Reply to Lively/Baldoni Lawsuit Part 2

Forum Index » Entertainment and Pop Culture

Reply to "Lively/Baldoni Lawsuit Part 2"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So I don't think Blake was sexually harassed. But one question I keep coming back to is: Did she lie about sexual harassment, knowing that she wasn't? Or does she personally believe she actually was sexually harassed?

It's hard to believe the latter based on the way she and Ryan have treated this whole situation (Blake kissing Justin unscripted, Ryan making jokes about Justin, Blake being so flippant about domestic abuse in interviews).

But she did ostensibly get so bothered about Justin at one point that she and Ryan came up with that list and Ryan berated Justin over it. And it's hard for me to wrap my head around her being a complete sociopathic liar.

Does anyone have a good unified theory explaining all of this?[/quote]

I have a theory. I don’t think this was premeditated. I think Blake and Justin didn’t get along and Blake used her power to be a big a-hole. It all would’ve been fine but SJ showed her those texts and Blake really thought the WF parties were trying to smear here. Blake then went to her lawyers and they likely explained to her that retaliation while it sucks is not actionable unless tied to protected activity. Enter the SH. That’s why the SH never made sense. They were cobbling together any minor example they could think of to try to fit the definition of pervasive to give their retaliation claim legs, which it just doesn’t have without SH. [/quote]

This is more or less what I've always thought. I do think she must have been legitimately annoyed during filming. I can see her being the type that would be like "I can say sexy, but if you say it to me, I'm offended." I think something happened enough that she was refusing to come back to the set unless they signed that demand letter with the 17 points. I know she's known as difficult, but I've never heard about her, or any other actress, going that far as to get lawyers involved before she'll continue filming. I will accept that she, subjectively, must have felt uncomfortable to go that far. (but does not IMO meet the reasonable juror, objective SH standard based on what we've seen). Wayfarer has a good argument that whatever it was, they remediated it because there were zero incidents during the second half when all the intimate scenes were filmed, and that's how it's supposed to work... you're uncomfortable with some minor comments and actions like hugging, you go to HR, and the behaviors stop.

Then she has a slew of bad press and I'm sure many actors have had feelings like "someone is out to get me" but they will never know for sure. In her case Abel got sloppy, and Jones gets actual texts of someone saying "we can't write we want to destroy her." She gets super upset and wants to sue. There's zero evidence they published anything defamatory about her, so the only way for the boosting of negative stories and comments to be illegal is for it to be retaliation, and then it was a matter of having to really dig down and recast these rather mundane interactions as severe and pervasive SH. And it certainly was very compelling when written out in her CRD, but with video, it just falls apart.

[/quote]

I think the problem with this is that if there is evidence that they sought to discredit Lively in the press specifically to undermine her if she ever spoke up about the problems on set during the first part of filming, that looks retaliatory. And is actually very in keeping with why retaliation laws even exist, because this has long been a problem for people who experience sexual harassment at work. A person gets harassed at work, they report it, the employer bad mouths the employee all over town so no one believes them.

I don't know if Lively was SHed but I do think she believed herself to be. Most companies understand that in that situation, you have to be careful about how you treat an employee lodging harassment allegations specifically to avoid a retaliation claim. It is often one of the first things an HR professional will tell the employer in these situations -- do not discuss this matter with anyone, and do not discuss the employee with anyone, and especially do not say negative things about this employee to anyone. It's like Rule #1.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics