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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes yes Blake is the antichrist.

But also Baldoni harassed and the retaliated against the antichrist. Still bad![/quote]

And yet the court disagreed with you. Stop trying to make fetch happen.[/quote]

The court said she wasn't covered by the SH law but let her retaliation claims proceed.

Oh sorry, I know you hate when I "twist" facts by... stating them.[/quote]

And then she dropped them and walked away. You always forget that part.  It’s over.[/quote]

Yeah...and that's the legalese. But this is a woman who was effing and defending Weinstein to the end while also sending crotch shots and full nudes to anyone who would look at them (married or not) her entire career before her affair marriage and frankly, mainly worried she is entering an unf**ckle status with the age and the weight. That's so plainly obvious. She thought they could play this and it didn't go as planned.

I actually have few thoughts on Baldoni but I'll trust America Ferrera over a Blake any day. [/quote]

Blake is far from perfect but this is untrue. She never defended Weinstein and I definitely don't think he ever tried anything with her. Never heard of her sending nudes either -- she's a big prude so that doesn't sound likely. It does seem like she and Ryan go together when he was still married.[/quote]

DP. The nude thing is totally true. She sent them to Ben on the set of their film the town when Jen Garner had a toddler and a three month old baby. There was a huge celebrity nudes hack called the frappening or something? Blake‘s nudes were caught up in that though she and her team obviously just denied denied denied though it was really obvious. Some even speculated Jen found them on Ben’s phone and leaked them. Then there was a whole thing with Reese Witherspoon shortly after giving a speech at an awards event, telling young celeb women, don’t be stupid enough to have your face in the nudes you send. And she and Jen were close friends, and so it was speculated that was directly aimed at blake. [/quote]

That situation was effed up, but Blake was 22 at the time, Affleck was 38, and he was her director on The Town. People always assume she sent those photos unprompted but there were also a bunch of rumors that Ben insisted on Blake for that role because he had a thing for her. This is exactly the sort of situation where I blame the skeevy older man in a position of authority and give a pass to someone young and dependent on the older guy for a freaking job. This is a story about Ben Affleck, the man who later cheated on his wife with their kid's nanny, being terrible. Blaming Blake for that is typical misogynist hate because while it was stupid of her to send those photos, the odds that Affleck was like "hey you should send me some photos of you in your underwear for, uh, a screen test" are very high. Blake was young, dumb, ambitious, and eager to please. Ben Affleck was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, pushing 40, married with young kids. And that's on Blake? No.

And the Weinstein stuff is false. She never defended him and there's zero evidence anything happened with them. Don't you think she would have come forward with her own allegations about Weinstein hitting on her when she was a TEEN when other A list actresses were coming forward? Instead she said that while he never did anything to her, she was horrified by what had happened, but believed his accusers. She didn't defend him.[/quote]

Yep, Ben was a major a hole here and has remained one his whole life, though I do think at 22 if you know someone has a toddler and a baby at home you should know better. I just think Blake has never been a person with a lot of depth or character. I was 22 years old once too, and I wasn’t sending nudes to married men. Sorry.

But I don’t think any of those things have anything to do with this case and I believe even if you were in a hole at 22 you could be sexually harassed 15 years later - I just don’t think in this case Blake was and a federal court agreed.

Agree, the Weinstein stuff has always been totally irrelevant to this or anything to do with her. He was a bad guy to a lot of women and I’m sure a lot of women were caught up in it. Whether she was or not, I don’t blame her.[/quote]

