If Sony refused to accept Blake’s harassment complaint, as she alleges, why aren’t they a party to her suit? Most plaintiffs want to make sure to include a party with deep pockets. Seems she stuck to suing only the “little fish.”
I think one reason that Blake and Justin have credibility issues is that they very publicly lied about their relationship not starting while he was still married on the set of Green Lantern. I can understand not wanting to publicize that, but affirmatively lying about it is a choice.
Anonymous wrote:I think one reason that Blake and Justin have credibility issues is that they very publicly lied about their relationship not starting while he was still married on the set of Green Lantern. I can understand not wanting to publicize that, but affirmatively lying about it is a choice.
Anonymous wrote:I think one reason that Blake and Justin have credibility issues is that they very publicly lied about their relationship not starting while he was still married on the set of Green Lantern. I can understand not wanting to publicize that, but affirmatively lying about it is a choice.
Who thinks they have credibility issues? Sounds like a personal opinion.
Anonymous wrote:I think one reason that Blake and Justin have credibility issues is that they very publicly lied about their relationship not starting while he was still married on the set of Green Lantern. I can understand not wanting to publicize that, but affirmatively lying about it is a choice.
Who thinks they have credibility issues? Sounds like a personal opinion.
Most of the world, outside of you and one or two posters here.
Anonymous wrote:I think one reason that Blake and Justin have credibility issues is that they very publicly lied about their relationship not starting while he was still married on the set of Green Lantern. I can understand not wanting to publicize that, but affirmatively lying about it is a choice.
Who thinks they have credibility issues? Sounds like a personal opinion.
Most of the world, outside of you and one or two posters here.
lol. Most of the world? We already established that most people have no idea who BL is. They certainly don't think someone they have never heard of has a credibility problem. It's just you and your echo chamber.
Lively is naked below her boobs. There are multiple closeups of her belly and upper legs. Her legs are up in stirrups in a way that if she tried to pull that hospital gown over her lower half, it would ride up because her legs are up in the air.
It was a nude scene. If the actress filming that scene asked for a sheet between takes to cover up her lower body (even just for warmth, not modesty) it should have been provided. I'm sure there were points when she was able to take her legs out of the stirrups and cover up with the gown, but there were also definitely points where she had to lie there in the stirrups between takes because her legs are up for the full scene so I'm sure they were up for much of the shoot.
Those of you quibbling over "oh she could have pulled her hospital gown down" or "she wasn't really nude, she was wearing clothes" just sound dumb. She's obviously nude and the position of her body would have made it impossible to fully cover up with her gown unless she was lying there holding the gown in place the entire time with her hands (and she probably had to do other things with her hands between takes, like review notes about the scene, drink from a water bottle, etc.).
Why didn't they just give her a sheet? Like this is not explained. What possible reason would the production have for not giving her something to cover up during the scene? She shouldn't have to prove that she needs one, it should just be provided.
Do you understand Blake's not actually giving birth? Its called movie making. That's not her nude belly. It's a thick, warm prosthetic torso. Do while she looks like she's naked, she's actually not.
Still legs spread with a tiny piece of fabric covering her labia while mimicking pushing on an open set, visible camera screens posting the uncut scenesz and regardless of whether she could move to close her legs or move the gown during the shot, nobody could be bothered to give her a coverup when she asked for one.
I am one hundred percent sure that the camera was not focused on her labia — for one thing the friend of the director actor would be blocking it, for the other, she wasn’t actually pushing a baby out and aiming a camera there would make it obvious, and lastly, this was a PG 13 movie. Again, your fiction reads well though.
Of course it wasn't -- she was wearing a strip of fabric over her genitals anyway. No one has suggested they tried to film her genitals.
That does not mean it wasn't uncomfortable to film a scene with no pants on and an actor you just met sitting inches from your vag. It would also be weird to constantly be moving your legs between takes and pulling down the gown and she shouldn't have to do that.
There's also no excuse for springing the nudity on her the day of the shoot and failing to have the intimacy coordinator on set, and also for not closing the set when one of your actors is not only partially nude but has let you know she's not totally comfortable with it.
Baldoni hasn't explained any of this. Why wasn't she given a sheet? Why didn't he raise the issue of nudity earlier? If he planned for Lively to be nude, why didn't he enlist the intimacy coordinator to be there and why didn't he make it a closed set?
I think if this is true, it could be a result of him being green (inexperienced) and less about him being a predator.
I do think a lot of the bad behavior Lively alleges was due to Baldoni being an inexperienced director and the production company just not having a lot of experience and being unprofessional. But that doesn't absolve him of liability if his behavior or the productions actions led to a hostile work environment. Like he doesn't have to be a predator to engage in sexual harassment if his ineptitude led to consistently inappropriate, invasive, sexualized behavior on set.
I worked for a time in the fitness industry, and one of the companies I worked for had this issue -- just incredibly poorly run by people who didn't have leadership/management experience. They mostly had good (or at least okay) intentions but their employment practices were awful. The fitness industry, like acting, is an industry where people might interact in a way that would be considered totally inappropriate in other setting but is normal in that industry -- people touching each other to adjust form, people wearing very little clothing and changing/showering at work, etc. The result of having a green and unprofessional management in an industry like that is that it gets bad very quickly. It also makes it very easy for someone who *is* a predator to do bad things without getting in trouble. I was groped by a colleague at that job and there was just no recourse and it was written off by higher ups because they had no formal HR, no workplace policy governing that kind of behavior (and certainly no training on what is and is not permitted). It was an unequivocal groping, not something that could be misinterpreted on my end (his hands were literally on my boobs and crotch) but because it was a workplace where people did sometimes touch each other in a way that elsewhere might be considered sexual (putting hands on someone's waist or midsection to address form), management believed it had been an accident and that he "didn't mean anything." I don't think all of those people were "predators" but the guy who groped me was and they made it extremely easy for him to get away with it.
That's what I think happened here. When you have a workplace where people might be nude or semi-nude, where part of their job might be to portray childbirth or sex, then you need to maintaining very high standards of professionalism and following protocols for maintaining consent and respect for everyone in the workplace. They did not do that and I think it resulted in a hostile work environment like the one I wound up working in. The fact that it was caused as much by ineptitude as bad intentions doesn't really make it any better. I think they are still liable for creating an unsafe, hostile work environment.
And it seems like we wouldn't have heard about any of this but for Baldoni's misguided smear attempt to "bury her" after the fact. Seems like she was going to look the other way and let it go until and keep it private until that happened, and then she came out guns blazing. Who wouldn't in her case?
Hard to say -- I really don't know what her intentions were prior to the summer PR campaign. It certainly didn't make it *less* likely that she would sue him. It's probably possible that if that had not happened and the film had been a success without all the online chatter about Lively, it might have been resolved more quietly.
This will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think situations like this could be resolved without litigation if people weren't so egotistical. Like there's a parallel universe where Baldoni was more responsive to Lively's concerns on set and sought to address them, and that results in Lively being more amenable to not only working with Baldoni but his vision for the movie, and Ryan Reynolds is never brought in to write scenes or do the final cut, and they promote the movie together without Baldoni trying to smear Lively online or Lively freezing him out and getting the rest of the cast to do so as well, and then there's no litigation.
But it all starts with people being willing to be self-critical, admit mistakes, apologize, and forgive. And I don't think the people involved in this situation have the ability. Baldoni strikes me as vain, oblivious, self-important, and obnoxious. Lively strikes me as the kind of person who, once she's decided she doesnt' like you, will just go nuclear until you are nothing. It's a terrible combination. I think Baldoni's more in the wrong here -- it really looks like he did some very skeevy, harassing stuff on set and he was the director and needed to take responsibility for the lack of professionalism -- but also Lively probably handled this in a way that maximized the conflict and now it's a death match. On the one hand, good for her for standing up for herself. On the other hand, I question whether anything good will come of this in the end because they are going scorched earth.
I disagree on how you view Baldoni. I don’t think he gives off this vibe at all. He seems pretty down to earth, sensitive and overall a good human which is why people are shocked at the allegations.
I guess he seems that way if you discount everything in Lively's complaint and the fact that the entire cast of the movie has come out in support of Lively. They were there.
I think I may not have written my response clear. What I was trying to articulate is that in the public overall Justin doesn’t have this reputation. I do think that most people would put those traits on Blake as she seems to have had the reputation of being self important and vain long before the allegations. I think people are genuinely shocked to hear these allegations simply due to the fact that Justin appeared to be one of the good guys. Now whether or not he is a good guy, I cannot answer. I was just shocked at how you saw him is all, but now I understand that you are viewing him through the lens of the lawsuit and not on anything outside of it.
Well, she is seeing him through the lens of the Blake’s lawsuit, but is willfully blind to his complaint against The NY Times, which raises serious issues about Blake’s credibility and motivation.
It really doesn't since he barely addressed most of her complaints. But keep harping on it.
He addressed her credibility or lack there of which goes to all her claims. If she is willing to edit texts to deliberately change their meaning and present them with no indication of such edits, why should we find her credible at all? And that’s a rhetorical question, because I know you will support her regardless of how much evidence piles up against her.
Lively didn't do that though. The NYT did that. And he's suing them for it! Good for him. But that argument doesn't have any impact on Lively's credibility -- she is not the one who decided how to present those texts.
And where did The NY Times get those texts? Lively and her publicist. You think it was The NY Times who sliced and diced them? Lively presented them that way, and The NY Times did not fully investigate her claims.
That sounds like a NYT problem.
Also NYT was able to independently verify the texts with Joneworks, the PR company that the Justin's team was working for at the time that the texts occurred. It is not clear to me they came from Lively's team -- they may have come directly from Jonesworks or come from both sources.
Interestingly, the NYT chose not to mention that the PR flaks were working for Jonesworks at the time, or mention Jonesworks at all. Or mention that the reason Jonesworks provided these texts (both to Lively's team AND to the NYT) is that they were discovered when Jonesworks launched a lawsuit against members of Baldoni PR team when they left Jonesworks to start their own company.
None of that has anything to do with Lively. I actually think Jonesworks fed the texts to the NYT specifically to discredit their former employees in a very public and embarrassing way right before Jonesworks sued them for breach of contract.
So no, I don't think Lively's team somehow stage managed all that. There are tons of competing interests at play. The NYT could had lots of opportunity to find and provide more context on the texts -- they didn't. They also could have given Baldoni's team time to respond -- they didn't. They also could have disclosed some of the broader context to how the texts came to be released so that readers would have a better sense of what was at play -- they didn't.
Lively's team, and certainly Lively herself, had nothing to do with any of that.
Anonymous wrote:I think one reason that Blake and Justin have credibility issues is that they very publicly lied about their relationship not starting while he was still married on the set of Green Lantern. I can understand not wanting to publicize that, but affirmatively lying about it is a choice.
Sorry, meant to say Blake and Ryan.
Lol the percent of the public who knows about this is minuscule and the percent who care is even smaller. That's the kind of think that people who spend 90% of their day posting on online message boards about celebrities care about. Not a big group.
Anonymous wrote:If Sony refused to accept Blake’s harassment complaint, as she alleges, why aren’t they a party to her suit? Most plaintiffs want to make sure to include a party with deep pockets. Seems she stuck to suing only the “little fish.”
Her complaint says that when she reached out to Sony to address Baldoni's and Heath's behavior, they told her they had no authority over the set because they were just the distributor. That's not the same as "refusing to accept" it. What they were saying is that neither Baldoni nor anyone on the production was an employee of Sony and therefore Sony's HR processes could not be used to resolve the dispute.
Also perhaps Lively's goal is not to get a big payday here, but to right a wrong. If her goal is to get accountability for Baldoni's and Wayfarer's actions, what is the point of suing Sony, who wasn't involved in the production? If she wanted deep pockets, I can see her adding the to the suit. But she's already very wealthy, she doesn't need money.
I agree with this. I watched the movie not knowing anything about the drama. I only got sucked in to this thread when I was bored over break. I have tried to discuss with DH and he gets a glazed over look and tells me he doesn’t know these people and doesn’t care to discuss. I still have no idea what happened with Depp and Heard. That’s how far removed I am from celebrity happenings. I have become far too invested in this thread and I sort of wish I had never clicked. LOL!
Lively is naked below her boobs. There are multiple closeups of her belly and upper legs. Her legs are up in stirrups in a way that if she tried to pull that hospital gown over her lower half, it would ride up because her legs are up in the air.
It was a nude scene. If the actress filming that scene asked for a sheet between takes to cover up her lower body (even just for warmth, not modesty) it should have been provided. I'm sure there were points when she was able to take her legs out of the stirrups and cover up with the gown, but there were also definitely points where she had to lie there in the stirrups between takes because her legs are up for the full scene so I'm sure they were up for much of the shoot.
Those of you quibbling over "oh she could have pulled her hospital gown down" or "she wasn't really nude, she was wearing clothes" just sound dumb. She's obviously nude and the position of her body would have made it impossible to fully cover up with her gown unless she was lying there holding the gown in place the entire time with her hands (and she probably had to do other things with her hands between takes, like review notes about the scene, drink from a water bottle, etc.).
Why didn't they just give her a sheet? Like this is not explained. What possible reason would the production have for not giving her something to cover up during the scene? She shouldn't have to prove that she needs one, it should just be provided.
Do you understand Blake's not actually giving birth? Its called movie making. That's not her nude belly. It's a thick, warm prosthetic torso. Do while she looks like she's naked, she's actually not.
Still legs spread with a tiny piece of fabric covering her labia while mimicking pushing on an open set, visible camera screens posting the uncut scenesz and regardless of whether she could move to close her legs or move the gown during the shot, nobody could be bothered to give her a coverup when she asked for one.
I am one hundred percent sure that the camera was not focused on her labia — for one thing the friend of the director actor would be blocking it, for the other, she wasn’t actually pushing a baby out and aiming a camera there would make it obvious, and lastly, this was a PG 13 movie. Again, your fiction reads well though.
Of course it wasn't -- she was wearing a strip of fabric over her genitals anyway. No one has suggested they tried to film her genitals.
That does not mean it wasn't uncomfortable to film a scene with no pants on and an actor you just met sitting inches from your vag. It would also be weird to constantly be moving your legs between takes and pulling down the gown and she shouldn't have to do that.
There's also no excuse for springing the nudity on her the day of the shoot and failing to have the intimacy coordinator on set, and also for not closing the set when one of your actors is not only partially nude but has let you know she's not totally comfortable with it.
