Reply to Lively/Baldoni Lawsuit Part 2

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To the post above, it’s fair to say Justin and Jamey made a lot of mistakes. I would likely find them annoying and I don’t dispute they were clueless and should have changed course.

But I also don’t believe they deserve this lawsuit and the article based on the evidence I have seen and I am pretty convinced no matter what Blake and Ryan were going to seek to undermine them to gain the rights to the sequel. Justin had bought the rights from Colleen and yet Colleen texted her friend “when Blake and I do the sequel.” So I do think that was the plan.

I don’t like that she was calling him a dufus and a clown before ever setting foot on set or that she was scheming with Taylor so early on. I don’t like that she refused to sigh a contract and used that as leverage to constantly bail on the movie no less than 10 times.

I also think Sony made a lot of mistakes and look really bad. They had 2 female senior producers on set every day and yet there might be SH?

And then when the movie made them 350 million - the head of the Sony Pictures called Blake epic level stupid and callously said she’d never work again.

If it was found that there was SH, Sony was on set every day and watching every daily and yet they called Blake a terrorist and accused her of creating drama. 
[/quote]

Real question: did you read the parts of Jamey Heath's depo where he talked about who was in charge on set, and how he thought HR issues should be handled during filming?[/quote]

Why don’t you calm down and stop acting like I have a real stake in this - I really don’t care. I was simply pointing out that Sony is looking bad in all this. They certainly did not expect those texts and  emails to come out, did they?

WF may have been in charge and the New York Times article made it seem like Sony was just a distributor and not really involved. We now know they were intimately involved. Having two senior producers onset every day. Being CCed on every piece of correspondence Blake’s lawyers were sending.

That’s the only point I was raising. Sony had a leak about 15 years ago that was humiliating for them. And here we are again reading the head of Sony pictures blunt emails about how he thinks Blake lively is stupid and she’ll never work again.

And how they disregarded any complaints of sexual harassment because they were obsessed with Blake‘s weight. I don’t know why she blamed Justin for that. It was the head of Sony pictures who said she looked bad and it was one of the senior producers saying don’t worry we will reshoot when she loses the baby weight.

Either Sony sucks and they’re really bad at their jobs to let it get this far and now have a huge headache of having their emails and texts out in public as well as having executives take up time to be deposed and things or they had no ideas this was coming, or probably both. No company wants that so they did open themselves up for that and I’m betting they might have some safeguards in place to avoid this kind of thing in the future, but who knows.

Conversely, they probably never thought it was going to get this far and they probably see this stuff every day on set and didn’t expect a times article and a lawsuit.

Either way they screwed themselves. I doubt, after seeing people magazine featuring head of Sony pictures calling Blake epic level stupid and having Ryan Reynolds called two of their executives “in effectual elderly people who have no idea what’s going on”….they are taking much comfort that you think it was Wayfares job or problem and not theirs - because it has became their problem.

They’re a huge company and they were caught flat footed.  I’m betting heads are rolling and they’re not saying well great job everybody this was WF fault. [/quote]

Whoa, what part of my single line post was not calm? I was just wondering if you had read those parts of Heath's depo. Did you?[/quote]

Yes. I understand that it was Wayfares role to handle HR concerns. That woefully misses the point of what happened.

When there is a crisis like this in corporate America, it does Sony little good to say well that was WF’s job. Were Sony executives deposed and may some of them have to come testify in court if this goes to trial? Yes. Did a lot of Sony’s texts and emails that they would not want the public to see get blasted out in People magazine and other media outlets? Yes. Were Sony executives humiliated by being insulted by Ryan Reynolds for all the world to see? Yes.

You can say it was Wayfares responsibility to contain the situation and that their HR people failed at their job, but the damage to Sony is still done.

Typically when a crisis like this happens in a company, it’s not good enough for people to say well, that was someone else’s job. Sony has had to spend money and resources cleaning up this mess, it’s been a huge distraction for their executives, and they’ve suffered reputational damage. It’s little comfort that it was wayfarers fault. And in the future, you can bet they’re putting safeguards in place so that they’re not letting some independent studio or any other business partner trash their reputation, cost them money, and create such a headache. [/quote]

Okay.

