Actress Blake Lively was arguably the internet’s public enemy number one for a couple of weeks in the summer. She’s now filed an explosive legal case that she claims lifts the lid on “hostile work environments” that are created to harm reputations in Hollywood – and which are making people question who and what to believe.
Blake Lively had always been a pretty inoffensive kind of actress. She had been in successful TV shows and films, like Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. She married fellow superstar Ryan Reynolds. She’s friends with Taylor Swift.
Then in August, while promoting her latest movie It Ends With Us, she suddenly became controversial, to the verge of being cancelled. She was criticised for comments appearing to downplay domestic violence, the film’s theme; while awkward old interviews were resurfaced and repurposed as evidence of bullying behaviour.
Public opinion – at least among those who knew and cared – seemed to have turned against her. Then the film came out, the furore died down, and social media moved on. But Lively has now filed a legal case that claims she suffered sexual harassment by It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni – and that when she complained, he and his studio Wayfarer retaliated by waging a campaign to “destroy” her reputation.
She was the subject of “a sophisticated, co-ordinated, and well-financed retaliation plan” designed “to silence her”, involving a “weaponised a digital army” and fake stories being fed to “unwitting reporters”, her lawyers have alleged – and that’s why she became the focus of negative publicity.
Throughout the complaint, which spans some 80 pages, Lively’s team repeatedly accuses Baldoni and Wayfarer of creating a “hostile work environment that nearly derailed production of the film”.
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