The truth about the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni scandal 4 replies ...Middle East

It didn’t take long for the internet to notice that something was afoot among the cast of It Ends With Us, the slushy-but-serious film adaptation of the whirlwind-romance-turned-domestic-abuse novel that made Colleen Hoover a BNOT (Big Name On TikTok). In the press cycle over the summer, its two leads, Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, were never seen in the same interview or red-carpet photo. She had unfollowed him on Instagram. All the signs pointed towards a beef.

A few months later and “beef” is putting it mildly. Lively has filed a legal complaint alleging that Baldoni conducted a calculated smear campaign against her (“We can bury anyone”, Baldoni’s PR is reported to have said) after she accused him and producer Jamey Heath of sexually inappropriate behaviour on set, including displaying a lack of respect for her boundaries during intimate scenes and making unwarranted sexual comments. Baldoni has sued the New York Times – who broke the story – for defamation damages worth $250m and countersued Lively for $400m. There was also a creative power struggle at play: Lively says the two men’s behaviour improved after safeguarding procedures – including hiring an intimacy coordinator – were put in place on set, after which she made her own cut of the film, which was used as the final version. Baldoni, the director, has claimed that Lively had not even read the book.

Yes, this is a celebrity feud – but it’s a much thornier one than we’re used to. Troublesome sexual dynamics, a creative power struggle, crisis PR teams (Baldoni’s team is the same one used by Johnny Depp during his defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard, who alleged he had abused her) – and all that caused by a film that, crudely executed and implausible as it is, concerns a topic as emotionally loaded as domestic violence.

Now, Baldoni has released footage of the slow-dance scene takes in which Lively claims he was behaving inappropriately – and the internet is aflame dissecting it. Some argue that Baldoni is doing his job as an actor, some that Lively’s body language and repeated assertions that the characters should “just talk” proves the allegations he was trying to dispel by making the video public.

There are a lot of strands to untangle – and it matters because we, the public, have played a significant part in the narrative from the outset. Sexual harassment allegations feel especially loaded because they often come down to a straightforward “he said, she said” – and so they become not only about the gender dynamics inherent to the initial interaction, but those that inflect conversations pitting feeling against “fact”, subjectivity against objectivity, intuition against rationality. Now – because of the internet – footage of what is, from the outside, an ambiguous interaction (which Lively claims made her uncomfortable, and Baldoni claims was part of the role) has been viewed by millions, and both parties are being tried in the court of public opinion.

It all feels icky and nasty. But it has done from the very beginning, and the pendulum swings of who’s in favour are symptomatic of a toxic media (and social media) culture that encourages us to swap those feelings of icky nastiness for a more straightforward rage and indignance.

When the New York Times article was published on 22 December it was met with widespread shock, because almost everyone reading it had fallen for the efforts to trash Lively’s reputation. We had been exposed to content that claimed she was a bully, compilation videos of her being rude to journalists, memes highlighting how she had hijacked a film about domestic violence to promote her haircare brand. Having believed it, most of us felt manipulated and guilty when we read the screenshots of messages where Baldoni and his team appeared to be plotting to take her down. “…socials are really really ramping up,” Melissa Nathan, Baldoni’s crisis management expert, wrote to her colleague in August. “In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” She was right, and we had proved it.

Aghast at Baldoni’s behaviour – towards us as well as Lively – we thought we had our villain. But now Baldoni has retaliated, the conversation has become messy again. Lively is more famous than Baldoni and more reputationally powerful – he has released a screenshot of a text in which she says she has “a lot of dragons” protecting her, referring, presumably, to her mega-celebrity best friend Taylor Swift and powerful Hollywood husband Ryan Reynolds (whom Baldoni is also suing). Her garnering feminist support as an individual alleging harassment feels at odds with the counternarrative that she wasn’t particularly interested in the deeper message of the film. Through the legacy of the PR campaign or through some other more mysterious means, the idea that Lively is a mean girl, out for herself, is alive and well.

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It’s our responsibility almost a decade on from MeToo to treat Lively’s allegations with the utmost seriousness. But mainly we have to be wary of our own tendencies to make binary judgements based on limited information. Because from the very beginning and at every juncture this story has highlighted the sheer force of public opinion in the digital age, the voracity with which we consume what the algorithm feeds us and its ability to push things to their extremes. Coincidentally, the monstrous success of a writer like Colleen Hoover, who has inspired thousands of people to film themselves sobbing hysterically over books so badly written that they are almost unreadable, demonstrates this perfectly.

When it comes to A-listers and BookTok, these pendulum swings are often put down to petty and spurious gossip culture or passing fads – but they are the same forces of black-and-white thinking and tribalism that fuel more dangerous extremism and political polarisation. It is impossible for us to know for sure, at this stage, what really happened on the set of It Ends With Us. Both sides think they’re right – of course, that doesn’t mean that neither are wrong. But nor does it mean that their wrongness equates to the kind of villainy or sainthood that grants us the relief of an easy answer.

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