December 22, 2024 • 34 mins
“We can bury anyone: Inside a Hollywood smear machine”.
That’s the New York Times headline that meant we had to bring you this episode of Mamamia Out Loud today.
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni made headlines just a few months ago for their roles in one of the year’s most-watched films, It Ends With Us. But what was happening off-screen turned out to be an even bigger story.
In this emergency meeting, Mia Freedman, Jessie Stephens and Holly Wainwright unpack the facts behind Blake's legal complaint against her co-star and director Justin, which alleges sexual harassment and an orchestrated campaign to destroy her reputation.
Plus, what this lawsuit means for Hollywood power dynamics, celebrity reputations, and the way narratives and the manipulation of public perception are shaped in the digital age.
Support independent women's media
The End Bits:
- Read the New York Times Article: ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine
- Read Blake Lively's Legal Complaint
- Listen to more episodes of The Spill here.
GET IN TOUCH:
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CREDITS:
Hosts: Mia Freedman, Jessie Stephens & Holly Wainwright
Group Executive Producer: Ruth Devine
Executive Producer: Emeline Gazilas
Audio Production: Scott Stronach
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and Waders
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hi everyone, it's me and Friedman in your ears from
our sister podcast out Loud, and today we are sharing
with spill listeners an emergency episode.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That we recorded on out Loud.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
We're Holly Wayne Right, Jesse Stevens, and I unpack all
the allegations that Blake Lively has made against Justin Baldoni
her It Ends with Us co star.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Have a listen and enjoy your holidays.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Hello out louders. It's Monday, the twenty third of December,
and I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm Weir Friedman, and.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 5 (00:57):
And we were not meant to be here right now,
but alas.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
We are here because we can bury anyone inside a
Hollywood smear machine. That is the New York Times headline
that we definitely had to be here right now, Jesse Stevens,
because you might remember you definitely remember bits of it.
It was one of the stories of the year that
one of the most watched movies of twenty twenty four,
(01:22):
It Ends with Us, came alongside the mass cancelation of
its star, Blake Lively. The pressure that accompanied that movie
was notable for the fact that the star and producer
Lively and its other star and director, Justin Baldoni, went
to great and unusual lengths not to be seen together,
to be interviewed together, to show any of the usual
(01:44):
camaraderie required of co creators of a big film. Lively,
the rumors went, wanted to promote the movie as if
it were a flowery rom com. Baldoni supposedly loudly insisted
that he wanted its serious subject matter, coercive control and
domestic violence, to be front and center. Lively was criticized
(02:05):
for trivializing a serious topic, for being a tone deaf
self promoter, for launching a haircare brand. The backlash was huge,
and then yesterday The New York Times reported that Lively
is taking legal action against Baldooni, accusing him of sexual
harassment and an effort to destroy her reputation. It's a
story that has massive implications for I'd say almost every
(02:29):
celebrity story you see on the internet. Mia, what did
the story the one with the we can bury anyone
headline allege I.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Think Jesse's going to take us through some of the
allegations in more detail, but.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Overall, it alleged serious misconduct on the set.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Now, what's important to understand is that Justin was not
only the director and the producer and the co star,
he also was a co owner of the studio that
was making the film, So even though Blake Lively was
more famous, he had huge power in the context of
making this film. So it alleged sexual harassment. And then
(03:07):
also it detailed that when Blake Lively complained about it
and insisted on a meeting with all the stakeholders before
she returned to filming in January this year, after the writers' strike,
Justin Baldoni hired a crisis pr to smear her, which
we're also going to get into in a moment. But
let's just rewind to August to remind ourselves what this
movie was about and why there was so much controversy
(03:29):
when it was released, because it was only released a
few months ago, and it's about to come onto streaming,
or I think it's just come on to streaming. The
movie is based on the Colleen Hoover book that was
also called It Ends with Us and It tells the
story of a florist called Lily Bloom played by Lively,
who navigates the romance with a neurosurgeon called Ryle Kincaid
(03:53):
that becomes abusive. That's the essence of the film. The
three of us went to see it, it was already
completely swamped in controversy. I really liked the film. I
thought Blake Lively was fantastic. Yeah, I thought it was
not the best film in the world, but I thought
it was really good. And I was surprised the controversy
that had completely engulfed this film. It seemed really out
(04:15):
of whack. So what was the controversy. Well, there's a
few different elements to it, but it was basically all
about Blake Lively being inappropriate during the promotional part of
the tour. So it wasn't about the actual movie itself.
It was about how it was promoted. There was an
interview where she encouraged fans to grab your friends, wear
(04:36):
your florals, and head out to see it, which kind
of suggested that it was a lighthearted viewing experience. There
was no trigger warning at the beginning of it, so
there was a whole big debate about trigger warnings, and
the whole marketing campaign was criticized as tone death given
how serious the themes were in the movie about domestic abuse,
(04:57):
and that all landed on Blake Lively. Now, there were
some things she did during the tour that particularly made
her a target of criticism, like she was launching a
hair care line at the time. She also promoted her
beverage brand, which was called Betty Booze, and many people
said that alcohol is often connected with domestic violence, so
that's insensitive, and so it was seen that she was
(05:20):
just not taking it seriously, which led to this big
backlash against her. And you'd have to say, one of
the worst cancelations that we've seen in a long time
for reasons that seemed really spurious.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Yes, I agree, because back at the time we talked
about it and it felt as though the facts we
had in front of us were not proportionate to the
avalanche of hate that Blake Lively was getting, particularly on TikTok.
Maybe that's because that's where I leave most of the time,
and we were getting these leaks. So the leaks that
(05:59):
we were getting were that there was something that said
justin Baldoni lingered too long on a kiss, he asked
how much she weighed because he had a former back
injury and was worried about picking her up, like weird,
weird stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
None of those took hold, so there were a few
rumors of was it uncomfortable on set. The other thing
that really came out was Blake had taken over and
she'd insisted on doing her own edit that somehow Ryan
Reynolds got involved and was rewriting a few scenes. So
the image that came across through the press tour was
that she was not taking it seriously, was dominating an
(06:38):
a diva on set, and that he was a victim
of all this. Because, in case you're not familiar with
Justin Baldoni, his most famous role as an actor was
in Jane the Virgin, and he's really fushioned himself over
the last few years as a feminist and as a
podcast called Man Enough, where he questions toxic masculinity.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
He had a viral ted talk about it like he's
very much he's that.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Guy, a champion of women. That was his vibe.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
And among all these rumors, what was very clear, the
whole like smoke fire thing is that they had definitely
fallen out. There was no question about that. You know,
the other cast members had stopped following him on Instagram
and seemed to very much be siding with her. As
I said at the beginning, they weren't photographed together, that
they didn't do any promo. It was kind of like
dueling press tours, which is very unusual.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
And Baldoni at the time he spoke to Today and
obviously addressing some of the creative differences, and he said,
I'm a best idea wins person and I always have
been to a fault, sometimes to a point where at
times I think I've had people wonder if I know
what I'm doing or if I have a point of view,
because I'm so willing to have my vision changed. I
(07:51):
don't believe that inspiration or creativity comes through one person.