Baldoni hasn't explained any of this. Why wasn't she given a sheet? Why didn't he raise the issue of nudity earlier? If he planned for Lively to be nude, why didn't he enlist the intimacy coordinator to be there and why didn't he make it a closed set?
I think if this is true, it could be a result of him being green (inexperienced) and less about him being a predator.
I do think a lot of the bad behavior Lively alleges was due to Baldoni being an inexperienced director and the production company just not having a lot of experience and being unprofessional. But that doesn't absolve him of liability if his behavior or the productions actions led to a hostile work environment. Like he doesn't have to be a predator to engage in sexual harassment if his ineptitude led to consistently inappropriate, invasive, sexualized behavior on set.
I worked for a time in the fitness industry, and one of the companies I worked for had this issue -- just incredibly poorly run by people who didn't have leadership/management experience. They mostly had good (or at least okay) intentions but their employment practices were awful. The fitness industry, like acting, is an industry where people might interact in a way that would be considered totally inappropriate in other setting but is normal in that industry -- people touching each other to adjust form, people wearing very little clothing and changing/showering at work, etc. The result of having a green and unprofessional management in an industry like that is that it gets bad very quickly. It also makes it very easy for someone who *is* a predator to do bad things without getting in trouble. I was groped by a colleague at that job and there was just no recourse and it was written off by higher ups because they had no formal HR, no workplace policy governing that kind of behavior (and certainly no training on what is and is not permitted). It was an unequivocal groping, not something that could be misinterpreted on my end (his hands were literally on my boobs and crotch) but because it was a workplace where people did sometimes touch each other in a way that elsewhere might be considered sexual (putting hands on someone's waist or midsection to address form), management believed it had been an accident and that he "didn't mean anything." I don't think all of those people were "predators" but the guy who groped me was and they made it extremely easy for him to get away with it.
That's what I think happened here. When you have a workplace where people might be nude or semi-nude, where part of their job might be to portray childbirth or sex, then you need to maintaining very high standards of professionalism and following protocols for maintaining consent and respect for everyone in the workplace. They did not do that and I think it resulted in a hostile work environment like the one I wound up working in. The fact that it was caused as much by ineptitude as bad intentions doesn't really make it any better. I think they are still liable for creating an unsafe, hostile work environment.
And it seems like we wouldn't have heard about any of this but for Baldoni's misguided smear attempt to "bury her" after the fact. Seems like she was going to look the other way and let it go until and keep it private until that happened, and then she came out guns blazing. Who wouldn't in her case?
Hard to say -- I really don't know what her intentions were prior to the summer PR campaign. It certainly didn't make it *less* likely that she would sue him. It's probably possible that if that had not happened and the film had been a success without all the online chatter about Lively, it might have been resolved more quietly.
This will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think situations like this could be resolved without litigation if people weren't so egotistical. Like there's a parallel universe where Baldoni was more responsive to Lively's concerns on set and sought to address them, and that results in Lively being more amenable to not only working with Baldoni but his vision for the movie, and Ryan Reynolds is never brought in to write scenes or do the final cut, and they promote the movie together without Baldoni trying to smear Lively online or Lively freezing him out and getting the rest of the cast to do so as well, and then there's no litigation.
But it all starts with people being willing to be self-critical, admit mistakes, apologize, and forgive. And I don't think the people involved in this situation have the ability. Baldoni strikes me as vain, oblivious, self-important, and obnoxious. Lively strikes me as the kind of person who, once she's decided she doesnt' like you, will just go nuclear until you are nothing. It's a terrible combination. I think Baldoni's more in the wrong here -- it really looks like he did some very skeevy, harassing stuff on set and he was the director and needed to take responsibility for the lack of professionalism -- but also Lively probably handled this in a way that maximized the conflict and now it's a death match. On the one hand, good for her for standing up for herself. On the other hand, I question whether anything good will come of this in the end because they are going scorched earth.
I disagree on how you view Baldoni. I don’t think he gives off this vibe at all. He seems pretty down to earth, sensitive and overall a good human which is why people are shocked at the allegations.
I guess he seems that way if you discount everything in Lively's complaint and the fact that the entire cast of the movie has come out in support of Lively. They were there.
I think I may not have written my response clear. What I was trying to articulate is that in the public overall Justin doesn’t have this reputation. I do think that most people would put those traits on Blake as she seems to have had the reputation of being self important and vain long before the allegations. I think people are genuinely shocked to hear these allegations simply due to the fact that Justin appeared to be one of the good guys. Now whether or not he is a good guy, I cannot answer. I was just shocked at how you saw him is all, but now I understand that you are viewing him through the lens of the lawsuit and not on anything outside of it.
Well, she is seeing him through the lens of the Blake’s lawsuit, but is willfully blind to his complaint against The NY Times, which raises serious issues about Blake’s credibility and motivation.
It really doesn't since he barely addressed most of her complaints. But keep harping on it.
He addressed her credibility or lack there of which goes to all her claims. If she is willing to edit texts to deliberately change their meaning and present them with no indication of such edits, why should we find her credible at all? And that’s a rhetorical question, because I know you will support her regardless of how much evidence piles up against her.
Lively didn't do that though. The NYT did that. And he's suing them for it! Good for him. But that argument doesn't have any impact on Lively's credibility -- she is not the one who decided how to present those texts.
And where did The NY Times get those texts? Lively and her publicist. You think it was The NY Times who sliced and diced them? Lively presented them that way, and The NY Times did not fully investigate her claims.
That sounds like a NYT problem.
Also NYT was able to independently verify the texts with Joneworks, the PR company that the Justin's team was working for at the time that the texts occurred. It is not clear to me they came from Lively's team -- they may have come directly from Jonesworks or come from both sources.
Interestingly, the NYT chose not to mention that the PR flaks were working for Jonesworks at the time, or mention Jonesworks at all. Or mention that the reason Jonesworks provided these texts (both to Lively's team AND to the NYT) is that they were discovered when Jonesworks launched a lawsuit against members of Baldoni PR team when they left Jonesworks to start their own company.
None of that has anything to do with Lively. I actually think Jonesworks fed the texts to the NYT specifically to discredit their former employees in a very public and embarrassing way right before Jonesworks sued them for breach of contract.
So no, I don't think Lively's team somehow stage managed all that. There are tons of competing interests at play. The NYT could had lots of opportunity to find and provide more context on the texts -- they didn't. They also could have given Baldoni's team time to respond -- they didn't. They also could have disclosed some of the broader context to how the texts came to be released so that readers would have a better sense of what was at play -- they didn't.
Lively's team, and certainly Lively herself, had nothing to do with any of that.
lol, she shared her draft complaint with the NYTimes.
Lively is naked below her boobs. There are multiple closeups of her belly and upper legs. Her legs are up in stirrups in a way that if she tried to pull that hospital gown over her lower half, it would ride up because her legs are up in the air.
It was a nude scene. If the actress filming that scene asked for a sheet between takes to cover up her lower body (even just for warmth, not modesty) it should have been provided. I'm sure there were points when she was able to take her legs out of the stirrups and cover up with the gown, but there were also definitely points where she had to lie there in the stirrups between takes because her legs are up for the full scene so I'm sure they were up for much of the shoot.