I agree at 22 you should know better, but because her team decide to simply deny it was her in the photos, we don't actually know how/why they were sent. I actually find it unlikely that Blake proactively decided to send those photos to Ben. Again, he was her director, a huge star, and he had cast her as his character's love interest in a movie he was directing. Plus he's a known womanizer who destroyed his marriage with his drinking and cheating. I think it's very, very likely he solicited those pictures, potentially under the guise of "I need to see how you'd look for xyz scene" and that she complied. That doesn't exempt her from the obligation to stop, think, and maybe make a different choice. But it would also change the dynamics a lot. We'll never know because everyone involved either lied or refused to discuss it in order to move past it, and honestly that's not the worst way to handle it. But portraying Blake as the aggressor in that whole fiasco is weird to me given the ages and relative power of everyone involved. Very different from the Lively/Baldoni thing where Blake was actually the much more established star and had real sway on set as a result. [/quote]

Yes, all of that could be true. But I will say I never accused Blake of being the aggressor in that situation. Just a participant. But an a- hole participant nonetheless, who should have known better. I can definitely give her grace for being young and possibly taken advantage of.

I truly believe, and you won’t convince me otherwise, that Blake and Ryan started fooling around when he was married to scar Jo. And yes, I hold him fully accountable as the married man in that situation but she deserves some culpability. And I think that marriage was on its way out. I don’t see any world where Scarlett and Ryan would’ve stayed together for much longer. It’s really clear he presents her fame and wants a wife that is more content to stay out of the spotlight. So I don’t blame Blake for the breakup of the marriage, but she just finds herself in these messy situations that frankly a lot of women who manage to move through the world don’t find themselves in.

Again, I will stress all of this has absolutely nothing to do with this case. I believe people can be messy and still be sexually harassed. And I believe most women are at some point at least mildly sexually harassed in their career. [b]I just don’t think in this instance, when Blake had all the power and a very involved, very powerful husband, that she was the target of sexual harassment. [/quote][/b]

This is what has always been a struggle for the public to get over and I have an issue with it too. You have to get over all preconceived notions of sexual harassment in the workplace and flip the script to believe an abuser-first time!- decided they were going to go for it and their target was going to be aiming up. Like a female associate decides she is going to harass the hell out of a male partner and make him very uncomfortable and fearful in the workplace. Can it happen? Sure, I guess. Is it all that likely and does it follow a typical pattern? Not at all. [/quote]

I have mixed feelings about this. ITA that Lively had a much more powerful role on that set than your average actress. And I think if it was Isabella Ferrer bringing these allegations, that would change the dynamic a lot. I certainly don't lose sleep over Lively somehow being taken advantage of by someone like Baldoni on the set of a movie, and I don't think anyone thinks that's what happened.

However, that doesn't mean that Baldoni's or Heath's behavior on set was good or okay.

Blake obviously had enough clout on the set to deal with their behavior, but that's different than saying they behaved well and Blake lied about it. I mean, Heath did walk in on her in her trailer unclothed. Over both her objection and that of others in the room. There are disputes over exactly what was said but both sides seem to agree that he did that, perhaps not conceiving that it was not appropriate. This is where Baldoni and Heath being, frankly, sort of weird about things comes in -- most people understand that if your coworker is undressed for any reason and is like "I'm not dressed please don't come in" that you would... not come in. For whatever reason, Heath did not think that was an issue which is on Heath. I don't think he was trying to hit on Lively but also: don't do that.

And similar with Baldoni. I don't think he was hitting on Lively but I think he was obtuse and inappropriate repeatedly with the "hot" comments and the totally inappropriate and tone deaf way they approached nudity in the childbirth scene and also just not really getting personal boundaries (fwiw I also think Blake and Ryan also did weird things at times, including Ryan being overbearing and inappropriate in his messages to Baldoni, so it's not like I think they are perfect in their behavior). But Baldoni was the director and he should have known better with this stuff. There was this anecdote from Alex Sak's deposition about how early on Baldoni kept inviting all the crew to go to like Korean baths with him and she finally had to tell him that it was making people uncomfortable because not everyone wants to go to a spa where people get naked with their boss. These things seem obvious to me and, I think, most people but Baldoni and Heath obviously live in their own world where somehow they don't get how most people's boundaries operate, especially in a workplace.