On the night of the premiere, he was saying, this
isn't about me, It's a night for Blake, It's for Colleen.
I'm so grateful we're here, and again it was clear
that neither of those women were speaking to him.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
What happened on the weekend is that Blake Lively has
filed a legal complaint that presents her side of the
story to all of the things that we were just discussing,
and Jesse's going to tell us about them in a minute,
but first shortbreak.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
So, the allegations of misconduct on set are pretty damning.
In terms of physical boundaries and violations. There are allegations
that he improvised unwanted kissing scenes. He would enter This
is Baldoni would enter her makeup trailer uninvited while she
was undressed, including while she was breastfeeding. In terms of
(08:48):
sexual harassment, Baldoni and Jamie Heath, he was a producer
and co owner, there are allegations that they would describe
their genitalia on set. Baldoni would frequently refer to his
past porn addiction and describe previous sexual encounters where he
said he may or may not have received consent. Now
(09:10):
we know that Lively made a series of requests part
way through filming. They actually had this all hands meeting
which included her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and it was held
to address Baldoni and Jamie Heaths alleged inappropriate conduct.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
So, yeah, this was interesting because this was like she
had Ryan there as her support person, and it was
after the writer's strike, so they'd only been filming for
six weeks. Then that was the writer's strike and she
had this meeting and she said, I'm not coming back
unless we have this meeting. She included Sony, who's the distributor,
and all these different people. So there are a lot
of people at that meeting, which means that there will
(09:48):
be a lot of you know.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
And none of this was disputed at the time.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
So there was a list of thirty things. They're quite
revealing some of Lively's requests, and these were, as you say,
they were confirmed because it's a document. Her request were
that Baldoni would stop asking her about religious beliefs, stop
asking her trainer about her weight, she was four months
pardon with her fourth baby, and stopped claiming to be
(10:13):
able to speak to her dead father. There are allegations
that Baldoni improvised while on set. So in one scene,
they weren't miked up. It was just to be filmed.
It was just a visual scene, and Lively claims that
as himself, Baldoni leaned in and slowly dragged his lips
from her ear to her neck and said it smells
(10:34):
so good. It says that when Lively objected to his actions,
Baldoni retorted, I'm not even attracted to you. Baldoni added,
this is an allegation improvised sexual content and nude scenes,
and he fought to have a scene where the characters
climaxed at the same time on their wedding night and
told Lively that he and his partner always did and
(10:57):
allegedly pressed her on whether that was the case with
her husband, and she says she was very uncomfortable by
that conversation. There's an allegation about the childbirth scene which
is particularly unsettling. It wasn't agreed that she would be
naked for it, but then when she got on set,
she says that he insisted she be naked. They compromised
(11:18):
that she would be naked from the waist down, but
the set wasn't closed and in the end his friend
came in to play the role of the obgyn.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
I think this is possibly the most chilling thing because
what's so illuminating about reading will link to it if
anybody wants to look at it, which I think you should.
But you learn a lot about Hollywood and how sex
scenes work right, and there are things like nudity writers
where everybody agrees what the parameters before you go into
a scene, things like closed sex when there's nudity, so
(11:50):
only essential people are there. Monitors are turned off so
other people can't look from other rooms and even film you.
So she was in stirrups. She had a little bit
of fabric just literally covering her and the role of
the gynecologist. They were like between her legs. And also
another owner of his studio, Wayfarirer, had just flown in
(12:11):
to visit the set on that day for the first time.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Like it is so gross and creepy.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
It also is clearly from this very long list of
requests clear that this set was a shit show, right
because one of them is also stop having hours long
meetings where Baldoni cries and no more pressing from Baldoni
to sage any of Blake Live's employees, Like this is
(12:40):
batshit what's going on on that set, And it seems
that she's very much trying to say, let's get back
to a professional set.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
And they're at claims as well that when you know
there were certain moments where Lively was made to feel uncomfortable,
other women from the set came up and said, I've
also had that experience so the allegations are that it
was not just her, she was trying to protect the
whole set.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
The last thing I'll say, and I could go on
and on about what's in this.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
Complaint, but the last thing is she alleges that there
was a clear marketing place that was distributed to the
cast and everyone involved in marketing it about how to
promote the film. This was from Sony and they said
they wanted to focus on hope and resilience and not
position this as a domestic violence film. They say that
(13:26):
Baldoni went against this, and that's massive because at the
time everyone was going, why is she not acknowledging that
this is a film about domestic violence. Baldoni was over
here with a link in his Instagram bio to help victims.
Everything he said in his messaging was acknowledging victims, and
(13:46):
this made Lively look really bad.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Well, as it turns out, or at least what's alleged
he here is that that Pivot Jesse was a very
deliberate one to smear Blake Lively because Baldoni and his
team knew what was coming. So to the smear campaign,
and why I say that this is a story that's
not just about Blake Lively and just In Baldoni, but
gives an in into what is really behind a lot
(14:13):
of what we believe right on social media. So all
those tiktoks and stories that we talked about at the
beginning that were being shared and reshared as facts that
Lively was a mean girl, that Lively tried to hijack
the movie, that Lively just wanted to promote a hair
care brand. What's alleged in this document is there was
nothing organic about those stories, and that the PR firm
(14:34):
hired by Baldoni when he realized that Reynolds had blocked
him on Instagram, Baldonian, his producing partner, hired this firm
who were expert in the dark arts of smearing, starting rumors,
and fanning the flames of negativity. Some of the tactics
that are alleged to have happened are that the PR
team would boost negative stories about Lively, branding her as
(14:56):
difficult and tone death. That contractors were allegedly hired to
dominate social media with untraceable tactics like social manipulation and
proactive fan posting. A hired gun helped amplify negative narrative online,
including on platforms like TikTok and Reddit, and basically all
these threads of theories started being sown and then amplified.
(15:19):
Now it's actually impossible, even by the investigative journalists at
The New York Times and actually by the legal team
to be able to absolutely identify exactly what the amplification did.
