There’s a Clear Arc Emerging in the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni Scandal. It Doesn’t Look Good for Anyone. – Slate

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.If you have no idea what to make of the Justin Baldoni–Blake Lively situation anymore, that’s partly by design. The past couple of weeks have been a perfect illustration of how confusing and removed from reality the case has become. Last week, Baldoni’s legal team released some supposedly unedited footage from the filming of It Ends With Us that, it would have you believe, proves once and for all that Baldoni, the film’s director and star, didn’t sexually harass his co-star. Funnily enough, Lively’s team seems to agree that the video is damning—only that it incriminates him, not her.These leaks, which also now include a voice note Baldoni is said to have sent Lively at 2 a.m. during filming, are the latest developments in a saga that kicked into high gear last month, when Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni and others behind the 2024 drama. It was covered prominently in the New York Times the day after the filing, meaning Lively’s side likely coordinated with the paper to some degree; this collaboration has sparked some conspiratorial thinking online. Since then, the parties have been trading blows: Baldoni sued the Times for $250 million, and Lively officially sued the actor as well. After a short period of implying that he also planned to sue Lively “into oblivion,” Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman did just that two weeks ago, filing a $400 million suit against the actress and adding her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for good measure. At this point, the combined pages of publicly available legal filings are now about the length of the 380-page Colleen Hoover novel that inspired the film at the heart of this whole mess.Lively’s original legal complaint alleged that Baldoni and the team behind It Ends With Us created a sexually inappropriate atmosphere on the set of the movie, then, as retaliation for Lively speaking out against it, hired a crisis communications team to attempt to smear her reputation. The Times’ report on the initial action quoted generously from Lively’s legal filing, which included text messages and emails that purportedly showed some of the inner workings of the crisis campaign. Baldoni and Co. denied any harassment and said the New York Times’ reporting cherry-picked its facts and excerpts. His complaints allege that the real scandal of the movie shoot was the way Lively attempted to wrest creative control of the movie away from him and his team.Public reception of the whole situation has followed a telling, and potentially troubling, arc. The initial Times story made a splash and seemed to bring recognition from some that they’d been duped by the smear campaign Lively was alleging. But Baldoni’s two lawsuits and other public volleys against Lively, including the video footage his side has now released, have undoubtedly been successful in chipping away at that. As Doreen St. Félix wrote for the New Yorker, the era in which #MeToo stories have the power to definitively move the cultural needle may be over, and for various reasons, the skepticism surrounding Lively in particular is widespread.In practice, what I’ve found this looks like is that now, every time there’s a new update in the case, I am served a bunch of videos on TikTok by armchair legal experts who claim to have analyzed the relevant evidence before making pronouncements like “Sorry, but this girl just keeps digging herself into a hole that I cannot dig her out of” and “Blake Lively is cooked! She is coo-ooked!” I occasionally see videos that appear to take Lively’s side, or even try to be neutral, but those seem to be far outnumbered by the veritable army of Baldoni supporters.This was all silly enough when what was being chewed over were mainly details from various legal filings, such as allegations that Lively’s side omitted a crucial emoji from some of the text-message evidence. Baldoni’s side and his supporters were stretching the definition of exculpatory in fairly transparent ways. Last week, though, we arrived at the surreal but inevitable point when both sides were watching the same footage and arguing that it means completely opposite things. The footage in question is from a scene Lively specifically cited in her original legal complaint. Here is how she describes it:On another occasion, Mr. Baldoni and Ms. Lively were filming a slow dance scene for a montage in which no sound was recorded. Mr. Baldoni chose to let the camera roll and have them perform the scene, but did not act in character as Ryle; instead, he spoke to Ms. Lively out of character as himself. At one point, he leaned forward and slowly dragged his lips from her ear and down her neck as he said, “it smells so good.” None of this was remotely in character, or based on any dialogue in the script, and nothing needed to be said because, again, there was no sound—Mr. Baldoni was caressing [Ms.] Lively with his mouth in a way that had nothing to do with their roles. When Ms. Lively later objected to this behavior, [Mr.] Baldoni’s response was, “I’m not even attracted to you.”Baldoni’s side’s description of the scene is longer, on Pages 53 and 54 of his suit against Lively. His lawyers argue that the scene was not shot in character at least in part because Lively—as herself, not her character, Lily—kept arguing that the two should appear to be talking while filming. The complaint says, in part:Lively continued to break character and speak as herself rather than as Lily, which was extremely confusing for Baldoni, who was trying to balance directing the scene within his artistic vision while also acting in character while filming and trying to get Lively to do the same. Lively apologized for the smell of her spray tan and body makeup. Baldoni responded, “It smells good,” and continued acting, slow dancing as he believed his character would with his partner, which requires some amount of physical touching. Lively took them out of character again and began to joke about Baldoni’s nose, which he laughed off and joked in turn, even as Lively joked that he should get plastic surgery.Baldoni’s side released the footage with a title card that says it “clearly refute[s]” Lively’s claim that Baldoni was behaving inappropriately: “Both actors are clearly behaving well within the scope of the scene and with mutual respect and professionalism.” Then Lively’s team released a statement in response asserting that the footage only corroborates her complaint.What does the footage actually show? Perhaps it does complicate Lively’s description in some ways: It includes sound, for one thing, which immediately calls her description into question even if it doesn’t ultimately change the substance of what she was saying. Her claim that Baldoni wasn’t acting in character is also odd, considering that she wasn’t either. But Lively clearly looks as if she is trying to avoid kissing Baldoni at points in the clip, and, as her side argued in a statement, her being so chatty could have been one way of trying to ward off Baldoni’s behavior. (An intimacy coordinator interviewed in the Hollywood Reporter, when informed that the Baldoni camp was claiming that the footage vindicated the actor, responded: “I see the opposite.”) It’s impossible to tell by the footage what is happening in either person’s head, and for that reason, the video doesn’t do much definitively for either side.Lively’s side has accused Baldoni’s of attempting to manipulate the public by releasing the video and other material to the media instead of waiting for the trial, and the team has now requested a gag order. I lack the legal training to know whether Lively and Co. should prevail, but all I can say is: Please, do it. If not, it will all never end. (Isn’t the movie’s title starting to seem like a curse?) To wit, this week brought us the aforementioned voice note, in which Baldoni apologizes to Lively over his reaction to some changes to a scene. Whether that particular voice note makes Baldoni seem like a good guy who was trying to get it right or makes you want to jump out of your skin and flee any part of society where you might ever encounter Baldoni or his voice again, as it did for some of my colleagues, depends on you. But it really proves nothing for either side.It would seem that Baldoni recorded the voice note in response to some text messages from Lively—included in one of his lawsuits—in which she compared to herself to Khaleesi, the Game of Thrones character, and talked about how her friend Taylor Swift was one of her dragons. That’s patently bananas. The details in this case are head-turning and often amusing to discuss, and Baldoni’s camp knows this. His team has even been teasing the launch of a website that will supposedly contain “all correspondence” and relevant videos from the case so fans can judge for themselves. Yeah, right. So far, all that’s been proved is that even when fans don’t have enough information to judge for themselves, they’ll draw the wrong conclusions. People aren’t trying to interpret evidence anymore; they’re taking a Rorschach test, and they’re finding that every single inkblot somehow resembles Lively behaving bitchily. The issue of the gag order won’t be officially heard until a hearing on Monday, but by the power vested in me by your reading this far, I hereby grant the order. Consider yourself gagged.
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Source: https://slate.com/life/2025/01/blake-lively-justin-baldoni-lawsuit-ryan-reynolds-voicemail.html