Those of you quibbling over "oh she could have pulled her hospital gown down" or "she wasn't really nude, she was wearing clothes" just sound dumb. She's obviously nude and the position of her body would have made it impossible to fully cover up with her gown unless she was lying there holding the gown in place the entire time with her hands (and she probably had to do other things with her hands between takes, like review notes about the scene, drink from a water bottle, etc.).
Why didn't they just give her a sheet? Like this is not explained. What possible reason would the production have for not giving her something to cover up during the scene? She shouldn't have to prove that she needs one, it should just be provided.
Do you understand Blake's not actually giving birth? Its called movie making. That's not her nude belly. It's a thick, warm prosthetic torso. Do while she looks like she's naked, she's actually not.
Still legs spread with a tiny piece of fabric covering her labia while mimicking pushing on an open set, visible camera screens posting the uncut scenesz and regardless of whether she could move to close her legs or move the gown during the shot, nobody could be bothered to give her a coverup when she asked for one.
I am one hundred percent sure that the camera was not focused on her labia — for one thing the friend of the director actor would be blocking it, for the other, she wasn’t actually pushing a baby out and aiming a camera there would make it obvious, and lastly, this was a PG 13 movie. Again, your fiction reads well though.
Of course it wasn't -- she was wearing a strip of fabric over her genitals anyway. No one has suggested they tried to film her genitals.
That does not mean it wasn't uncomfortable to film a scene with no pants on and an actor you just met sitting inches from your vag. It would also be weird to constantly be moving your legs between takes and pulling down the gown and she shouldn't have to do that.
There's also no excuse for springing the nudity on her the day of the shoot and failing to have the intimacy coordinator on set, and also for not closing the set when one of your actors is not only partially nude but has let you know she's not totally comfortable with it.
Baldoni hasn't explained any of this. Why wasn't she given a sheet? Why didn't he raise the issue of nudity earlier? If he planned for Lively to be nude, why didn't he enlist the intimacy coordinator to be there and why didn't he make it a closed set?
I think if this is true, it could be a result of him being green (inexperienced) and less about him being a predator.
I do think a lot of the bad behavior Lively alleges was due to Baldoni being an inexperienced director and the production company just not having a lot of experience and being unprofessional. But that doesn't absolve him of liability if his behavior or the productions actions led to a hostile work environment. Like he doesn't have to be a predator to engage in sexual harassment if his ineptitude led to consistently inappropriate, invasive, sexualized behavior on set.
I worked for a time in the fitness industry, and one of the companies I worked for had this issue -- just incredibly poorly run by people who didn't have leadership/management experience. They mostly had good (or at least okay) intentions but their employment practices were awful. The fitness industry, like acting, is an industry where people might interact in a way that would be considered totally inappropriate in other setting but is normal in that industry -- people touching each other to adjust form, people wearing very little clothing and changing/showering at work, etc. The result of having a green and unprofessional management in an industry like that is that it gets bad very quickly. It also makes it very easy for someone who *is* a predator to do bad things without getting in trouble. I was groped by a colleague at that job and there was just no recourse and it was written off by higher ups because they had no formal HR, no workplace policy governing that kind of behavior (and certainly no training on what is and is not permitted). It was an unequivocal groping, not something that could be misinterpreted on my end (his hands were literally on my boobs and crotch) but because it was a workplace where people did sometimes touch each other in a way that elsewhere might be considered sexual (putting hands on someone's waist or midsection to address form), management believed it had been an accident and that he "didn't mean anything." I don't think all of those people were "predators" but the guy who groped me was and they made it extremely easy for him to get away with it.
That's what I think happened here. When you have a workplace where people might be nude or semi-nude, where part of their job might be to portray childbirth or sex, then you need to maintaining very high standards of professionalism and following protocols for maintaining consent and respect for everyone in the workplace. They did not do that and I think it resulted in a hostile work environment like the one I wound up working in. The fact that it was caused as much by ineptitude as bad intentions doesn't really make it any better. I think they are still liable for creating an unsafe, hostile work environment.
And it seems like we wouldn't have heard about any of this but for Baldoni's misguided smear attempt to "bury her" after the fact. Seems like she was going to look the other way and let it go until and keep it private until that happened, and then she came out guns blazing. Who wouldn't in her case?
Hard to say -- I really don't know what her intentions were prior to the summer PR campaign. It certainly didn't make it *less* likely that she would sue him. It's probably possible that if that had not happened and the film had been a success without all the online chatter about Lively, it might have been resolved more quietly.
This will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think situations like this could be resolved without litigation if people weren't so egotistical. Like there's a parallel universe where Baldoni was more responsive to Lively's concerns on set and sought to address them, and that results in Lively being more amenable to not only working with Baldoni but his vision for the movie, and Ryan Reynolds is never brought in to write scenes or do the final cut, and they promote the movie together without Baldoni trying to smear Lively online or Lively freezing him out and getting the rest of the cast to do so as well, and then there's no litigation.
But it all starts with people being willing to be self-critical, admit mistakes, apologize, and forgive. And I don't think the people involved in this situation have the ability. Baldoni strikes me as vain, oblivious, self-important, and obnoxious. Lively strikes me as the kind of person who, once she's decided she doesnt' like you, will just go nuclear until you are nothing. It's a terrible combination. I think Baldoni's more in the wrong here -- it really looks like he did some very skeevy, harassing stuff on set and he was the director and needed to take responsibility for the lack of professionalism -- but also Lively probably handled this in a way that maximized the conflict and now it's a death match. On the one hand, good for her for standing up for herself. On the other hand, I question whether anything good will come of this in the end because they are going scorched earth.
I disagree on how you view Baldoni. I don’t think he gives off this vibe at all. He seems pretty down to earth, sensitive and overall a good human which is why people are shocked at the allegations.
I guess he seems that way if you discount everything in Lively's complaint and the fact that the entire cast of the movie has come out in support of Lively. They were there.
I think I may not have written my response clear. What I was trying to articulate is that in the public overall Justin doesn’t have this reputation. I do think that most people would put those traits on Blake as she seems to have had the reputation of being self important and vain long before the allegations. I think people are genuinely shocked to hear these allegations simply due to the fact that Justin appeared to be one of the good guys. Now whether or not he is a good guy, I cannot answer. I was just shocked at how you saw him is all, but now I understand that you are viewing him through the lens of the lawsuit and not on anything outside of it.
Well, she is seeing him through the lens of the Blake’s lawsuit, but is willfully blind to his complaint against The NY Times, which raises serious issues about Blake’s credibility and motivation.
It really doesn't since he barely addressed most of her complaints. But keep harping on it.
He addressed her credibility or lack there of which goes to all her claims. If she is willing to edit texts to deliberately change their meaning and present them with no indication of such edits, why should we find her credible at all? And that’s a rhetorical question, because I know you will support her regardless of how much evidence piles up against her.
Lively didn't do that though. The NYT did that. And he's suing them for it! Good for him. But that argument doesn't have any impact on Lively's credibility -- she is not the one who decided how to present those texts.
And where did The NY Times get those texts? Lively and her publicist. You think it was The NY Times who sliced and diced them? Lively presented them that way, and The NY Times did not fully investigate her claims.
That sounds like a NYT problem.
Also NYT was able to independently verify the texts with Joneworks, the PR company that the Justin's team was working for at the time that the texts occurred. It is not clear to me they came from Lively's team -- they may have come directly from Jonesworks or come from both sources.