As we know, the Internet is sprawling and enormous. But
the negative stories that were planted were planted very deliberately
and then encouraged. So this tells you everything about how
(15:42):
we the public were manipulated in this story.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
In August, there were two things we talked about. The
first was something that we've referred to as the dig,
which is what happens when someone is in the process
of cancelation, and we were saying that it's again back
to it being disproportionate. Is that people started yelling about
her plantation wedding, about how Reynolds cheated on scullet Jo
(16:08):
Hansen with Lively. She's always been rude. Everyone on Gossip
Girl hated her. There were weird videos of people gifting
her a bracelet on a red carpet and she would
not accept it, or something like.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
The one that got the most traction was and I
remember thinking at the time, this is weird. Without wanting
to we definitely had our doubts and we spoke about
this on the show, as did others. That interview with
a Swedish journalist entertainment journalist called Christie Flaher which came
out where it showed her interviewing Blake Lively for a
(16:40):
different movie I think back in twenty fifteen, and it
showed Blake being a little bit rude, and for some
reason she posted that with the headline the interview that
made me want to quit my job. That was in
twenty sixteen. That interview happened, and yet it came out.
Now why did it come out? Well, you could say
(17:02):
that organically that journalist was just trying to ride the
wave of hate against Blake Lively. But what was revealed
in this is that this journalist had worked with the
PR company before because they'd also represented Johnny Depp in
his trial against Amber Heard. And we know that some
really dodgy things happened then in terms of how Amber
(17:24):
Heard was trolled and the volume of internet hate towards her,
so much of which was seen to be manufactured. So
again it wasn't organic. And there's a word called astroturfing,
which I learned, which is basically means you think something
is organic it looks like natural grass, but when you.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Look closer you see that it's artificial.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And what that means is that these things are planted
and then amplified, either by bots or by these agencies.
That's what they do.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
Yeah, so in terms of being planted, I think that's
an important point because in the investigation it sort of
said this isn't bots. I always imagined it was bots.
But at the time, I was posting on TikTok about
the Blake Lively thing, and I was noticing that every
time I posted something that was defensive, it got no reach.
(18:13):
So I remember talking about this on the show, only
a few hundred views, and then I posted one thing
that was cheeky that had something about Blake Lively's cancelation.
It actually went against it, but all the metadata would
have suggested that I was about to go her blew up,
and it seemed that if you were being critical of
Blake Lively, your content was on steroids. As someone who
(18:38):
consumes a lot of social media content, it is not
often that you get a unanimous view on anything. But
you went onto these media platforms and all of a sudden,
it was like wall to wall. Everyone hated her. And
let's be clear, if you saw someone pop up and
have a go at Blake Lively, that was probably legitimate.
(19:02):
But where they were getting the information, how their brain
had been marinating in content kind of contributed to that.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Well, it creates a lens.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
And I should say, Christy Flower has come out and
said she has nothing to do with the alleged smear campaign,
but she was exactly what you were talking about, Jesse.
She was being opportunistic. So we live in the attention
economy and if you wanted to go viral, everybody looks
at the numbers who makes content and in the media,
so you knew that if you did something that was
(19:34):
against Blake Lively, it would go off. So it's important
to understand how something can be both organic and manipulated
because people will say, but.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Hang on, Blake Lively.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
They didn't make her try and promote her hair care line,
they didn't make her reference alcohol, they didn't make her
wear florals. But the thing is that it's the volume,
So you can start to believe, oh, everybody hates Blake Lively,
and when you hear enough of that, it does impact
on how you view someone.
Speaker 5 (20:05):
And there was also I remember looking at interviews where
she seemed really insensitive about the subject matter of the film,
but it was so purposefully cut, and if you watch
the whole interview, that's not how it seemed. And then
you were getting Justin Baldoni with these incredible cuts of
him saying something really eloquent about domestic violence. So it
(20:26):
did seem that, yeah, I suppose that that is allegedly
part of the smearing.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
This is where we can bury anyone. Headline comes in
because in the New York Times investigation, there are literal
screenshots of text messages between Baldoni's people and the PR
people saying exactly that that they can bury anybody with
enough ammunition, and that they needed to do it to
get Baldoni's story across. We're going to be back in
(20:54):
a minute, but first a little break.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
I want to talk about the effect of how cancelation
works and how it can be manipulated, because having experienced
it a number of times organically, certainly not to my knowledge,
with a calculated or paid smear campaign by a publicist,
things gained traction, and then everybody wants to be part
(21:23):
of a pylon, right, That's why it's called a dogpile
or a pylon, and there becomes status in reinforcing the
accepted narrative, which in this case was that Justin Baldoni
was a hero and cared about domestic violence victims, and
Blake Lively was an entitled diva who cared about nothing
(21:43):
other than her hair and looking pretty.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
And because of that that sort of narrative about who
Blake Lively was, she's a prime candidate for this, right,
because the thing that's very depressing about this story is
that we're all being manipulated all the time right on
social media, and we think we're having our own thoughts
about things and going, yes, I see, But what this
shows very clearly is that we're being As Lively said
(22:08):
in her statement about it, she said she wanted to
show behind the curtain of how these things start. But
one of the things that we've got to ask ourselves
is why are we so invested in thinking awful things
about women and women like Lively? You know, she in particular,
I guess she is blonde and beautiful, married to a
rich man. She is a striver We've talked about on
(22:29):
this show lots of times. Is the worst thing you
can be. She has her own businesses, she tries really hard,
like she promoted the shit out of that movie, and
it's almost like the world was dying to believe this
about her, which is one of the things I find
deeply depressing about it.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
And that's what the crisis pr person behind all of
this actually said in one of the And the reason
we have these texts, I should say, is because they
were subpoened. So it's the genius of Blake Lively in
all of this is to go, I'm going to get
all the evidence I need to show what really happened,
which is that you have Melissa Nathan saying basically, I
(23:10):
can't believe how quickly people just want to hate a woman.
I'm seeing all this positive justin Baldoni's stuff, and I
don't even agree with half of it. So it was
like they lit the fire and then when it blew up,
they didn't need to do a thing because people.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Want to hate a woman.
Speaker 5 (23:28):
And the irony of this entire story is that it's
an allegory for domestic violence in the context of a
film about domestic violence, which is that people were so
ready to jump on a woman who maybe didn't use
the right words, or was profiting or something. And except
(23:53):
that this man was a feminist ally. It's almost Shakespearean
in that in order to defend his image it's a
feminist ally, he had to bury a female co star.
And we were so happy to follow him there and
to go not only follow him there, like we didn't
look at all the facts, which is that none of
(24:15):
the cast were on speaking terms with him anymore, Colleen
who all on her side, yes, And we were so
happy to follow him there. And I think that there's
a difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
This speaks to something that.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
Feels very very true, which is that there are people
who use the right words, who have the right link
in their Instagram bio. But that is not the same
as being the thing you're purporting to being, which is
that he's saying he supports women and that this story
was really important to him. It's just an incredible, like,
(24:56):
look at potential if it's true hypocrisy.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I think this story has many places to go.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
And today one of the pr Wizards involved in this.
