Here we go again. The typical social media scroll at the end of 2024 eerily resembled that of mid-2022: A blonde bombshell’s reputation and life were virally upended by a targeted smear campaign. This year, it was Blake Lively; in 2022, it was Amber Heard. In both cases, the basic narrative is all but identical, leaving us with only one question: Who will be the next victim alleging domestic abuse or workplace sexual harassment who will summon forth the same online army of vengeful defenders of patriarchal impunity? Our society is clearly not ready to face up to the predations of the actors portraying beloved characters on screen—so we rally instead to the fictional alibis they peddle in their own defense.
On December 21, Blake Lively filed a complaint against Justin Baldoni, her costar in the anti–sexual abuse film It Ends With Us. Lively also sued Baldoni’s crisis PR publicist, Melissa Nathan, as well as several other players in what she alleges to be a smear campaign that targeted her throughout the film’s promotion. The basic claim at the heart of the suit involves a mind-bending bid to create a discourse around the film’s flawed treatment of the sensitive themes of domestic violence and coercive control of women in intimate partner relationships exclusively to benefit Baldoni. After the film’s release, Lively and other cast members were slammed for avoiding the topic of domestic violence or preventing the marketing campaign for It Ends With Us from engaging with similarly complex and dark material. After the cast—particularly Lively—faced the brunt of a backlash, Baldoni’s social media pages and promotional work for the film almost exclusively featured content promoting domestic violence awareness.
According to Lively’s complaint, she and other cast members were contractually obligated to follow the marketing plan approved by Sony Pictures, the studio that released the film. Sony officials instructed them not to focus on domestic violence but instead portray the film as a story of “hope.” Baldoni’s own efforts to engage these issues, meanwhile, cast Lively in dark contrast as someone who was, at best, sidestepping the difficult questions raised in the film. In communications cited in Lively’s complaint, Baldoni and his team described this public makeover as “social manipulation” designed to “destroy” Lively’s reputation. Documents in the complaint also show Steve Sarowitz, the multibillionaire cofounder and cochair of Baldoni’s production company, Wayfarer Studios, saying he was prepared to spend as much as $100 million to do so.
Lively’s complaint also alleges that Baldoni, the self-styled brave truth-teller in the sphere of domestic violence, was systematically harassing her and other performers on the set of It Ends With Us. Lively and several others working on the film complained of a hostile work environment manufactured by Baldoni. Cast and crew members alleged that Baldoni improvised kisses with Lively, confronted her with images of nude women, and discussed sexual conquests with cast members, including Lively, among other inappropriate actions. These complaints were presented to Sony and Wayfarer. (Baldoni and his own legal team have denied all these charges.)
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Lively’s complaint also cites communications from Baldoni in May 2024, warning the members of his PR team that they needed a plan to get ahead of the charges against him in case they were to go public. In one e-mail, he wrote, “Just want you guys to have a plan. Plans make me feel more at ease.”
The plan they hit on was a classic strategy adopted by accused male abusers: Get out in front of accusations by painting your accuser as the bad actor. Baldoni positioned himself as an impassioned advocate for healthy masculinity and violence prevention. His act was so convincing that the Hollywood press and the general public overlooked some fairly flagrant red flags. Colleen Hoover, the author of the book that the film adapted, refused to do press with Baldoni—and the other principal cast members also shunned public appearances with him.
Beyond questions of media positioning, Baldoni and his PR agent Nathan, who had previously represented Johnny Depp during his defamation suit against Amber Heard, deployed the same basic playbook that Depp relied on: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO), a term coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd. The DARVO strategy pivots around the effort to deny a victim’s claim by turning the basic logic of the case upside down. Thus, the key objective becomes to relentlessly undermine a victim’s credibility so as to reverse the power dynamic alleged in the complaint, transforming the offender into the victim and the victim into a predator, motivated by attention, money, and revenge. In 2016, shortly after Heard obtained a temporary restraining order and exited the courthouse with a black eye, Depp hired new legal counsel and began his DARVO campaign to fend off the public allegations he knew were coming. It appears that Baldoni has followed Depp’s example, planting the seeds to undermine Lively’s credibility long before she went public with her harassment complaints.
Perhaps saddest of all, select women happily identify opportunities to monetize their sisters’ pain. A case in point: Kjersti Flaa, a freelance journalist, went viral on August 10, 2024, when she resurfaced an interview with Lively on YouTube that she had recorded eight years earlier. Asserting that the conversation left her “traumatized,” she captioned it, “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.” The interview showcased a decidedly uncomfortable dynamic among Lively, Kjersti, and Parker Posey, Lively’s costar in Cafe Society, a 2016 film directed by yet another DARVO master, Woody Allen. Early on in the exchange, Flaa questioned both Lively and Posey about their clothing in the film—an awkward and sexist opening feint that rendered the rest of the interview halting and painful to watch, as both actresses delivered cursory replies while seldom making eye contact with their interviewer.
What’s most notable about the interview is the timing of Flaa’s upload—on the day following the premiere of It Ends With Us—which is to say, in the midst of Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign against Lively. Prior to her uploading her interview, Flaa’s weekly incoming subscribers were averaging in the two figures. Within a week of the re-upped Lively interview, she gained 8,500. Now, she boasts nearly 50,000 new subscribers. Her weekly page views spiked even more dramatically; during that week in August, they reached more than 2,800,000, from an earlier range of 40,000 to 60,000. Flaa seems to be working from a click-chasing playbook of her own: In May 2022, at the outset of the Depp suit against Amber Heard, she re-upped a 2015 interview with Depp under the hashtag #JusticeForJohnny.
Flaa indeed sought to bolster her online following from her Lively interview with a carefully timed burst of pro-Depp apologetics. In October 2024, Flaa uploaded a video to her YouTube channel titled “Why I have a soft spot for Johnny Depp.” She again sows skepticism about Heard’s abuse claims by stressing Depp’s fundamental “shyness.” At the same time, however, she dismisses colleagues’ interviews where Depp comes across as hostile and unlikable as “pretty outrageous”—the sort of material that “shouldn’t be aired anywhere.” (Here, Flaa wasn’t merely taking up Nathan’s DARVO playbook; she was acting as a Depp publicist herself, declaring certain subjects and reported facts out of bounds—something that is fundamentally at odds with the conduct of honest journalism.)
Flaa also adopts a publicist’s blasé, passive attitude toward the serious allegations of domestic abuse and sexual assault against Depp, which had been adjudicated in Heard’s favor in the UK justice system. “I know people have been, you know, criticizing [Depp] for what he did to Amber Heard or whatever,” Flaa announced, before offering a superficial character assessment of Depp that’s a common refrain among abuser apologists: “Every time that I’ve met him, he’s just been such a doll.”
Melissa Nathan, the PR handler for both Depp and Baldoni, could scarcely have put it better herself. Lively’s suit cites a text exchange between Nathan and one of her (now former) employees, Jennifer Abel, monitoring the progress of their effort to rehabilitate Baldoni’s image at Lively’s expense: “And socials are really really ramping up,” Nathan wrote, eliciting this response from Abel: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people [who] really want to hate on women.” Of course, what’s sadder still is that our judicial system, our celebrity culture, and our social media feeds are hardwired to continue stoking and cashing in on this hatred. That’s how women like Flaa and Nathan conspire to enable figures like Depp and Baldoni to appear as dolls when they act more like monsters.