So we've got two people ostensibly "in charge" who are just kind of inappropriate, weird, don't seem to get how to talk to people or where boundaries are, and then we have an actress playing the lead who is actually very well established in the industry, has been on a lot of film sets, has some built in clout with the crew because of her fame level and connections, and she's like wtf is this, this is unprofessional and violating.

So yes, it's not a standard sexual harassment situation at all. I fully agree with that. But it's also not a good situation where Baldoni and Heath are blameless and Blake is in the wrong. I think she was correct to complain about their behavior, correct to not let it go when they sort of waived it off (I think because of a combination of just not getting it and also being disorganized and bad at the management side of their jobs). I think the 17 point list was appropriate (not the way Ryan handled it but the list itself and Lively insisting on getting these issues addressed before returning to filming). And everyone agrees the second part of filming went much better and smoother and I think that has a lot to do with Blake putting her foot down and asking for the set to become more professional and for certain behaviors to stop. She wasn't just some ingenue being taken advantage of and she didn't pretend she was. She used her power and position to, IMO, force Baldoni and Heath to shape up and do better.

Where it all gets messy is when they hired Melissa Nathan, Jed Wallace, and Bryan Freedman. That's where I lose a lot of sympathy for Wayfarer and come over to supporting Blake. I don't think what happened on set was some massive problem (in part because she very capably handled it and go tit to stop) or that Baldoni and Heath needed to be publicly pilloried for it at that point. But then they went on the offensive by hiring a team of people who I just think are abhorrent, and engaging in a campaign that I think is really misleading and revolting. That's why I'm pro-Blake and anti-Baldoni. And I think if Baldoni were really a feminist who believed in listening to women or examining his own behavior, he would not have made these specific hires or signed on to a PR approach that sought to exploit an existing predisposition to hate and tear apart women in order to destroy the rep of someone he was worried might one day tell the truth about his bad (not egregiously bad, but just run of the mill, stupid bad) behavior on set.

I also think the reason he overreacted was specifically because he was trying to build a career on the premise that he's a feminist man who gets and supports women, which made anything negative Blake might say about him publicly, even if not only true but also nowhere near as bad as what many other men in Hollywood have done, far more dangerous for his rep. He positioned himself as a certain kind of man and Blake became a threat to that reputation (which was, to be clear, BS) so he went after her. This is so much worse to me than anything he actually did to Blake or another woman on set.[/quote]

TLDR honestly. This is pretty much done and dusted. [/quote]

No need to read she says the same thing over and over again like a broken record.  Anyway both sides got their submissions in yesterday.  No surprises in either.  Looking forward to the hearing to get a better sense of where Liman is going.  My guess is he’d like to wind this up before his current clerks leave in July.[/quote]

Lively didn’t really touch treble and punitive damages, perhaps because they know it’s a long shot. I think they just want the bare minimum favorable finding (fees) so they can spin it as a win in the press.[/quote]

She does address it but refers to it as just "compensatory damages" or "damages" in the brief, likely due to the tight page limit. She cites to a 1994 CA case called [I]Lundquist[/I]. Baldoni's brief cites more cases (and more recent cases) on this issue but they may be problematic because they refer to damages awards under other statutes that lack 47.1's specific language on damages, as well as the legislative history showing that compensatory damages are part of the intended impact of the statute.

Both briefs struggle with the fact that there is so little, if any, case law interpreting 47.1. I'd have to read the underlying cases to say which one does a better job advocating for a favorable burden scheme and I don't have time for that. I'm curious whether Liman will have reviewed any of these cases before the hearing today or it will be more of a listening session for him to hear their arguments before reviewing briefs and coming to his own conclusions. Either way, given the very tight limit on the briefs, I actually think the tone of the hearing will be pretty important.[/quote]

I think Liman’s already done his research and has a draft opinion.  He wants to give the parties a chance to add cases he might have missed but it doesn’t seem either side cited anything earth shattering.  I don’t think either knows where he is going with this.   [/quote]

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