Jennifer Abel has some messages that are allegedly her who's
saying that those messages that we were just talking about,
Jesse were cherry picked and that you didn't see others.
And I'm sure that's true. So there's are many more
places to go. But your point, Jesse is so spot on,
because I remember at the time a lot of people
(25:23):
have a lot of love for Baldoni and he was
seen to be doing all the right things. But I'll
just listened to the interview with him that he did
on How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, and the guy,
I'm sorry, I'm just going to say it is insufferable,
like he is insufferable. He doesn't obviously go to lively
in that interview, and it happened before the legal letter,
(25:46):
but he described the filming as devastatingly difficult for a
number of reasons. He made very clear on the record
that he thought there should have been a trigger warning,
like it was very clear. But the whole feeling about it,
Elizabeth Day barely gets a word in, is that he
was lecturing about victimhood and we are always saying that
(26:07):
we want men to talk about domestic violence, and we do.
But we want men to talk to men about domestic violence.
We don't want them to lecture women about it. And
I know people have problems with the movie, and people
have problems with the source material of the book, but
this movie was aimed at women. The book was aimed
at women, right. It's the way that they chose to
(26:29):
promote it that Baldoni then flipped in order to virtue
signal because he knew basically that he was going to
be taken down. What's also interested in all this is
that Ryan Reynold and Blake Lively and the power that
they wield in Hollywood is probably always going to come
for him, right, So he knew that was coming, so
he wanted to position himself as the perfect allocate ally
(26:51):
and advocate, and he's there lecturing women about victimhood and violence.
That's not what we want from the guys. I mean,
I can't speak for all women, but.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Can we talk about timing for a second, because it's
pretty sobering to go online and look at some of
the reactions to this, where people are just they want
to twist it and still make it about Blake and
they're not interested in facts or perspectives.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Why now?
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Why now?
Speaker 3 (27:19):
It's pre Christmas. Some people have said, well, it's just
come out on Netflix. It's a calculated move. She wants
to just try and salvage the damage to her reputation.
But she didn't say anything back then like this. Everyone
had forgotten about it. Essentially, she'd come back.
Speaker 5 (27:37):
Why now, it would have been totally lost. If she
said something back then, she would have sounded And this
is also such a great example of gas lighting. She
would have been told she was crazy. If she said
at the time that there is a manufactured effort to
bury me, people would have gone, you are grasping, how embarrassing,
(27:58):
blah blah.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Blah, and that she was making it all about her
instead of centering the centering victims.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
It's about to come out on Netflix. I'm not sure
if that's just in the US or if that's here too.
And just in the last week I started seeing stories
about Blake Lively pop up again. I saw a story
about something Ryan Reynolds had said about how he and
Blake grew up working class, and then people were going
into Blake Lively's childhood and going, that's not working class,
(28:25):
how embarrassing? Yeah, were they anticipating another wave, that's the question.
And the other reason why I think it's now is
because of how long this takes. In order to do
this properly in order to get lawyers do the research subpoena.
Those text messages prove it, they needed to buide their time.
(28:50):
And it's important to remember Blake Lively is worth about
thirty million dollars. She's rich, but she's not like the
richest person in Hollywood, Ryan Reynolds, is worth more than
three hundred million, because he hasn't had these business ventures.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
Right and also intensely well connected.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
Yes, so I think it took because you can look
at this case and go, what does Blake Lively want?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
This isn't going to be about damages.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
This isn't about sending Justin Baldoni to jail, like, nothing
about that.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
It's not criminal.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
She wants to correct the record, and in order you
need to have power and you need to have the
financial means, and she does. And I think that's why
she's doing it because imagine how many actresses have been
buried and have never been able to tell their story.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Well, that's the rule of cancelation, isn't it. You can't
defend yourself, well it's happening, otherwise it makes it worse.
But the other thing to note is that there's a
civil complaint. But then there's also the New York Times investigation.
The lead journalist on this was the same journalists that
exposed Harvey Weinstein, Megan Towey. And they don't just publish
(30:00):
what someone else wants them to publish. They go and
corroborate everything. They do their own extensive reporting out, making
sure that all the sources can be confirmed. So in
many ways, the timing was more about what The New
York Times was going to do. But the other thing
to remember, when we're talking about power and money, the
guy who is the financial backer of Wayfarer, which is
(30:22):
the studio that Jamie Heath and Justin Baldonia partners in,
is like a billionaire, so he's also got unlimited funds.
He has a lot more money than Ryan Randalls and
Blake Lively put together. So it's not a case of
Blake Lively punching down the complexity of power. Dynamics on
both the set and in Hollywood aren't just about who's
(30:46):
the most famous in the Daily Mail.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
You know what, though, And this is A more pragmatic
reason too, is they let the movie do its thing.
That movie was really successful. Yeah, you know, so she
would have been contractually obliged to promote that movie. Also,
she clearly wanted to, and she didn't want to promote
it with him, which is again very unusual. But she
promoted the shit out of that movie while all this
(31:09):
was going on. It was very successful, It's had its
period of box office time, and now you can sit
there and reflect on that that was all happening in
real time to her. It does seem extraordinary to me,
though I know that Baldoni has very powerful backer their
met of course, but that he ever thought that they
weren't going to do this Because Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively
(31:35):
Reynolds is one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.
Deadpool was the second biggest movie of the year. He
makes a lot of people a lot of money. They
are intensely powerful. He would be furious. Imagine sitting in
that meeting that he sat in with his wife and
all those people and literally listening to that list being
read out about them walking in on her when she's
half naked and breastfeeding in her trailer Revenge is a
(31:57):
dish best served cold. Right, those guys have gone and
got their ducks in a row in a very professional,
very organized manner, and now they're coming for them. And
fair enough, if indeed everything that's in that legal letter
is true, absolutely fair enough.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
So what are our takeaways before we wrap up and
actually go on holidays?
Speaker 5 (32:17):
I think the reason why people are so fascinated by
this is because it's an exercise in perspective, but also
we were used as audiences and consumers of media. We
were played. And the other thing is that I am
now looking at other examples of cancelation. I'm sorry, but well,
(32:40):
actually there are some examples of men. But what's confusing
about them are I don't know who benefited. So it's
really important when you look at a cancelation like this
to see who the winners are. But it makes me
think very differently about Megan Markle. I just wonder when
you see Walter all and wheneverone walks around and they
(33:01):
go I just have a sense of something. I have
a sense that they're not very nice or something.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
It's a great point.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
It just makes me go, how much of this is
all manufactured? And how difficult is it to prove when
these social media wizards are so much smarter than us.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
So out loud As, we will be returning to our
scheduled programming of hot Pods summer, where we are going
to be giving you all sorts of delicious things to
listen to over summer.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
If only you could see us.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Now, it's early in the morning, we are all at home,
but we really wanted to bring this to you because
we just thought that it was an important story to cover.
