Blake Lively is a mediocre actress, a nepo baby, a diva, an arguable racist and a mean girl — she is also a victim of sexual harassment. On August 29th, 2024, the monstrosity that was Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, It Ends with Us, was released in theaters. Baldoni, an actor and director, best known for his role as Rafael on Jane the Virgin, played the story’s antagonist, Ryle Kincaid, the abusive husband to Blake Lively’s character Lily Blossom Bloom (yes, that is the character’s actual, legal name — and also yes, she is a florist). The film was a box office success, making $351 million on a budget of $25 million despite its mixed reviews from critics and audience members alike, who said it was not only terribly acted and written, but also an offensively unrealistic portrayal of domestic violence.
From the second Blake was cast, there were rumors of a feud between her and Baldoni. Between blind items saying she took over his film, to reports that she had her husband, Ryan Reynolds, rewrite the script, the drama just seemed to deepen. No one spoke much of the film until behind-the-scenes shots of Blake’s outfits were leaked. The outfits were — to put it lightly — egregious. Blake was given the official title of ‘executive producer’ on the film, but wasn’t expected to do anything more than act as the leading lady. Instead of simply reciting her lines, she took this opportunity to take some creative control of the movie, specifically in the wardrobe department. For worse or for better (it was for worse; the outfits were terrible), her costume changes drew attention to the film. This led to the first wave of media scrutiny, which was just a mockery of the outfits, but with this came more eyes on the film. The more attention a movie has pre-release, the better financially, but this doesn’t apply to PR. Then came claims that Baldoni had “fat-shamed” a post-partum Lively, who had just given birth to her fourth child. Baldoni’s team maintained that Baldoni questioned Lively’s weight because of a cut scene where he had to lift her and Baldoni was simply worried about his back. This launched a wave of hatred against Lively, which seemed to snowball into an avalanche.
The August that It Ends with Us came out, Blake Lively experienced her first official “cancellation”. After the “fat-shaming” debacle, spectators began viewing Lively as a manipulator who loved to play the victim. This led to a tsunami of clips from the press tour to be posted, making it seem like Blake Lively had stolen every aspect of Justin Baldoni’s passion project. In many of the promotional interviews, Baldoni was seated alone, and Lively was put with her castmates. Baldoni used his time in the interviews to bring attention to victims of domestic violence, and Lively used her time to bring attention to which designers she was wearing. Does this make her vapid and tone-deaf? Yes. Does it make him a saintly feminist that can do no wrong? No, not at all.
The internet dug up countless other bad moments of Blake, such as when she was congratulated on her “little bump” (pregnancy) by an interviewer and responded by congratulating the interviewer on her “little bump”, effectively fat-shaming her (the interviewer later publicly stated that she was having fertility issues, which added salt to the wound). People also began to talk about how Blake Lively married Ryan Reynolds on a plantation, something that was once quite popular despite it being a place where hundreds of enslaved African Americans were once tortured and forced into labor. Her racist, mean-girl past was all over TikTok that August. This coincided with the launch of her hair-care brand, which ruined the launch and potential. On red carpets, Blake Lively walked alongside Jenny Slate (who portrayed Lily’s friend and Ryle’s sister) and Colleen Hoover, as Justin Baldoni was pushed off to the side. Some people interpret this as Blake hijacking the production and turning the cast and crew against Justin; others think maybe Justin did something to cause all of his co-workers to avoid him. At the point that this was observed, most people assumed the former.
On December 20th, 2024, Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, accusing Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath of sexual harassment on set. Not even a day later, the New York Times published her complaint, putting Baldoni and his team in hot water. Almost two weeks later, Lively filed a lawsuit against Baldoni, his production company and Heath for sexual harassment and retaliation via a smear campaign in order to discredit her. Around this time, Baldoni also sued the New York Times for $250 million for defamation, and in early 2025, Baldoni filed a lawsuit against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds for $400 million for defamation (which was dismissed — Baldoni had yet to refile).
In her complaint, Lively alleged that Baldoni:
- Made crude/degrading comments about women’s bodies.
- Explicitly discussed his sex life and pornography addiction.
- Asked her invasive questions about her sex life.
- Showed her lewd pornographic images.
- Made her uncomfortable via the repeated mention of her dead father.
- Pressed her about her religious beliefs.
- And created a smear campaign in order to ruin her image.
Lively backed up her complaint with records of meetings she had throughout production, where she attempted to address these issues with Baldoni, the support of and similar claims by cast/crew members, as well as emails and text messages between Baldoni and his team claiming they wanted to take Lively down and had outlined a plan to do so. I urge all those interested to read the publications of the New York Times and Page Six’s report on the smear campaign.
The shock of this news split people down the middle; on one hand, Blake Lively is a disgraced actress with a habit of being nasty. On the other hand, nothing she has done has proved Baldoni right. Once claims of Baldoni’s behavior surfaced, he hired the same crisis PR team that Johnny Depp did during his years-long battle with ex-wife Amber Heard. This raised some eyebrows for those who believed Heard, whose experience with a smear campaign wasn’t much different from Lively’s. The fact that the majority of the cast seemed to take Blake’s side during the conflict also looked bad for Justin.
Baldoni has claimed for a long time to be a feminist, but has shown little proof of such. He was only addicted to pornography, which has been shown to devalue and dehumanize women. He went on to appear on Penn Badgley’s (yes, Blake Lively’s ex-boyfriend and also former co-star on Gossip Girl) podcast and joked about how his first attempts at getting his now wife, Emily Baldoni, to date him made her uncomfortable and were “co-dependent”, making him seem like a creep. His decision to adapt It Ends with Us out of all books about domestic violence speaks volumes as well. Not only has the author, Colleen Hoover, been scandalized due to the actions of her son who allegedly sexually harassed a teenage girl over snapchat and her response to that, which was to simply block the victim after she came to Hoover for help, but the book is also such a terrible depiction of domestic abuse that victims and domestic violence specialists called it out. Baldoni’s behavior makes him look more like the type of man who uses women’s issues to garner praise for himself than the type of man who cares even slightly about women’s issues. Most importantly, on top of all of Lively’s evidence and Baldoni’s faux-feminism, two other female crew members claimed that Baldoni made them feel uncomfortable, and Isabella Ferrer, who played the young version of Lively’s character, alleged that Baldoni had bullied her on set.
The way I see it, this case is a microcosm of the failures of the #METOO Movement. I can’t count how many people I know in person and have seen online preach “BELIEVE ALL WOMEN!” then immediately turn around and call Blake Lively a liar because they dislike her as a person. In 2017, #METOO was at its peak. I had just turned thirteen and had the naive belief that any middle school-aged feminist would know that if I were ever sexually harassed in the workplace, my credibility wouldn’t be reliant solely on my popularity. In 2024, I was officially proven wrong. Blake Lively’s cancellation was inevitable; she made the smear campaign against her all too easy to construct, but is our sense of nuance at such an all-time-low that we think that one person being problematic means that all those who oppose them are justified? In the same manner that someone can be beautiful and charismatic and also an abuser, someone else can be incorrigibly flawed and also a victim.