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“I think the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni thing is such a hot-button thing right now that even a mere mention of it will seem like I could be on the wrong side of things, even though I would never be,” Nikki Glaser told Yahoo Entertainment, in early January, ahead of her debut as host of the Golden Globes. “I also don’t want to give his name any — I’m mad I even know his name, to be honest with you, so I don’t need to say it anymore.”
Days later, Glaser’s opening monologue praised Zendaya’s year of work, quipping that her film Challengers was “more sexually charged than Diddy’s credit card.” She continued, saying that the afterparty would not “be as good this year.”
Glaser’s red line is murky here. On one hand, there’s nothing funny about the harassment and calculated humiliation of women. On the other hand, sometimes, when the victims are less visible, there just might be.
Blake Lively filed a legal complaint in December 2024, alleging sexual harassment and numerous violations of her physical boundaries on the set of It Ends With Us—a film about survivors of generational cycles of domestic violence.
The filing claims that after Lively held a meeting with director and co-star Justin Baldoni and other members of the production team to discuss what had become a “hostile work environment,” Baldoni and his public relations team then set in motion a “multi-tiered plan” to “destroy her reputation.”
Melissa Nathan, a crisis management expert, developed a similar campaign for Johnny Depp amid his highly publicized defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife, Amber Heard.
By the time It Ends With Us hit theaters, online criticism of Lively was rampant. The overwhelming narrative was that the actress was a “diva,” a “bully,” and completely “tone-deaf” about the film’s messaging. This was despite the fact that Lively was, in fact, following the film’s official promotional plan to “focus more on the uplifting aspects of the movie than on abuse.” Taking swift note of the backlash, Baldoni’s PR team recommended he instead highlight survivors of domestic violence in his interviews and on social media when promoting the movie.
In a text message to Jennifer Abel in August 2024, a PR executive involved in the campaign against Blake Lively, Nathan said of the online attacks: “… socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people [who] really want to hate on women.”
In 2022, a jury unanimously found that Amber Heard had defamed Johnny Depp in an article she wrote for the Washington Post in December 2018, where she called out how “institutions protect men accused of abuse.” Depp was awarded $5 million in punitive damages and $10 million in compensatory damages.
A report by Bot Sentinel published in 2022 concluded that the widespread campaign against Amber Heard was “one of the worst cases of platform manipulation and flagrant abuse from a group of Twitter accounts.” Twitter trolls had exploited trending conversations “while targeting and abusing women to suppress any positive tweets supporting Amber Heard.”
Bots, brands, celebrities, and ordinary online users alike treated the trial as a sort of spectator sport, cheering for Johnny Depp, whom they believed to be the “real” victim. Users made memes of Heard’s crying face on the stand; her sobs became a trending TikTok audio. However, Depp’s text messages to friends in which he openly and vividly fantasized about murdering his ex-wife were not a part of the conversation, nor a factor that lent credibility to Heard’s claims. Heard was painted as the manipulator and instigator—although, there was no evidence to suggest that was the truth.
Despite the serious nature of Lively’s allegations and their implications for people working on film sets in Hollywood, some corporate media outlets immediately reported the news as a petty “feud” between Lively and Baldoni—or merely celebrity “drama.”
Recently, Baldoni’s attorney and PR team leaked behind-the-scenes footage from It Ends With Us to the Daily Mail. In the video, Lively and Baldoni are dancing as part of a silent, slow-motion sequence. Neither actor is in character; they chat idly about their spouses and how they think the scene should play out. Baldoni’s camp says this clip proves the actor demonstrated the utmost professionalism on set.
However, the footage does seem to support Lively’s claim that Baldoni “was caressing (Ms.) Lively with his mouth in a way that had nothing to do with their roles.” When Lively later objected to this behavior, Baldoni said he “wasn’t even attracted to her.”
When reporting this story, the Daily Mail simply asked its readers, “Who’s lying?”
Every year, Project Censored features a Junk Food News chapter in its annual State of the Free Press, where authors review the year’s most sensational, inconsequential stories the establishment press was covering, diverting attention away from informative news stories.
The chapter highlights how the public’s engagement with “celebrity gossip” stories might reflect deeper societal issues, such as the public’s fixation on fame, the media’s role in shaping cultural values, or the systemic inequalities that undermine progress.
Where once it may have seemed impossible to go back to the way things were before the #MeToo movement began, it now seems even more unlikely we’ll ever escape the stubborn grip of misogyny, especially as Donald Trump—whose sexual misconduct and overt sexism precedes him—enters office for a second time.
But we can try.
We can take notice when surges of online vitriol against women take hold seemingly out of nowhere. We can ask why someone like Justin Baldoni, who at the time hadn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, was suddenly enlisting the help of a crisis team known for managing and mitigating abuse allegations. We can be critical thinkers when there appears to be a larger agenda at play.
Further, we can recognize that for every celebrity detailing accounts of workplace harassment or intimate partner violence—stories that might be dismissed outright or reduced to trivial “scandals”—there are thousands of survivors whose names we do not know, silenced by a culture that we, collectively, have helped to sustain.
More/Source: https://www.projectcensored.org/from-metoo-to-misdirection-media-misogny/