Speaker 5 (33:41):
It was one of those stories that in terms of
the group chat, it was just going off.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Look, chances are in two.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
Days there'll be another story that blows up our group
chat and we're like, let's jump on. But this time
of year, I think we all tend to fall into
some rabbit holes, and it appears that we were.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Victims of that.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
If this conversation has brought anything up for you, help
is available. We're going to put links to resources that
can help in the show notes.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Take care, I'm going outside to touch some grass.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
We love you out Louders. We will be in your
ears shortly.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Bye bye bye
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and Waders
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hi everyone, it's me and Friedman in your ears from
our sister podcast out Loud, and today we are sharing
with spill listeners an emergency episode.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That we recorded on out Loud.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
We're Holly Wayne Right, Jesse Stevens, and I unpack all
the allegations that Blake Lively has made against Justin Baldoni
her It Ends with Us co star.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Have a listen and enjoy your holidays.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Hello out louders. It's Monday, the twenty third of December,
and I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm Weir Friedman, and.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 5 (00:57):
And we were not meant to be here right now,
but alas.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
We are here because we can bury anyone inside a
Hollywood smear machine. That is the New York Times headline
that we definitely had to be here right now, Jesse Stevens,
because you might remember you definitely remember bits of it.
It was one of the stories of the year that
one of the most watched movies of twenty twenty four,
(01:22):
It Ends with Us, came alongside the mass cancelation of
its star, Blake Lively. The pressure that accompanied that movie
was notable for the fact that the star and producer
Lively and its other star and director, Justin Baldoni, went
to great and unusual lengths not to be seen together,
to be interviewed together, to show any of the usual
(01:44):
camaraderie required of co creators of a big film. Lively,
the rumors went, wanted to promote the movie as if
it were a flowery rom com. Baldoni supposedly loudly insisted
that he wanted its serious subject matter, coercive control and
domestic violence, to be front and center. Lively was criticized
(02:05):
for trivializing a serious topic, for being a tone deaf
self promoter, for launching a haircare brand. The backlash was huge,
and then yesterday The New York Times reported that Lively
is taking legal action against Baldooni, accusing him of sexual
harassment and an effort to destroy her reputation. It's a
story that has massive implications for I'd say almost every
(02:29):
celebrity story you see on the internet. Mia, what did
the story the one with the we can bury anyone
headline allege I.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Think Jesse's going to take us through some of the
allegations in more detail, but.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Overall, it alleged serious misconduct on the set.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Now, what's important to understand is that Justin was not
only the director and the producer and the co star,
he also was a co owner of the studio that
was making the film, So even though Blake Lively was
more famous, he had huge power in the context of
making this film. So it alleged sexual harassment. And then
(03:07):
also it detailed that when Blake Lively complained about it
and insisted on a meeting with all the stakeholders before
she returned to filming in January this year, after the writers' strike,
Justin Baldoni hired a crisis pr to smear her, which
we're also going to get into in a moment. But
let's just rewind to August to remind ourselves what this
movie was about and why there was so much controversy
(03:29):
when it was released, because it was only released a
few months ago, and it's about to come onto streaming,
or I think it's just come on to streaming. The
movie is based on the Colleen Hoover book that was
also called It Ends with Us and It tells the
story of a florist called Lily Bloom played by Lively,
who navigates the romance with a neurosurgeon called Ryle Kincaid
(03:53):
that becomes abusive. That's the essence of the film. The
three of us went to see it, it was already
completely swamped in controversy. I really liked the film. I
thought Blake Lively was fantastic. Yeah, I thought it was
not the best film in the world, but I thought
it was really good. And I was surprised the controversy
that had completely engulfed this film. It seemed really out
(04:15):
of whack. So what was the controversy. Well, there's a
few different elements to it, but it was basically all
about Blake Lively being inappropriate during the promotional part of
the tour. So it wasn't about the actual movie itself.
It was about how it was promoted. There was an
interview where she encouraged fans to grab your friends, wear
(04:36):
your florals, and head out to see it, which kind
of suggested that it was a lighthearted viewing experience. There
was no trigger warning at the beginning of it, so
there was a whole big debate about trigger warnings, and
the whole marketing campaign was criticized as tone death given
how serious the themes were in the movie about domestic abuse,
(04:57):
and that all landed on Blake Lively. Now, there were
some things she did during the tour that particularly made
her a target of criticism, like she was launching a
hair care line at the time. She also promoted her
beverage brand, which was called Betty Booze, and many people
said that alcohol is often connected with domestic violence, so
that's insensitive, and so it was seen that she was
(05:20):
just not taking it seriously, which led to this big
backlash against her. And you'd have to say, one of
the worst cancelations that we've seen in a long time
for reasons that seemed really spurious.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Yes, I agree, because back at the time we talked
about it and it felt as though the facts we
had in front of us were not proportionate to the
avalanche of hate that Blake Lively was getting, particularly on TikTok.
Maybe that's because that's where I leave most of the time,
and we were getting these leaks. So the leaks that
(05:59):
we were getting were that there was something that said
justin Baldoni lingered too long on a kiss, he asked
how much she weighed because he had a former back
injury and was worried about picking her up, like weird,
weird stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
None of those took hold, so there were a few
rumors of was it uncomfortable on set. The other thing
that really came out was Blake had taken over and
she'd insisted on doing her own edit that somehow Ryan
Reynolds got involved and was rewriting a few scenes. So
the image that came across through the press tour was
that she was not taking it seriously, was dominating an
(06:38):
a diva on set, and that he was a victim
of all this. Because, in case you're not familiar with
Justin Baldoni, his most famous role as an actor was
in Jane the Virgin, and he's really fushioned himself over
the last few years as a feminist and as a
podcast called Man Enough, where he questions toxic masculinity.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
He had a viral ted talk about it like he's
very much he's that.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Guy, a champion of women. That was his vibe.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
And among all these rumors, what was very clear, the
whole like smoke fire thing is that they had definitely
fallen out. There was no question about that. You know,
the other cast members had stopped following him on Instagram
and seemed to very much be siding with her. As
I said at the beginning, they weren't photographed together, that
they didn't do any promo. It was kind of like
dueling press tours, which is very unusual.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
And Baldoni at the time he spoke to Today and
obviously addressing some of the creative differences, and he said,
I'm a best idea wins person and I always have
been to a fault, sometimes to a point where at
times I think I've had people wonder if I know
what I'm doing or if I have a point of view,
because I'm so willing to have my vision changed. I
(07:51):
don't believe that inspiration or creativity comes through one person.
On the night of the premiere, he was saying, this
isn't about me, It's a night for Blake, It's for Colleen.