So the reason I asked if you'd read Heath's deposition is because I was really surprised and frustrated by Heath's responses to questions about how HR worked on the film and how he thought HR issues should be addressed. When asked who he thought cast and crew should go to with HR concerns, he said he felt Alex Sachs, or maybe the first AD, would be appropriate, but he honestly didn't know. When told that Alex Sachs had testified that Heath is who she would have gone to with HR issues, he was surprised to hear that. He also stated that he believed there was a hotline people could contact with HR concerns, but when asked if Wayfarer or the film LLC had paid for and set up a hotline, he said he was not aware of one.

From an employment law perspective, this is negligence at a minimum. It also undercuts the argument that Blake failed to report issues as they arose -- she absolutely made Sachs and Heath (and Baldoni and Ange Giannetti) aware of her concerns. But none of them felt they were in charge. Again, this is negligence. And IME, when employers are *this* negligent about basic HR, it makes it much easier for other employment law issues, including harassment, to arise. Because there are no adults in the room who will step in and address problems, so they metastasize. And I think that's what happened here.

When companies are this negligent in operations, they get sued. Well...[/quote]

Blake is not suing because of neglected HR issues. She watched herself get canceled and become “bizarrely unhirable” as confirmed by Hollywood insiders and she needed someone to blame. This case is more about retaliation.

Unfortunately, for her, it’s going be hard to stick the genie back into the bottle. Even if she wins everything in court, which seems like a long shot given some of the technical issues she faces as well as that damn smear campaign is “untraceable”, it’s hard to imagine studios wanting to hire her, or Blake Brown Beauty recovering. 
[/quote]

She is literally suing over HR issues. Like as in it is the basis of her complaint.

[b]Baldoni & Co. ran a disorganized, casual set, and engaged in a bunch of inappropriate behavior that made women on set (multiple women) uncomfortable. They had no HR on set and even after multiple actresses came to them AND Alex Sachs AND Sony with complaints, they did not initiate HR proceedings to address the issues and ensure they were not repeated. So yes, Blake did wind up forcing HR compliance on the production, paying her own lawyers to draft safe set requirements and getting Wayfarer to agree to them. All parties agree that after Blake did this, the set ran smoothly and there were no more issues. Were it up to Wayfarer, they would have just kept winging it and ignoring problems.[/b]

And then when Justin and Jamey realized they had pissed off half a dozen of the most important people involved in the film (most of the main cast, Alex Sachs, Colleen Hoover), they panicked and hired Epstein/Depp/"bad man"-defender Melissa Nathan to do crisis management for them, over the strong advice of Stephanie Jones. Nathan did what she does best -- enlist Jed Wallace and Bryan Freedman to help destroy someone's reputation online. Unfortunately for them, they were in cahoots with Jen Abel, who chose to conduct part of this conspiracy using a work phone that belonged to Stephanie Jones. Oops.

Did Blake make things harder for herself with some of her marketing choices? You bet! Does she have some problematic past interviews that are cringeworthy to watch now? Yes. Is it normal for a director and producers to hire someone to help highlight their LEAD ACTRESS's worst qualities and past behavior online as the movie they just spent millions to make and staked their reputations on is coming out? No, it's insane. It also, unfortunately may have broken the law.

The idea that this whole thing is about Blake Brown Beauty is some fantasy a bunch of red pilled weirdos on Reddit came up with. This is actually about Justin Baldoni, Jamey Heath, and their behavior. You can try to distract from that all you want, but the actual court case will remain focused on that.[/quote]

The bolded part was always impressive to me as far back as the NYT. So many times women come out years later and everyone is like "why didn't she say something" and here we have her actually using the pause in production to get something put in place that actually worked (which is maybe, the one thing the parties agree on?), and she didn't breathe a word about it or make any waves in public at the time. And we have her texts and conversations from during filming, and the accounts of others, like the real time texts from the IC getting creeped out, that demonstrates these were all genuine good faith beliefs, not something manufactured later. It's not something she made up to steal a movie (she stole that movie fair and square, hah). It may not end up being actionable sexual harassment, but this was a genuine problem, this stuff happened, she didn't make this up. But then she unfollowed him and he decided to destroy her (and then claims he didn't have to because it organically happened, and again we'll see if that pans out in court). Baldoni threw just as big of a tantrum.

I'm not saying she's perfect, just that she deserves her day in court. [/quote]

I'm not either of these two PPs but I agree with both of these comments so hard.  Haven't been to this thread in a while.  [/quote]

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