Interestingly, the NYT chose not to mention that the PR flaks were working for Jonesworks at the time, or mention Jonesworks at all. Or mention that the reason Jonesworks provided these texts (both to Lively's team AND to the NYT) is that they were discovered when Jonesworks launched a lawsuit against members of Baldoni PR team when they left Jonesworks to start their own company.
None of that has anything to do with Lively. I actually think Jonesworks fed the texts to the NYT specifically to discredit their former employees in a very public and embarrassing way right before Jonesworks sued them for breach of contract.
So no, I don't think Lively's team somehow stage managed all that. There are tons of competing interests at play. The NYT could had lots of opportunity to find and provide more context on the texts -- they didn't. They also could have given Baldoni's team time to respond -- they didn't. They also could have disclosed some of the broader context to how the texts came to be released so that readers would have a better sense of what was at play -- they didn't.
Lively's team, and certainly Lively herself, had nothing to do with any of that.
Lively is naked below her boobs. There are multiple closeups of her belly and upper legs. Her legs are up in stirrups in a way that if she tried to pull that hospital gown over her lower half, it would ride up because her legs are up in the air.
It was a nude scene. If the actress filming that scene asked for a sheet between takes to cover up her lower body (even just for warmth, not modesty) it should have been provided. I'm sure there were points when she was able to take her legs out of the stirrups and cover up with the gown, but there were also definitely points where she had to lie there in the stirrups between takes because her legs are up for the full scene so I'm sure they were up for much of the shoot.
Those of you quibbling over "oh she could have pulled her hospital gown down" or "she wasn't really nude, she was wearing clothes" just sound dumb. She's obviously nude and the position of her body would have made it impossible to fully cover up with her gown unless she was lying there holding the gown in place the entire time with her hands (and she probably had to do other things with her hands between takes, like review notes about the scene, drink from a water bottle, etc.).
Why didn't they just give her a sheet? Like this is not explained. What possible reason would the production have for not giving her something to cover up during the scene? She shouldn't have to prove that she needs one, it should just be provided.
Do you understand Blake's not actually giving birth? Its called movie making. That's not her nude belly. It's a thick, warm prosthetic torso. Do while she looks like she's naked, she's actually not.
Still legs spread with a tiny piece of fabric covering her labia while mimicking pushing on an open set, visible camera screens posting the uncut scenesz and regardless of whether she could move to close her legs or move the gown during the shot, nobody could be bothered to give her a coverup when she asked for one.
I am one hundred percent sure that the camera was not focused on her labia — for one thing the friend of the director actor would be blocking it, for the other, she wasn’t actually pushing a baby out and aiming a camera there would make it obvious, and lastly, this was a PG 13 movie. Again, your fiction reads well though.
Of course it wasn't -- she was wearing a strip of fabric over her genitals anyway. No one has suggested they tried to film her genitals.
That does not mean it wasn't uncomfortable to film a scene with no pants on and an actor you just met sitting inches from your vag. It would also be weird to constantly be moving your legs between takes and pulling down the gown and she shouldn't have to do that.
There's also no excuse for springing the nudity on her the day of the shoot and failing to have the intimacy coordinator on set, and also for not closing the set when one of your actors is not only partially nude but has let you know she's not totally comfortable with it.
Baldoni hasn't explained any of this. Why wasn't she given a sheet? Why didn't he raise the issue of nudity earlier? If he planned for Lively to be nude, why didn't he enlist the intimacy coordinator to be there and why didn't he make it a closed set?
I think if this is true, it could be a result of him being green (inexperienced) and less about him being a predator.
I do think a lot of the bad behavior Lively alleges was due to Baldoni being an inexperienced director and the production company just not having a lot of experience and being unprofessional. But that doesn't absolve him of liability if his behavior or the productions actions led to a hostile work environment. Like he doesn't have to be a predator to engage in sexual harassment if his ineptitude led to consistently inappropriate, invasive, sexualized behavior on set.
I worked for a time in the fitness industry, and one of the companies I worked for had this issue -- just incredibly poorly run by people who didn't have leadership/management experience. They mostly had good (or at least okay) intentions but their employment practices were awful. The fitness industry, like acting, is an industry where people might interact in a way that would be considered totally inappropriate in other setting but is normal in that industry -- people touching each other to adjust form, people wearing very little clothing and changing/showering at work, etc. The result of having a green and unprofessional management in an industry like that is that it gets bad very quickly. It also makes it very easy for someone who *is* a predator to do bad things without getting in trouble. I was groped by a colleague at that job and there was just no recourse and it was written off by higher ups because they had no formal HR, no workplace policy governing that kind of behavior (and certainly no training on what is and is not permitted). It was an unequivocal groping, not something that could be misinterpreted on my end (his hands were literally on my boobs and crotch) but because it was a workplace where people did sometimes touch each other in a way that elsewhere might be considered sexual (putting hands on someone's waist or midsection to address form), management believed it had been an accident and that he "didn't mean anything." I don't think all of those people were "predators" but the guy who groped me was and they made it extremely easy for him to get away with it.
That's what I think happened here. When you have a workplace where people might be nude or semi-nude, where part of their job might be to portray childbirth or sex, then you need to maintaining very high standards of professionalism and following protocols for maintaining consent and respect for everyone in the workplace. They did not do that and I think it resulted in a hostile work environment like the one I wound up working in. The fact that it was caused as much by ineptitude as bad intentions doesn't really make it any better. I think they are still liable for creating an unsafe, hostile work environment.
And it seems like we wouldn't have heard about any of this but for Baldoni's misguided smear attempt to "bury her" after the fact. Seems like she was going to look the other way and let it go until and keep it private until that happened, and then she came out guns blazing. Who wouldn't in her case?
Hard to say -- I really don't know what her intentions were prior to the summer PR campaign. It certainly didn't make it *less* likely that she would sue him. It's probably possible that if that had not happened and the film had been a success without all the online chatter about Lively, it might have been resolved more quietly.
This will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think situations like this could be resolved without litigation if people weren't so egotistical. Like there's a parallel universe where Baldoni was more responsive to Lively's concerns on set and sought to address them, and that results in Lively being more amenable to not only working with Baldoni but his vision for the movie, and Ryan Reynolds is never brought in to write scenes or do the final cut, and they promote the movie together without Baldoni trying to smear Lively online or Lively freezing him out and getting the rest of the cast to do so as well, and then there's no litigation.
But it all starts with people being willing to be self-critical, admit mistakes, apologize, and forgive. And I don't think the people involved in this situation have the ability. Baldoni strikes me as vain, oblivious, self-important, and obnoxious. Lively strikes me as the kind of person who, once she's decided she doesnt' like you, will just go nuclear until you are nothing. It's a terrible combination. I think Baldoni's more in the wrong here -- it really looks like he did some very skeevy, harassing stuff on set and he was the director and needed to take responsibility for the lack of professionalism -- but also Lively probably handled this in a way that maximized the conflict and now it's a death match. On the one hand, good for her for standing up for herself. On the other hand, I question whether anything good will come of this in the end because they are going scorched earth.
I disagree on how you view Baldoni. I don’t think he gives off this vibe at all. He seems pretty down to earth, sensitive and overall a good human which is why people are shocked at the allegations.