I'm so grateful we're here, and again it was clear
that neither of those women were speaking to him.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
What happened on the weekend is that Blake Lively has
filed a legal complaint that presents her side of the
story to all of the things that we were just discussing,
and Jesse's going to tell us about them in a minute,
but first shortbreak.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
So, the allegations of misconduct on set are pretty damning.
In terms of physical boundaries and violations. There are allegations
that he improvised unwanted kissing scenes. He would enter This
is Baldoni would enter her makeup trailer uninvited while she
was undressed, including while she was breastfeeding. In terms of
(08:48):
sexual harassment, Baldoni and Jamie Heath, he was a producer
and co owner, there are allegations that they would describe
their genitalia on set. Baldoni would frequently refer to his
past porn addiction and describe previous sexual encounters where he
said he may or may not have received consent. Now
(09:10):
we know that Lively made a series of requests part
way through filming. They actually had this all hands meeting
which included her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and it was held
to address Baldoni and Jamie Heaths alleged inappropriate conduct.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
So, yeah, this was interesting because this was like she
had Ryan there as her support person, and it was
after the writer's strike, so they'd only been filming for
six weeks. Then that was the writer's strike and she
had this meeting and she said, I'm not coming back
unless we have this meeting. She included Sony, who's the distributor,
and all these different people. So there are a lot
of people at that meeting, which means that there will
(09:48):
be a lot of you know.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
And none of this was disputed at the time.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
So there was a list of thirty things. They're quite
revealing some of Lively's requests, and these were, as you say,
they were confirmed because it's a document. Her request were
that Baldoni would stop asking her about religious beliefs, stop
asking her trainer about her weight, she was four months
pardon with her fourth baby, and stopped claiming to be
(10:13):
able to speak to her dead father. There are allegations
that Baldoni improvised while on set. So in one scene,
they weren't miked up. It was just to be filmed.
It was just a visual scene, and Lively claims that
as himself, Baldoni leaned in and slowly dragged his lips
from her ear to her neck and said it smells
(10:34):
so good. It says that when Lively objected to his actions,
Baldoni retorted, I'm not even attracted to you. Baldoni added,
this is an allegation improvised sexual content and nude scenes,
and he fought to have a scene where the characters
climaxed at the same time on their wedding night and
told Lively that he and his partner always did and
(10:57):
allegedly pressed her on whether that was the case with
her husband, and she says she was very uncomfortable by
that conversation. There's an allegation about the childbirth scene which
is particularly unsettling. It wasn't agreed that she would be
naked for it, but then when she got on set,
she says that he insisted she be naked. They compromised
(11:18):
that she would be naked from the waist down, but
the set wasn't closed and in the end his friend
came in to play the role of the obgyn.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
I think this is possibly the most chilling thing because
what's so illuminating about reading will link to it if
anybody wants to look at it, which I think you should.
But you learn a lot about Hollywood and how sex
scenes work right, and there are things like nudity writers
where everybody agrees what the parameters before you go into
a scene, things like closed sex when there's nudity, so
(11:50):
only essential people are there. Monitors are turned off so
other people can't look from other rooms and even film you.
So she was in stirrups. She had a little bit
of fabric just literally covering her and the role of
the gynecologist. They were like between her legs. And also
another owner of his studio, Wayfarirer, had just flown in
(12:11):
to visit the set on that day for the first time.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Like it is so gross and creepy.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
It also is clearly from this very long list of
requests clear that this set was a shit show, right
because one of them is also stop having hours long
meetings where Baldoni cries and no more pressing from Baldoni
to sage any of Blake Live's employees, Like this is
(12:40):
batshit what's going on on that set, And it seems
that she's very much trying to say, let's get back
to a professional set.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
And they're at claims as well that when you know
there were certain moments where Lively was made to feel uncomfortable,
other women from the set came up and said, I've
also had that experience so the allegations are that it
was not just her, she was trying to protect the
whole set.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
The last thing I'll say, and I could go on
and on about what's in this.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
Complaint, but the last thing is she alleges that there
was a clear marketing place that was distributed to the
cast and everyone involved in marketing it about how to
promote the film. This was from Sony and they said
they wanted to focus on hope and resilience and not
position this as a domestic violence film. They say that
(13:26):
Baldoni went against this, and that's massive because at the
time everyone was going, why is she not acknowledging that
this is a film about domestic violence. Baldoni was over
here with a link in his Instagram bio to help victims.
Everything he said in his messaging was acknowledging victims, and
(13:46):
this made Lively look really bad.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Well, as it turns out, or at least what's alleged
he here is that that Pivot Jesse was a very
deliberate one to smear Blake Lively because Baldoni and his
team knew what was coming. So to the smear campaign,
and why I say that this is a story that's
not just about Blake Lively and just In Baldoni, but
gives an in into what is really behind a lot
(14:13):
of what we believe right on social media. So all
those tiktoks and stories that we talked about at the
beginning that were being shared and reshared as facts that
Lively was a mean girl, that Lively tried to hijack
the movie, that Lively just wanted to promote a hair
care brand. What's alleged in this document is there was
nothing organic about those stories, and that the PR firm
(14:34):
hired by Baldoni when he realized that Reynolds had blocked
him on Instagram, Baldonian, his producing partner, hired this firm
who were expert in the dark arts of smearing, starting rumors,
and fanning the flames of negativity. Some of the tactics
that are alleged to have happened are that the PR
team would boost negative stories about Lively, branding her as
(14:56):
difficult and tone death. That contractors were allegedly hired to
dominate social media with untraceable tactics like social manipulation and
proactive fan posting. A hired gun helped amplify negative narrative online,
including on platforms like TikTok and Reddit, and basically all
these threads of theories started being sown and then amplified.
(15:19):
Now it's actually impossible, even by the investigative journalists at
The New York Times and actually by the legal team
to be able to absolutely identify exactly what the amplification did.
As we know, the Internet is sprawling and enormous. But
the negative stories that were planted were planted very deliberately
and then encouraged. So this tells you everything about how
(15:42):
we the public were manipulated in this story.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
In August, there were two things we talked about. The
first was something that we've referred to as the dig,
which is what happens when someone is in the process
of cancelation, and we were saying that it's again back
to it being disproportionate. Is that people started yelling about
her plantation wedding, about how Reynolds cheated on scullet Jo
(16:08):
Hansen with Lively. She's always been rude. Everyone on Gossip
Girl hated her. There were weird videos of people gifting
her a bracelet on a red carpet and she would
not accept it, or something like.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
The one that got the most traction was and I
remember thinking at the time, this is weird. Without wanting
to we definitely had our doubts and we spoke about
this on the show, as did others. That interview with
a Swedish journalist entertainment journalist called Christie Flaher which came
out where it showed her interviewing Blake Lively for a
(16:40):
different movie I think back in twenty fifteen, and it
showed Blake being a little bit rude, and for some
reason she posted that with the headline the interview that
made me want to quit my job. That was in
twenty sixteen. That interview happened, and yet it came out.
