Reply to Blake Lively- Jason Baldoni and NYT

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can someone summarize what this thread is all about?[/quote]

Honestly, why?  If you haven’t been around for the last 580 pages, I do not recommend you start now.

Blake Lively worked on a movie, It Ends With Us, that Justin Baldoni directed and starred in (as her abusive spouse that she leaves at the end of the movie).

She alleges Baldoni engaged in a bunch of weird behavior that all added up to sexual harassment. It’s unclear whether this behavior affected just lively or others on set. Halfway through the movie, shooting stopped because of the strike. Before she would return to filming, she made a list of 17 demands she required before she would shoot again with him, including things like no more putting extra nudity into scenes without my agreement. No more discussing porn in my presence. No more remarks about communicating with my dead father.

Baldoni said he didn’t do a bunch of these things. But agreed they shouldn’t be done on set and agreed to pledge not to do them in future, and signed the list.

Shooting continued and I don’t think there were further SH problems.

Towards the end of shooting, Lively wanted to see the dailies and ultimately re-edited the Final Cut of the film so that her version, not Baldoni’s, was the one seen in theaters.  It’s believed she also was behind the whole cast unfollowing him on Instagram.

When press for the movie release started, Lively received a lot of bad press.  Many say this was completely self inflicted because she was promoting a movie about DV but wasn’t addressing the topic head on, but instead was encouraging women to “wear their florals” and go see it with friends. She was also promoting her liquor brand as part of the movie PR, which was esp tone deaf re DV.  On the other hand, the PR strategy was specifically NOT to promote the film as a DV narrative, since typically that doesn’t sell tickets.

Lively blamed Baldoni’s PR for her negative press coverage and wanted him to sign a statement taking responsibility for it, which he refused.

She refused to promote the movie with him.  He had to sit in the basement of the film theater with his family and team while she walked the red carpet with the rest of the cast, and he watched the premier in a separate theater than her and the cast.

Six months later, Lively sued Baldoni, his production company, and his PR reps for sexual harassment and for running a smear campaign against her in retaliation for her speaking up about SH.  Shortly after, the NYT ran a piece about the conflict, reprinting text messages from his PR team reflecting that they did have a plan in place to watch how social media was covering the movie release and related press in August and September.  This plan referred to someone on their team named “Jed Wallace” who told them they were “killing it on Reddit.”  The plan alludes to doing more than monitoring socials and actively influencing public opinion, though other texts between Baldoni’s PR agents also talk about only having to monitor socials and never had to engage the bigger plan to heavily influence.  Baldoni himself occasionally comments on the PR campaign, wanting a campaign similar to the one run against Hailey Bieber but not wanting bots. NYT runs an article repeating a lot of the texts, which make it look like Baldoni and team ran a smear campaign against Lively.

I don’t remember the order, but I think Baldoni sued Lively next for defamation, extortion, breach of contract, etc, basically saying the smear campaign was a lie, and they were only monitoring socials because Lively was trying to steal the movie from Baldoni. Not in any way related to the SH (which they say never happened).

Some of the SH allegations in Lively’s original complaint appear to have been overstated, which Baldoni supporters take as evidence that Lively wanted to make Baldoni look bad, and expected him to back down and settle rather than fight.

In signing the 17 point agreement before returning to filming, Baldoni did specifically agree not to retaliate against Lively. And the text messages (which Baldoni didn’t think Lively would ever see) do sound like he is trying to make himself look good and potentially make Lively look bad — he argues this wasn’t because of the SH, but because of her plan to steal the movie and make him look bad.

The movie, btw, was a crazy success that no one expected.  I think it was marketed alongside Lively’s husband’s Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds). IEWU made $400 million dollars worldwide, which is insane.  There is a book sequel, which would be a hot property to follow with, if this whole movie hadn’t been such a clusterflock.

Both sides here are angry at the other.

I am pro-Lively but tried to make this balanced.

Hope this helps. Run away while you can.[/quote]

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