Yet Another Hollywood PR Battle

It Ends With Us should have been a success story. The long-awaited film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, a tale of cyclical domestic violence, premiered in August to decent reviews and wide audience interest; it grossed $350m, against a $25m budget, despite a tide of press and social media speculation over an alleged rift between its director, Justin Baldoni, and its star, Blake Lively. Most of the ire was trained on Lively – for glossing over the subject of domestic violence with florals, for simultaneously promoting her haircare and alcohol lines, for being gruff with reporters in the past, while Baldoni, who played the abuser in the film, championed abuse survivors. But the movie was a hit, demonstrating the viability of female-led, mid-budget melodramas at the box office.

Not that anyone remembers that now. The film has become embroiled in an even more dramatic legal mess exposing a different dark secret: Hollywood public relations. On 21 December, the New York Times published an explosive 4,000-word investigation titled ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Campaign. The report, co-authored by the Harvey Weinstein investigator Megan Twohey, cited documents submitted by Lively in a complaint to the California civil rights commission that accused Baldoni, his co-producer Jamey Heath and their production company, Wayfarer Studios, of orchestrating a smear campaign – including planted stories and artificially boosted social media posts – to destroy Lively’s reputation, in retaliation for speaking up about alleged sexual harassment on set.

The complaint, which included seemingly damning text messages, sent shockwaves through the media, caused more than one columnist to regret contributing to the Lively pile-on, and invoked the specter of the successful social media campaign to smear Johnny Depp’s ex-wife, Amber Heard, out of Hollywood on a wave of outright online misogyny. (And not just invoked – one of Baldoni’s crisis PR representatives, Melissa Nathan, also represented Depp.)

It also triggered an all-out war in the press, via legal filings and responses to them. Lively sued Baldoni, Heath and the publicists directly in New York on 1 January. Concurrently, Baldoni denied the allegations and sued the New York Times for defamation, claiming that the Times relied on “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead”. His outspoken lawyer, Bryan Freedman – who has elected to defend Baldoni on TMZ and the Megyn Kelly Show, among others – promised and delivered on a separate lawsuit to “expose” Lively; on 16 January, Baldoni and co sued Lively, her publicist Leslie Sloane and her husband, the Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds, for defamation, extortion and invasion of privacy, to the tune of $400m. In Baldoni’s telling, via a 179-page complaint including his own selection of private communications, Lively and her husband conspired to take over control of the film and concocted false allegations of sexual harassment, then their own smear campaign, to sideline him and recover a reputation damaged by organic online backlash.

Keeping up? It’s difficult – and that’s not even getting into a separate suit from Baldoni’s former publicist, Stephanie Jones, a polarizing figure in Hollywood PR and the source of the subpoenaed materials in Lively’s complaint, against the alleged smear campaigners for stealing her clients. This story has played out piecemeal in the press, tied up in legalese and deep inside baseball, concerned as much with narrative – how it’s shaped and manipulated, how it plays on existing biases, how it’s embedded in everything – as what actually went down during and after the film’s production. This is how news works amid, as the New Yorker’s Doreen St Félix put it, the collapse of Hollywood’s #MeToo era, where the fact-based reportage of 2010s investigations cannot cut through volatile online sentiment. Depending on who you’re hearing, information is misinformation, victim is offender, and power is in the eye of the beholder. “This is a case that is being litigated in the public forum,” said Matthew Belloni, a former entertainment lawyer and Hollywood Reporter columnist who has covered the story for Puck. “These claims are being made as much for what they say in court as what they say in the media.”

“This isn’t a typical lawsuit about money and compensation and retribution. It’s mostly about the respective images of each of these celebrities,” said Camron Dowlatshahi, a Los Angeles-based employment and entertainment lawyer.

The actual legal filings themselves build their cases through excerpted texts, emails and other documentation, and concern two different but interlinked – and contested – issues: sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior on set as exposed by the #MeToo movement, and clandestine PR work to burnish one celebrity’s reputation at the expense of another. According to Lively’s complaint, Baldoni, Wayfarer and a team of publicists, plus a contractor, embarked on a “multi-tiered plan” to, in their words, “bury” her reputation after she spoke up about alleged sexual harassment by Baldoni detailed in a 30-point agreement for Lively to return to production following the 2023 Sag-Aftra strike. The alleged smear tactics include astroturfing, the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated campaign as organic social media posts or comments, and false planted stories.

No one disputes that celebrities try to influence public opinion. “Publicity is publicity. Everyone’s engaging in it,” said Molly McPherson, a crisis communications expert. “Do people plant negative stories? Sure. That’s been going on for decades in Hollywood.” But the game has changed as the power of traditional media has waned, ceding ground to the cacophony of social media. “Now, it matters what everybody is talking about online,” said Belloni. “And the way to influence that is often through shadow campaigns that seed conversations and influence how people are thinking about celebrities, often when they don’t even know you’re influencing them.”