Now why did it come out? Well, you could say
(17:02):
that organically that journalist was just trying to ride the
wave of hate against Blake Lively. But what was revealed
in this is that this journalist had worked with the
PR company before because they'd also represented Johnny Depp in
his trial against Amber Heard. And we know that some
really dodgy things happened then in terms of how Amber
(17:24):
Heard was trolled and the volume of internet hate towards her,
so much of which was seen to be manufactured. So
again it wasn't organic. And there's a word called astroturfing,
which I learned, which is basically means you think something
is organic it looks like natural grass, but when you.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Look closer you see that it's artificial.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And what that means is that these things are planted
and then amplified, either by bots or by these agencies.
That's what they do.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
Yeah, so in terms of being planted, I think that's
an important point because in the investigation it sort of
said this isn't bots. I always imagined it was bots.
But at the time, I was posting on TikTok about
the Blake Lively thing, and I was noticing that every
time I posted something that was defensive, it got no reach.
(18:13):
So I remember talking about this on the show, only
a few hundred views, and then I posted one thing
that was cheeky that had something about Blake Lively's cancelation.
It actually went against it, but all the metadata would
have suggested that I was about to go her blew up,
and it seemed that if you were being critical of
Blake Lively, your content was on steroids. As someone who
(18:38):
consumes a lot of social media content, it is not
often that you get a unanimous view on anything. But
you went onto these media platforms and all of a sudden,
it was like wall to wall. Everyone hated her. And
let's be clear, if you saw someone pop up and
have a go at Blake Lively, that was probably legitimate.
(19:02):
But where they were getting the information, how their brain
had been marinating in content kind of contributed to that.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Well, it creates a lens.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
And I should say, Christy Flower has come out and
said she has nothing to do with the alleged smear campaign,
but she was exactly what you were talking about, Jesse.
She was being opportunistic. So we live in the attention
economy and if you wanted to go viral, everybody looks
at the numbers who makes content and in the media,
so you knew that if you did something that was
(19:34):
against Blake Lively, it would go off. So it's important
to understand how something can be both organic and manipulated
because people will say, but.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Hang on, Blake Lively.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
They didn't make her try and promote her hair care line,
they didn't make her reference alcohol, they didn't make her
wear florals. But the thing is that it's the volume,
So you can start to believe, oh, everybody hates Blake Lively,
and when you hear enough of that, it does impact
on how you view someone.
Speaker 5 (20:05):
And there was also I remember looking at interviews where
she seemed really insensitive about the subject matter of the film,
but it was so purposefully cut, and if you watch
the whole interview, that's not how it seemed. And then
you were getting Justin Baldoni with these incredible cuts of
him saying something really eloquent about domestic violence. So it
(20:26):
did seem that, yeah, I suppose that that is allegedly
part of the smearing.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
This is where we can bury anyone. Headline comes in
because in the New York Times investigation, there are literal
screenshots of text messages between Baldoni's people and the PR
people saying exactly that that they can bury anybody with
enough ammunition, and that they needed to do it to
get Baldoni's story across. We're going to be back in
(20:54):
a minute, but first a little break.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
I want to talk about the effect of how cancelation
works and how it can be manipulated, because having experienced
it a number of times organically, certainly not to my knowledge,
with a calculated or paid smear campaign by a publicist,
things gained traction, and then everybody wants to be part
(21:23):
of a pylon, right, That's why it's called a dogpile
or a pylon, and there becomes status in reinforcing the
accepted narrative, which in this case was that Justin Baldoni
was a hero and cared about domestic violence victims, and
Blake Lively was an entitled diva who cared about nothing
(21:43):
other than her hair and looking pretty.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
And because of that that sort of narrative about who
Blake Lively was, she's a prime candidate for this, right,
because the thing that's very depressing about this story is
that we're all being manipulated all the time right on
social media, and we think we're having our own thoughts
about things and going, yes, I see, But what this
shows very clearly is that we're being As Lively said
(22:08):
in her statement about it, she said she wanted to
show behind the curtain of how these things start. But
one of the things that we've got to ask ourselves
is why are we so invested in thinking awful things
about women and women like Lively? You know, she in particular,
I guess she is blonde and beautiful, married to a
rich man. She is a striver We've talked about on
(22:29):
this show lots of times. Is the worst thing you
can be. She has her own businesses, she tries really hard,
like she promoted the shit out of that movie, and
it's almost like the world was dying to believe this
about her, which is one of the things I find
deeply depressing about it.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
And that's what the crisis pr person behind all of
this actually said in one of the And the reason
we have these texts, I should say, is because they
were subpoened. So it's the genius of Blake Lively in
all of this is to go, I'm going to get
all the evidence I need to show what really happened,
which is that you have Melissa Nathan saying basically, I
(23:10):
can't believe how quickly people just want to hate a woman.
I'm seeing all this positive justin Baldoni's stuff, and I
don't even agree with half of it. So it was
like they lit the fire and then when it blew up,
they didn't need to do a thing because people.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Want to hate a woman.
Speaker 5 (23:28):
And the irony of this entire story is that it's
an allegory for domestic violence in the context of a
film about domestic violence, which is that people were so
ready to jump on a woman who maybe didn't use
the right words, or was profiting or something. And except
(23:53):
that this man was a feminist ally. It's almost Shakespearean
in that in order to defend his image it's a
feminist ally, he had to bury a female co star.
And we were so happy to follow him there and
to go not only follow him there, like we didn't
look at all the facts, which is that none of
(24:15):
the cast were on speaking terms with him anymore, Colleen
who all on her side, yes, And we were so
happy to follow him there. And I think that there's
a difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
This speaks to something that.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
Feels very very true, which is that there are people
who use the right words, who have the right link
in their Instagram bio. But that is not the same
as being the thing you're purporting to being, which is
that he's saying he supports women and that this story
was really important to him. It's just an incredible, like,
(24:56):
look at potential if it's true hypocrisy.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I think this story has many places to go.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
And today one of the pr Wizards involved in this.
Jennifer Abel has some messages that are allegedly her who's
saying that those messages that we were just talking about,
Jesse were cherry picked and that you didn't see others.
And I'm sure that's true. So there's are many more
places to go. But your point, Jesse is so spot on,
because I remember at the time a lot of people
(25:23):
have a lot of love for Baldoni and he was
seen to be doing all the right things. But I'll
just listened to the interview with him that he did
on How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, and the guy,
I'm sorry, I'm just going to say it is insufferable,
like he is insufferable. He doesn't obviously go to lively
in that interview, and it happened before the legal letter,
(25:46):
but he described the filming as devastatingly difficult for a
number of reasons. He made very clear on the record
that he thought there should have been a trigger warning,
like it was very clear. But the whole feeling about it,
Elizabeth Day barely gets a word in, is that he
was lecturing about victimhood and we are always saying that
(26:07):
we want men to talk about domestic violence, and we do.
