film’s subject matter seriously. Instead, articles and internet users pointed out that she appeared to be using it to sell her hair care line. That criticism is valid, but it doesn’t change whether she experienced sexual harassment on set.
Blake Lively isn't the 'perfect victim' so we hold it against her
The day after her complaint was filed, The Times published a story with the headline “ ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which detailed the complaint Lively made against Baldoni and highlighted just how much influence PR professionals have on our perception of those in the entertainment industry.
“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist texted Nathan on Aug. 2.
“You know we can bury anyone,” Nathan replied.
On Dec. 31, Baldoni sued The Times for $250 million over the article, claiming that The Times failed to criticize Lively’s “self-serving narrative” and included a “defamatory headline designed to immediately mislead the reader.”
Baldoni’s lawyer has said that they also intend to sue Lively.
I won’t lie: Baldoni’s lawsuit makes it seem like Lively was difficult to work with. But I don’t think that it’s the smoking gun people assume it is, or that her initial accusations are false.
I think it just means that this story is complicated, and that it is really easy to fault women. The posts on TikTok are an echo chamber for every person who hates Lively, the person we seem to have forgotten claims to have been sexually harassed by her coworker.
What’s depressing is that women so often experience this. It was just a few years ago that we lived through Depp v. Heard and witnessed the way social media can determine how a victim is perceived. Heard has acknowledged that the barrage of negative posts about her possibly swayed the jury.
“I’m not a good victim,” Heard told Savannah Guthrie in 2022 after the trial wrapped. “I get it. I'm not a likable victim, I'm not a perfect victim. But when I testified, I asked the jury to just see me as human.”
Or, as Nathan described it in one text: “People really want to hate on women.”
It’s up to the courts to decide how these legal challenges will play out, but the court of public opinion can determine what happens to Baldoni's and Lively’s careers. I might not care for Lively, but she deserves to be treated with the same respect that any victim of sexual harassment deserves.
Follow Paste BN columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter: @sara__pequeno