I guess he seems that way if you discount everything in Lively's complaint and the fact that the entire cast of the movie has come out in support of Lively. They were there.
I think I may not have written my response clear. What I was trying to articulate is that in the public overall Justin doesn’t have this reputation. I do think that most people would put those traits on Blake as she seems to have had the reputation of being self important and vain long before the allegations. I think people are genuinely shocked to hear these allegations simply due to the fact that Justin appeared to be one of the good guys. Now whether or not he is a good guy, I cannot answer. I was just shocked at how you saw him is all, but now I understand that you are viewing him through the lens of the lawsuit and not on anything outside of it.
Well, she is seeing him through the lens of the Blake’s lawsuit, but is willfully blind to his complaint against The NY Times, which raises serious issues about Blake’s credibility and motivation.
It really doesn't since he barely addressed most of her complaints. But keep harping on it.
He addressed her credibility or lack there of which goes to all her claims. If she is willing to edit texts to deliberately change their meaning and present them with no indication of such edits, why should we find her credible at all? And that’s a rhetorical question, because I know you will support her regardless of how much evidence piles up against her.
Lively didn't do that though. The NYT did that. And he's suing them for it! Good for him. But that argument doesn't have any impact on Lively's credibility -- she is not the one who decided how to present those texts.
And where did The NY Times get those texts? Lively and her publicist. You think it was The NY Times who sliced and diced them? Lively presented them that way, and The NY Times did not fully investigate her claims.
That sounds like a NYT problem.
Also NYT was able to independently verify the texts with Joneworks, the PR company that the Justin's team was working for at the time that the texts occurred. It is not clear to me they came from Lively's team -- they may have come directly from Jonesworks or come from both sources.
Interestingly, the NYT chose not to mention that the PR flaks were working for Jonesworks at the time, or mention Jonesworks at all. Or mention that the reason Jonesworks provided these texts (both to Lively's team AND to the NYT) is that they were discovered when Jonesworks launched a lawsuit against members of Baldoni PR team when they left Jonesworks to start their own company.
None of that has anything to do with Lively. I actually think Jonesworks fed the texts to the NYT specifically to discredit their former employees in a very public and embarrassing way right before Jonesworks sued them for breach of contract.
So no, I don't think Lively's team somehow stage managed all that. There are tons of competing interests at play. The NYT could had lots of opportunity to find and provide more context on the texts -- they didn't. They also could have given Baldoni's team time to respond -- they didn't. They also could have disclosed some of the broader context to how the texts came to be released so that readers would have a better sense of what was at play -- they didn't.
Lively's team, and certainly Lively herself, had nothing to do with any of that.
And you know this exactly how?
Bumping. Nothing like this is any of the NY Time’s articles. So who told you?
Lively is naked below her boobs. There are multiple closeups of her belly and upper legs. Her legs are up in stirrups in a way that if she tried to pull that hospital gown over her lower half, it would ride up because her legs are up in the air.
It was a nude scene. If the actress filming that scene asked for a sheet between takes to cover up her lower body (even just for warmth, not modesty) it should have been provided. I'm sure there were points when she was able to take her legs out of the stirrups and cover up with the gown, but there were also definitely points where she had to lie there in the stirrups between takes because her legs are up for the full scene so I'm sure they were up for much of the shoot.
Those of you quibbling over "oh she could have pulled her hospital gown down" or "she wasn't really nude, she was wearing clothes" just sound dumb. She's obviously nude and the position of her body would have made it impossible to fully cover up with her gown unless she was lying there holding the gown in place the entire time with her hands (and she probably had to do other things with her hands between takes, like review notes about the scene, drink from a water bottle, etc.).
Why didn't they just give her a sheet? Like this is not explained. What possible reason would the production have for not giving her something to cover up during the scene? She shouldn't have to prove that she needs one, it should just be provided.
Do you understand Blake's not actually giving birth? Its called movie making. That's not her nude belly. It's a thick, warm prosthetic torso. Do while she looks like she's naked, she's actually not.
Still legs spread with a tiny piece of fabric covering her labia while mimicking pushing on an open set, visible camera screens posting the uncut scenesz and regardless of whether she could move to close her legs or move the gown during the shot, nobody could be bothered to give her a coverup when she asked for one.
I am one hundred percent sure that the camera was not focused on her labia — for one thing the friend of the director actor would be blocking it, for the other, she wasn’t actually pushing a baby out and aiming a camera there would make it obvious, and lastly, this was a PG 13 movie. Again, your fiction reads well though.
Of course it wasn't -- she was wearing a strip of fabric over her genitals anyway. No one has suggested they tried to film her genitals.
That does not mean it wasn't uncomfortable to film a scene with no pants on and an actor you just met sitting inches from your vag. It would also be weird to constantly be moving your legs between takes and pulling down the gown and she shouldn't have to do that.
There's also no excuse for springing the nudity on her the day of the shoot and failing to have the intimacy coordinator on set, and also for not closing the set when one of your actors is not only partially nude but has let you know she's not totally comfortable with it.
Baldoni hasn't explained any of this. Why wasn't she given a sheet? Why didn't he raise the issue of nudity earlier? If he planned for Lively to be nude, why didn't he enlist the intimacy coordinator to be there and why didn't he make it a closed set?
I think if this is true, it could be a result of him being green (inexperienced) and less about him being a predator.
I do think a lot of the bad behavior Lively alleges was due to Baldoni being an inexperienced director and the production company just not having a lot of experience and being unprofessional. But that doesn't absolve him of liability if his behavior or the productions actions led to a hostile work environment. Like he doesn't have to be a predator to engage in sexual harassment if his ineptitude led to consistently inappropriate, invasive, sexualized behavior on set.
I worked for a time in the fitness industry, and one of the companies I worked for had this issue -- just incredibly poorly run by people who didn't have leadership/management experience. They mostly had good (or at least okay) intentions but their employment practices were awful. The fitness industry, like acting, is an industry where people might interact in a way that would be considered totally inappropriate in other setting but is normal in that industry -- people touching each other to adjust form, people wearing very little clothing and changing/showering at work, etc. The result of having a green and unprofessional management in an industry like that is that it gets bad very quickly. It also makes it very easy for someone who *is* a predator to do bad things without getting in trouble. I was groped by a colleague at that job and there was just no recourse and it was written off by higher ups because they had no formal HR, no workplace policy governing that kind of behavior (and certainly no training on what is and is not permitted). It was an unequivocal groping, not something that could be misinterpreted on my end (his hands were literally on my boobs and crotch) but because it was a workplace where people did sometimes touch each other in a way that elsewhere might be considered sexual (putting hands on someone's waist or midsection to address form), management believed it had been an accident and that he "didn't mean anything." I don't think all of those people were "predators" but the guy who groped me was and they made it extremely easy for him to get away with it.
That's what I think happened here. When you have a workplace where people might be nude or semi-nude, where part of their job might be to portray childbirth or sex, then you need to maintaining very high standards of professionalism and following protocols for maintaining consent and respect for everyone in the workplace. They did not do that and I think it resulted in a hostile work environment like the one I wound up working in. The fact that it was caused as much by ineptitude as bad intentions doesn't really make it any better. I think they are still liable for creating an unsafe, hostile work environment.
And it seems like we wouldn't have heard about any of this but for Baldoni's misguided smear attempt to "bury her" after the fact. Seems like she was going to look the other way and let it go until and keep it private until that happened, and then she came out guns blazing. Who wouldn't in her case?
Hard to say -- I really don't know what her intentions were prior to the summer PR campaign. It certainly didn't make it *less* likely that she would sue him. It's probably possible that if that had not happened and the film had been a success without all the online chatter about Lively, it might have been resolved more quietly.
This will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think situations like this could be resolved without litigation if people weren't so egotistical. Like there's a parallel universe where Baldoni was more responsive to Lively's concerns on set and sought to address them, and that results in Lively being more amenable to not only working with Baldoni but his vision for the movie, and Ryan Reynolds is never brought in to write scenes or do the final cut, and they promote the movie together without Baldoni trying to smear Lively online or Lively freezing him out and getting the rest of the cast to do so as well, and then there's no litigation.
But it all starts with people being willing to be self-critical, admit mistakes, apologize, and forgive. And I don't think the people involved in this situation have the ability. Baldoni strikes me as vain, oblivious, self-important, and obnoxious. Lively strikes me as the kind of person who, once she's decided she doesnt' like you, will just go nuclear until you are nothing. It's a terrible combination. I think Baldoni's more in the wrong here -- it really looks like he did some very skeevy, harassing stuff on set and he was the director and needed to take responsibility for the lack of professionalism -- but also Lively probably handled this in a way that maximized the conflict and now it's a death match. On the one hand, good for her for standing up for herself. On the other hand, I question whether anything good will come of this in the end because they are going scorched earth.
I disagree on how you view Baldoni. I don’t think he gives off this vibe at all. He seems pretty down to earth, sensitive and overall a good human which is why people are shocked at the allegations.
I guess he seems that way if you discount everything in Lively's complaint and the fact that the entire cast of the movie has come out in support of Lively. They were there.
I think I may not have written my response clear. What I was trying to articulate is that in the public overall Justin doesn’t have this reputation. I do think that most people would put those traits on Blake as she seems to have had the reputation of being self important and vain long before the allegations. I think people are genuinely shocked to hear these allegations simply due to the fact that Justin appeared to be one of the good guys. Now whether or not he is a good guy, I cannot answer. I was just shocked at how you saw him is all, but now I understand that you are viewing him through the lens of the lawsuit and not on anything outside of it.
Well, she is seeing him through the lens of the Blake’s lawsuit, but is willfully blind to his complaint against The NY Times, which raises serious issues about Blake’s credibility and motivation.
It really doesn't since he barely addressed most of her complaints. But keep harping on it.
He addressed her credibility or lack there of which goes to all her claims. If she is willing to edit texts to deliberately change their meaning and present them with no indication of such edits, why should we find her credible at all? And that’s a rhetorical question, because I know you will support her regardless of how much evidence piles up against her.
Lively didn't do that though. The NYT did that. And he's suing them for it! Good for him. But that argument doesn't have any impact on Lively's credibility -- she is not the one who decided how to present those texts.
And where did The NY Times get those texts? Lively and her publicist. You think it was The NY Times who sliced and diced them? Lively presented them that way, and The NY Times did not fully investigate her claims.
That sounds like a NYT problem.
Also NYT was able to independently verify the texts with Joneworks, the PR company that the Justin's team was working for at the time that the texts occurred. It is not clear to me they came from Lively's team -- they may have come directly from Jonesworks or come from both sources.
Interestingly, the NYT chose not to mention that the PR flaks were working for Jonesworks at the time, or mention Jonesworks at all. Or mention that the reason Jonesworks provided these texts (both to Lively's team AND to the NYT) is that they were discovered when Jonesworks launched a lawsuit against members of Baldoni PR team when they left Jonesworks to start their own company.
None of that has anything to do with Lively. I actually think Jonesworks fed the texts to the NYT specifically to discredit their former employees in a very public and embarrassing way right before Jonesworks sued them for breach of contract.
So no, I don't think Lively's team somehow stage managed all that. There are tons of competing interests at play. The NYT could had lots of opportunity to find and provide more context on the texts -- they didn't. They also could have given Baldoni's team time to respond -- they didn't. They also could have disclosed some of the broader context to how the texts came to be released so that readers would have a better sense of what was at play -- they didn't.
Lively's team, and certainly Lively herself, had nothing to do with any of that.
And you know this exactly how?
Bumping. Nothing like this is any of the NY Time’s articles. So who told you?
Hollywood/media coverage on Puck is good on these issues. Listen to the podcasts The Town and The Powers That Be. Good reporters who know the industry who can speak knowledgeably about it. The Powers That Be has an episode out today about the whole thing I haven't listened to yet but older episodes of The Town also talk about it. They also have reporting on their site but they are annoyingly subscription only so I can't share those. But the podcasts are free to the public.
I got turned onto them because I listened to their politics coverage during the election and really came to respect, appreciate their reporting. It's a rare news outlet that has dogged reporting and seems to call it like it is.
Lively is naked below her boobs. There are multiple closeups of her belly and upper legs. Her legs are up in stirrups in a way that if she tried to pull that hospital gown over her lower half, it would ride up because her legs are up in the air.
It was a nude scene. If the actress filming that scene asked for a sheet between takes to cover up her lower body (even just for warmth, not modesty) it should have been provided. I'm sure there were points when she was able to take her legs out of the stirrups and cover up with the gown, but there were also definitely points where she had to lie there in the stirrups between takes because her legs are up for the full scene so I'm sure they were up for much of the shoot.
Those of you quibbling over "oh she could have pulled her hospital gown down" or "she wasn't really nude, she was wearing clothes" just sound dumb. She's obviously nude and the position of her body would have made it impossible to fully cover up with her gown unless she was lying there holding the gown in place the entire time with her hands (and she probably had to do other things with her hands between takes, like review notes about the scene, drink from a water bottle, etc.).
Why didn't they just give her a sheet? Like this is not explained. What possible reason would the production have for not giving her something to cover up during the scene? She shouldn't have to prove that she needs one, it should just be provided.
Do you understand Blake's not actually giving birth? Its called movie making. That's not her nude belly. It's a thick, warm prosthetic torso. Do while she looks like she's naked, she's actually not.
Still legs spread with a tiny piece of fabric covering her labia while mimicking pushing on an open set, visible camera screens posting the uncut scenesz and regardless of whether she could move to close her legs or move the gown during the shot, nobody could be bothered to give her a coverup when she asked for one.
I am one hundred percent sure that the camera was not focused on her labia — for one thing the friend of the director actor would be blocking it, for the other, she wasn’t actually pushing a baby out and aiming a camera there would make it obvious, and lastly, this was a PG 13 movie. Again, your fiction reads well though.
Of course it wasn't -- she was wearing a strip of fabric over her genitals anyway. No one has suggested they tried to film her genitals.
That does not mean it wasn't uncomfortable to film a scene with no pants on and an actor you just met sitting inches from your vag. It would also be weird to constantly be moving your legs between takes and pulling down the gown and she shouldn't have to do that.
There's also no excuse for springing the nudity on her the day of the shoot and failing to have the intimacy coordinator on set, and also for not closing the set when one of your actors is not only partially nude but has let you know she's not totally comfortable with it.