But we want men to talk to men about domestic violence.
We don't want them to lecture women about it. And
I know people have problems with the movie, and people
have problems with the source material of the book, but
this movie was aimed at women. The book was aimed
at women, right. It's the way that they chose to
(26:29):
promote it that Baldoni then flipped in order to virtue
signal because he knew basically that he was going to
be taken down. What's also interested in all this is
that Ryan Reynold and Blake Lively and the power that
they wield in Hollywood is probably always going to come
for him, right, So he knew that was coming, so
he wanted to position himself as the perfect allocate ally
(26:51):
and advocate, and he's there lecturing women about victimhood and violence.
That's not what we want from the guys. I mean,
I can't speak for all women, but.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Can we talk about timing for a second, because it's
pretty sobering to go online and look at some of
the reactions to this, where people are just they want
to twist it and still make it about Blake and
they're not interested in facts or perspectives.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Why now?
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Why now?
Speaker 3 (27:19):
It's pre Christmas. Some people have said, well, it's just
come out on Netflix. It's a calculated move. She wants
to just try and salvage the damage to her reputation.
But she didn't say anything back then like this. Everyone
had forgotten about it. Essentially, she'd come back.
Speaker 5 (27:37):
Why now, it would have been totally lost. If she
said something back then, she would have sounded And this
is also such a great example of gas lighting. She
would have been told she was crazy. If she said
at the time that there is a manufactured effort to
bury me, people would have gone, you are grasping, how embarrassing,
(27:58):
blah blah.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Blah, and that she was making it all about her
instead of centering the centering victims.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
It's about to come out on Netflix. I'm not sure
if that's just in the US or if that's here too.
And just in the last week I started seeing stories
about Blake Lively pop up again. I saw a story
about something Ryan Reynolds had said about how he and
Blake grew up working class, and then people were going
into Blake Lively's childhood and going, that's not working class,
(28:25):
how embarrassing? Yeah, were they anticipating another wave, that's the question.
And the other reason why I think it's now is
because of how long this takes. In order to do
this properly in order to get lawyers do the research subpoena.
Those text messages prove it, they needed to buide their time.
(28:50):
And it's important to remember Blake Lively is worth about
thirty million dollars. She's rich, but she's not like the
richest person in Hollywood, Ryan Reynolds, is worth more than
three hundred million, because he hasn't had these business ventures.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
Right and also intensely well connected.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
Yes, so I think it took because you can look
at this case and go, what does Blake Lively want?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
This isn't going to be about damages.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
This isn't about sending Justin Baldoni to jail, like, nothing
about that.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
It's not criminal.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
She wants to correct the record, and in order you
need to have power and you need to have the
financial means, and she does. And I think that's why
she's doing it because imagine how many actresses have been
buried and have never been able to tell their story.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Well, that's the rule of cancelation, isn't it. You can't
defend yourself, well it's happening, otherwise it makes it worse.
But the other thing to note is that there's a
civil complaint. But then there's also the New York Times investigation.
The lead journalist on this was the same journalists that
exposed Harvey Weinstein, Megan Towey. And they don't just publish
(30:00):
what someone else wants them to publish. They go and
corroborate everything. They do their own extensive reporting out, making
sure that all the sources can be confirmed. So in
many ways, the timing was more about what The New
York Times was going to do. But the other thing
to remember, when we're talking about power and money, the
guy who is the financial backer of Wayfarer, which is
(30:22):
the studio that Jamie Heath and Justin Baldonia partners in,
is like a billionaire, so he's also got unlimited funds.
He has a lot more money than Ryan Randalls and
Blake Lively put together. So it's not a case of
Blake Lively punching down the complexity of power. Dynamics on
both the set and in Hollywood aren't just about who's
(30:46):
the most famous in the Daily Mail.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
You know what, though, And this is A more pragmatic
reason too, is they let the movie do its thing.
That movie was really successful. Yeah, you know, so she
would have been contractually obliged to promote that movie. Also,
she clearly wanted to, and she didn't want to promote
it with him, which is again very unusual. But she
promoted the shit out of that movie while all this
(31:09):
was going on. It was very successful, It's had its
period of box office time, and now you can sit
there and reflect on that that was all happening in
real time to her. It does seem extraordinary to me,
though I know that Baldoni has very powerful backer their
met of course, but that he ever thought that they
weren't going to do this Because Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively
(31:35):
Reynolds is one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.
Deadpool was the second biggest movie of the year. He
makes a lot of people a lot of money. They
are intensely powerful. He would be furious. Imagine sitting in
that meeting that he sat in with his wife and
all those people and literally listening to that list being
read out about them walking in on her when she's
half naked and breastfeeding in her trailer Revenge is a
(31:57):
dish best served cold. Right, those guys have gone and
got their ducks in a row in a very professional,
very organized manner, and now they're coming for them. And
fair enough, if indeed everything that's in that legal letter
is true, absolutely fair enough.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
So what are our takeaways before we wrap up and
actually go on holidays?
Speaker 5 (32:17):
I think the reason why people are so fascinated by
this is because it's an exercise in perspective, but also
we were used as audiences and consumers of media. We
were played. And the other thing is that I am
now looking at other examples of cancelation. I'm sorry, but well,
(32:40):
actually there are some examples of men. But what's confusing
about them are I don't know who benefited. So it's
really important when you look at a cancelation like this
to see who the winners are. But it makes me
think very differently about Megan Markle. I just wonder when
you see Walter all and wheneverone walks around and they
(33:01):
go I just have a sense of something. I have
a sense that they're not very nice or something.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
It's a great point.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
It just makes me go, how much of this is
all manufactured? And how difficult is it to prove when
these social media wizards are so much smarter than us.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
So out loud As, we will be returning to our
scheduled programming of hot Pods summer, where we are going
to be giving you all sorts of delicious things to
listen to over summer.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
If only you could see us.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Now, it's early in the morning, we are all at home,
but we really wanted to bring this to you because
we just thought that it was an important story to cover.
Speaker 5 (33:41):
It was one of those stories that in terms of
the group chat, it was just going off.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Look, chances are in two.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
Days there'll be another story that blows up our group
chat and we're like, let's jump on. But this time
of year, I think we all tend to fall into
some rabbit holes, and it appears that we were.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Victims of that.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
If this conversation has brought anything up for you, help
is available. We're going to put links to resources that
can help in the show notes.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Take care, I'm going outside to touch some grass.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
We love you out Louders. We will be in your
ears shortly.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Bye bye bye
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