Breaking News: Texts, lies and videotape: Making sense of the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni case

If TikTok is to be believed, Ryan Reynolds began visiting the set of It Ends With Us every day after he started to suspect his wife, Blake Lively, was having an affair with her co-star (and the film’s director and co-producer) Justin Baldoni.

There’s absolutely no evidence that was the case – TikTok really isn’t to be believed – but with so much rumour, gossip, claim and counterclaim swirling around what has become the highest-profile celebrity feud since Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, it’s impossible to know who or what to trust any more.

And that, it seems, is precisely how the spin doctors on either side want it to be
“There are a lot of myths around and general confusion,” says Lucinda Nelson, a PhD candidate in law at Queensland University of Technology, and a keen follower of the case and all it signifies.

“The Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni brouhaha is a fitting symbol of the decline of the American century,” observes marketer Toby Ralph, a regular on the ABC’s The Gruen Report. “A trivial stoush that might have been settled with a slap and a ‘pull-your-head-in’ chat has festered and become headlines, websites, social media scuttlebutt and lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

But for all its he-said, she-said pettiness, the case is also genuinely fascinating and significant. It illustrates just how much manipulation of the narrative on mainstream and social media has become part of the celebrity management arsenal. And it suggests that the hard-won gains of #MeToo cannot be taken for granted (or, at the very least, that the pendulum has swung back a little from the #believewomen apex of that moment).

For those playing along at home (and those who have barely registered the whole stoush), a brief recap may be in order.

It Ends With Us is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s loosely autobiographical novel, and was marketed as a romantic drama though it deals with domestic abuse and intergenerational trauma. As the lead, Baldoni portrays a neurosurgeon who is violent to his partner, played by Lively, who rose to fame on Gossip Girl, is married to Deadpool star Reynolds, and is the teetotal boss of a bunch of businesses, with interests in haircare products and alcohol-free cocktails.

Shortly before the film’s release last August, internet chatter surfaced to suggest there was tension between Baldoni and Lively – they did not appear together for any of the film’s promotional events – with the finger of blame at first seeming to point his way. But soon stories surfaced about Lively’s behaviour on set, casting her as difficult and demanding, and suggesting that rewrites done for her by her husband during the Hollywood shutdown may have amounted to strike-busting.

The chatter did nothing to deter interest in the film (and perhaps even fuelled it), which went on to gross $US345 million at the box office before moving to streaming on Prime.
“It doesn’t seem to have been adversely affected by this poor publicity where the two main stars seem to be at loggerheads,” says Robert Gill, associate professor of Swinburne’s Media and Communications department.

But any sense of the battle playing out organically was shattered in December, when The New York Times published a story alleging that Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer Studios had engaged PR consultants to wage a deliberate smear campaign against Lively in anticipation of her bad-mouthing the film and/or its director.

Published under the headline “We Can Bury Anyone: Inside A Hollywood Smear Campaign”, the story quoted extensively from a 93-page civil complaint – a precursor to a lawsuit – lodged by Lively that detailed allegations of sexual harassment on the set, and a subsequent effort to destroy her reputation should news of those allegations leak.

Baldoni then filed a counter-claim against Lively and her husband, accusing them of hijacking the movie, civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy, and seeking $400 million in damages. He is also suing The New York Times over its reporting. Lively’s side has also sought a gag order, which has not (yet) been granted.