Baldoni hasn't explained any of this. Why wasn't she given a sheet? Why didn't he raise the issue of nudity earlier? If he planned for Lively to be nude, why didn't he enlist the intimacy coordinator to be there and why didn't he make it a closed set?
I think if this is true, it could be a result of him being green (inexperienced) and less about him being a predator.
I do think a lot of the bad behavior Lively alleges was due to Baldoni being an inexperienced director and the production company just not having a lot of experience and being unprofessional. But that doesn't absolve him of liability if his behavior or the productions actions led to a hostile work environment. Like he doesn't have to be a predator to engage in sexual harassment if his ineptitude led to consistently inappropriate, invasive, sexualized behavior on set.
I worked for a time in the fitness industry, and one of the companies I worked for had this issue -- just incredibly poorly run by people who didn't have leadership/management experience. They mostly had good (or at least okay) intentions but their employment practices were awful. The fitness industry, like acting, is an industry where people might interact in a way that would be considered totally inappropriate in other setting but is normal in that industry -- people touching each other to adjust form, people wearing very little clothing and changing/showering at work, etc. The result of having a green and unprofessional management in an industry like that is that it gets bad very quickly. It also makes it very easy for someone who *is* a predator to do bad things without getting in trouble. I was groped by a colleague at that job and there was just no recourse and it was written off by higher ups because they had no formal HR, no workplace policy governing that kind of behavior (and certainly no training on what is and is not permitted). It was an unequivocal groping, not something that could be misinterpreted on my end (his hands were literally on my boobs and crotch) but because it was a workplace where people did sometimes touch each other in a way that elsewhere might be considered sexual (putting hands on someone's waist or midsection to address form), management believed it had been an accident and that he "didn't mean anything." I don't think all of those people were "predators" but the guy who groped me was and they made it extremely easy for him to get away with it.
That's what I think happened here. When you have a workplace where people might be nude or semi-nude, where part of their job might be to portray childbirth or sex, then you need to maintaining very high standards of professionalism and following protocols for maintaining consent and respect for everyone in the workplace. They did not do that and I think it resulted in a hostile work environment like the one I wound up working in. The fact that it was caused as much by ineptitude as bad intentions doesn't really make it any better. I think they are still liable for creating an unsafe, hostile work environment.
And it seems like we wouldn't have heard about any of this but for Baldoni's misguided smear attempt to "bury her" after the fact. Seems like she was going to look the other way and let it go until and keep it private until that happened, and then she came out guns blazing. Who wouldn't in her case?
Hard to say -- I really don't know what her intentions were prior to the summer PR campaign. It certainly didn't make it *less* likely that she would sue him. It's probably possible that if that had not happened and the film had been a success without all the online chatter about Lively, it might have been resolved more quietly.
This will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think situations like this could be resolved without litigation if people weren't so egotistical. Like there's a parallel universe where Baldoni was more responsive to Lively's concerns on set and sought to address them, and that results in Lively being more amenable to not only working with Baldoni but his vision for the movie, and Ryan Reynolds is never brought in to write scenes or do the final cut, and they promote the movie together without Baldoni trying to smear Lively online or Lively freezing him out and getting the rest of the cast to do so as well, and then there's no litigation.
But it all starts with people being willing to be self-critical, admit mistakes, apologize, and forgive. And I don't think the people involved in this situation have the ability. Baldoni strikes me as vain, oblivious, self-important, and obnoxious. Lively strikes me as the kind of person who, once she's decided she doesnt' like you, will just go nuclear until you are nothing. It's a terrible combination. I think Baldoni's more in the wrong here -- it really looks like he did some very skeevy, harassing stuff on set and he was the director and needed to take responsibility for the lack of professionalism -- but also Lively probably handled this in a way that maximized the conflict and now it's a death match. On the one hand, good for her for standing up for herself. On the other hand, I question whether anything good will come of this in the end because they are going scorched earth.
I disagree on how you view Baldoni. I don’t think he gives off this vibe at all. He seems pretty down to earth, sensitive and overall a good human which is why people are shocked at the allegations.
I guess he seems that way if you discount everything in Lively's complaint and the fact that the entire cast of the movie has come out in support of Lively. They were there.
I think I may not have written my response clear. What I was trying to articulate is that in the public overall Justin doesn’t have this reputation. I do think that most people would put those traits on Blake as she seems to have had the reputation of being self important and vain long before the allegations. I think people are genuinely shocked to hear these allegations simply due to the fact that Justin appeared to be one of the good guys. Now whether or not he is a good guy, I cannot answer. I was just shocked at how you saw him is all, but now I understand that you are viewing him through the lens of the lawsuit and not on anything outside of it.
Well, she is seeing him through the lens of the Blake’s lawsuit, but is willfully blind to his complaint against The NY Times, which raises serious issues about Blake’s credibility and motivation.
It really doesn't since he barely addressed most of her complaints. But keep harping on it.
He addressed her credibility or lack there of which goes to all her claims. If she is willing to edit texts to deliberately change their meaning and present them with no indication of such edits, why should we find her credible at all? And that’s a rhetorical question, because I know you will support her regardless of how much evidence piles up against her.
Lively didn't do that though. The NYT did that. And he's suing them for it! Good for him. But that argument doesn't have any impact on Lively's credibility -- she is not the one who decided how to present those texts.
And where did The NY Times get those texts? Lively and her publicist. You think it was The NY Times who sliced and diced them? Lively presented them that way, and The NY Times did not fully investigate her claims.
That sounds like a NYT problem.
Also NYT was able to independently verify the texts with Joneworks, the PR company that the Justin's team was working for at the time that the texts occurred. It is not clear to me they came from Lively's team -- they may have come directly from Jonesworks or come from both sources.
Interestingly, the NYT chose not to mention that the PR flaks were working for Jonesworks at the time, or mention Jonesworks at all. Or mention that the reason Jonesworks provided these texts (both to Lively's team AND to the NYT) is that they were discovered when Jonesworks launched a lawsuit against members of Baldoni PR team when they left Jonesworks to start their own company.
None of that has anything to do with Lively. I actually think Jonesworks fed the texts to the NYT specifically to discredit their former employees in a very public and embarrassing way right before Jonesworks sued them for breach of contract.
So no, I don't think Lively's team somehow stage managed all that. There are tons of competing interests at play. The NYT could had lots of opportunity to find and provide more context on the texts -- they didn't. They also could have given Baldoni's team time to respond -- they didn't. They also could have disclosed some of the broader context to how the texts came to be released so that readers would have a better sense of what was at play -- they didn't.
Lively's team, and certainly Lively herself, had nothing to do with any of that.
lol, she shared her draft complaint with the NYTimes.
So? Her team wanted them to report on it and wanted to get ahead of the story. That is their job. Also it's not like Lively showed up at the Times with a copy of her self-drafted complaint. Her PR team reached out to them.
Just because a PR firm contacts you with a scoop on their client's soon-to-be filed lawsuit does not mean that the newspaper doesn't have an obligation to research the claims. And they also didn't have to present her claims as fact. They failed to give Baldoni sufficient time to respond and they did a poor job of framing the story. That's the paper's fault.
Ironically, while I'm sure in the moment Lively's team was happy with the way it was covered, I think in the end it hurt them and they would have been better off if the Times had been more restrained and even in their coverage. But none of that was Lively's decision and she didn't draft those articles. It's not her fault that the Times did their jobs poorly.
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