Still, the methods alleged in Lively’s complaint are, according to experts, fairly extraordinary. Astroturfing is “not very common at all”, said McPherson. “It is highly frowned upon in the PR industry, but non-PR practitioners will use the tactic.” Crisis PR, crisis management, or “reputation management consultants” are “a very discrete subset of public relations”, said Belloni. “It’s not something that your average celebrity empowers their team to do.”

What Lively detailed in her complaint is not, in a legal sense, evidence under oath – should her New York lawsuit go to trial, it would be submitted, along with depositions, witness testimony and other evidence, to demonstrate that it is not, as Baldoni’s team claims, misleadingly edited. And there’s no concrete evidence that Baldoni et al activated an astroturfing campaign – as the Times notes, the impact of smear campaigns are impossible to quantify, though Lively cites a text from Nathan on release day that they “started to see [a] shift on social, due largely to [contractor] and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative”. Baldoni’s team denies it and includes a message from Nathan citing a “perfect example of why we don’t use ‘bots’”, then accusing Lively’s team of employing bots.

Until further discovery, this is still a question of who you believe. “You can talk about seeding narratives, and putting bots out there, and putting out a fake comment, and trying to get things to go viral, but we don’t know whether that worked,” said Belloni. “We don’t know whether this was an organic outcome from Blake’s own comments that she had made in the press. It’s an inexact science.”

But you don’t need a degree to understand how misogyny, herd logic and unfettered misinformation fan the flames of a pile-on, whether organic or sparked by PR. Particularly when the subject is a very famous woman who engenders some envy, and who is not a perfect victim. (Lively has historically been criticized for out-of-touch white privilege – for launching a lifestyle website in 2014 with a photoshoot titled Allure of the Antebellum, and for marrying at a South Carolina plantation in 2012; she apologized for the wedding venue in 2020.) It happened with Heard, disproportionately torn apart on social media in what many have called the end of the #MeToo movement. As Nathan acknowledged in a text to a colleague cited in Lively’s complaint, supposedly cheering their success: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you [that] people really want to hate on women.”

Baldoni’s defamation suits paint Lively as a manipulative liar, a strategy that, regardless of its truth value, mirrors a defense tactic employed to undermine sexual abuse allegations called Darvo – “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender”. Lively invoked the term in her official response to Baldoni’s suit against her: “This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim,” the lengthy statement reads. “While the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy of attacking the woman is desperate, it does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and it will fail.”

In Baldoni’s telling, Lively is a diva who, along with her husband, misrepresented or manipulated real events into false sexual harassment allegations as leverage to “assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production”. He claims Lively surprised him at a meeting with Reynolds and a “megacelebrity friend” – clearly Taylor Swift – who enthusiastically praised Lively’s unofficial rewrites of the script, thus pressuring Baldoni to accept them. Baldoni claims the couple pushed their mutual agency, WME, to drop Baldoni as a client before he hired crisis PR, and that Lively’s complaint is an attempt to resuscitate her reputation via a “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign of her own. For example, the Times story, citing Lively’s complaint, says that Baldoni “repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding”. Baldoni’s suit contains a text message exchange that appears to counter that claim; in one instance Lively wrote: “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.” To which Baldoni responded: “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.”

Both of Baldoni’s suits proceed as such – alternate renderings of Lively’s suit point by point with documentation aimed for the court of public opinion. Notably, no documentation is provided to support his claim that Wayfarer pushed back against Lively’s 17-point return-to-set conditions, which he argues were concocted as a extortionate paper trail.

The extortion element is key; for a defamation suit, Baldoni, as a public figure, would have to prove that Lively and the New York Times acted with “actual malice” – as in, a reckless or knowing disregard for the falsity of information. His suit against the Times will probably be dismissed on what’s called fair report grounds – the media’s privilege to report on the contents of official government documents, which would ostensibly include Lively’s complaint. Extortion has a lower bar – demonstrating that Lively and Reynolds’s actions crossed a line from aggressive negotiation to illegality.

As a defamation case, Baldoni’s suit against the Times is “very weak”, said George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center. “One wonders whether it was brought for other reasons than winning a verdict.” Such as, say, recasting Lively’s complaint as one side of an intense, confusing case of he-said, she-said. This is where these lawsuits remain now, at least in the public eye – a trial of feelings over facts hashed out by TikTok commentators and self-appointed legal experts. Lively’s complaint is now left up to the state of California to potentially investigate; both suits in New York, meanwhile, will probably proceed into discovery – possibly including, as Lively stated in her suit, testimony from other co-stars – that may enlighten the facts, or more likely further fan the flames of judgment.

As such, things will probably get messier, further obscuring what truth can be gleaned. Typically most cases settle but “I wouldn’t be surprised if [they] go to trial, because I think both of these individuals want public vindication,” said Dowlatshahi. “And that’s what drove Depp and Heard through multiple trials.”

From a PR standpoint, though – and this story has always really been about image – settlement would be the better option. “This doesn’t help either of them,” said Belloni. “The longer this goes on and the more mud that’s slung at each other, it really hurts both of them.”