You Fell For an Alleged Smear Campaign Against Blake Lively. Now What?

As she watched the tide turn online against Blake Lively in the It Ends With Us drama last summer, Justin Baldoni’s newly-hired publicist mused to a colleague their team had a reliable weapon on their side: misogyny.

“Socials are really, really ramping up in his favour,” Melissa Nathan said of Baldoni, according to emails obtained by Lively in a lawsuit and shared with The New York Times. “[Lively] must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people [who] really want to hate on women.”

Nathan, a crisis PR professional whose firm has worked with Johnny Depp and Drake, among others, wasn’t wrong. It’s never been easier to destroy a woman’s reputation using the internet. Most of the time, the people leading the charge are other women in woman-dominated online spaces, which have been insidiously weaponized and manipulated without those participating even realizing it.

This is what Lively is claiming to have experienced last summer, when rumors of a feud between herself and Baldoni on the set of the film It Ends With Us began to surface. Lively was the star of the highly-anticipated movie, the first adaption of a novel written by bestselling author Colleen Hoover, and undoubtedly was the biggest name. However, on set, the power largely rested with Baldoni, who not only co-starred in the film, but directed it. The production studio Baldoni co-founded, Wayfarer Studios, was producing the film as one of its first big projects, and had the backing of billionaire businessman Steve Sarowitz, who is co-chair of the studio.

According to the bombshell lawsuit, Baldoni and his producing partner Jamey Heath, subjected Lively and other women on set to a barrage of sexual harassment, bullied and fat-shamed her, and exposed her and her infant to COVID-19, which they both contracted (the full complaint, which details all the allegations, is worth a read). After production paused for the union strikes in 2023, Lively and her team sent Baldoni, Heath, and Wayfarer a list of provisions for ending the hostile work environment and demanded they agree to them before Lively would return to set (they did).

When the film ramped up for the release in 2024, according to the lawsuit, Baldoni and his team began to worry that it would soon become obvious that something had gone down on set. The entire cast had unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram and he was shut out from group events featuring Blake Lively and It Ends With Us.

So, the lawsuit alleges, Baldoni enlisted a cadre of PR professionals, including Nathan, to shift the narrative in his favor. Their main strategy? Make the internet—and then society at large—hate Lively (the actual phrasing they allegedly used was “bury” her). And they knew exactly what to do. After all, they had a blueprint.