Until about two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who or what is a Justin Baldoni. I wasn’t a fan of JANE THE VIRGIN (quelle surprise) and I’m not in the demo or gender who might have been inclined to be a fan of his. I do confess to being familiar with Blake Lively, having loved her breakout movie THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS and I knew she was the gal you loved to hate in her far more popular CW series GOSSIP GIRL. Plus she’s married to Ryan Reynolds, and considering he touches both the worlds of professional soccer (WELCOME TO WREXHAM) and game shows (his ill-fated ABC prime time gambit DON’T), let alone that side hustle of starring in this summer’s top box office performer involving human beings, I sure know who HE is.
But with a slow holiday season in media news outside of a few deaths, I couldn’t get out of the way of seeing his image and hearing his story, especially when THE NEW YORK TIMES’ triad of trailblazing #metoo experts Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate dropped a lengthy bombshell story just before Christmas with the clickbait-worthy title INSIDE A HOLLYWOOD SMEAR MACHINE, which opened with this revelation:
Last summer, as the release of “It Ends With Us” approached, Justin Baldoni, the director and a star of the film, and Jamey Heath, the lead producer, hired a crisis public relations expert.
During shooting, Blake Lively, the co-star, had complained that the men had repeatedly violated physical boundaries and made sexual and other inappropriate comments to her. Their studio, Wayfarer, agreed to provide a full-time intimacy coordinator, bring in an outside producer and put other safeguards on set. In a side letter to Ms. Lively’s contract, signed by Mr. Heath, the studio also agreed not to retaliate against the actress.
But by August, the two men, who had positioned themselves as feminist allies in the #MeToo era, expressed fears that her allegations would become public and taint them, according to a legal complaint that she filed Friday. It claims that their P.R. effort had an explicit goal: to harm Ms. Lively’s reputation instead.
There have long been figures behind the scenes shaping public opinion about celebrities — through gossip columns, tabloids and strategic interviews. The documents show an additional playbook for waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era. While the film, about domestic violence, was a box office hit — making nearly $350 million worldwide — online criticism of the actress skyrocketed.
“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio and Mr. Baldoni wrote in an Aug. 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. “You know we can bury anyone,” Ms. Nathan wrote.
Insert the dramatic stock music here. Turns out Mr. Baldoni’s side hustle has been to build a public image as a “sensitive dude”, as his Wikipedia bio details:
In July 2017, Variety announced that Baldoni was developing a talk show through his media company Wayfarer Entertainment. The show, entitled Man Enough, is described as a disruptive panel series that explores what it means to be a man today.[37] Eight 25-minute episodes were to be distributed on the internet.[38] In 2021, Baldoni released a book under the same premise.[39] He began a podcast series under the same name with co-hosts Liz Plank and Jamey Heath. A children’s version of the book Boys Will Be Human was released in October 2022.
So there’s apparently far more than irony in evidence here. There’s the issue of personal brand, which as the Times’ trio detailed, was something that both Baldoni and Lively are as focused on arguably more than their acting careers. Not that their reporting was even-handed:
The effort to tarnish Ms. Lively appears to have paid off. Within days of the film’s release, the negative media coverage and commentary became an unusually high percentage of her online presence, according to a forensic review she sought from a brand marketing consultant. Ms. Lively — who is married to the actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds of “Deadpool” fame, and is close with Taylor Swift — experienced the biggest reputational hit of her career. She was branded tone-deaf, difficult to work with, a bully. Sales of her new hair-care line plummeted. Mr. Baldoni, by contrast, emerged largely unscathed. This month, he was honored at a star-studded event celebrating men who “elevate women, combat gender-based violence and promote gender equality worldwide.
This past week, this war of the roses escalated further. By Thursday, PEOPLE’s Benjamin VanHoose had picked up the scent:
By Dec. 31, Lively officially filed a federal complaint in the Southern District of New York. That same day, Baldoni took legal action of his own, suing the Times for $250 million over the article and putting forth his side of the story on many of Lively’s claims, which he previously denied in a statement to the outlet.
Bryan Freedman, the attorney representing Baldoni, said “the irony is rich” and alleged that Lively is the one who “fully orchestrated” a “vicious smear campaign” against Baldoni, not the other way around.
Freedman was all over any news outlet that would give him time over the past two days. You might know his mug even better than Baldoni’s given his history of representing high-profile “victims”, including the likes of Megan Kelly, Gabrielle Union and former BACHELOR host Chris Harrison. Collectively, people who present and purport a public face that differs greatly from how they conduct themselves in private. I’ve had direct interactions with Union and intimately know folks who have dealt with those others. And they know Freedman, who is expert at deftly dodging details on specifics and focusing more on higher-level “brand tarnishing”. Let’s just say the collective consensus is that none of us disagree with Dick the Butcher, the Shakespearean character responsible for this observation.
Look, I’m hardly qualified to weigh in on who’s telling more truth than not in this particular showdown of egos and reputations. Suffice to say I’ve worked with enough Hollywood talent, famous and not-so-much, to know that more often than not there are two sides to every story and G-d gave us erasers on the ends of pencils for a reason. And I’ve also worked with publicists perhaps not quite as cutthroat as Melissa Nathan and her team, but folks who were determined to get as many clicks and, in the day, thick enough decks of press clippings to justify their own worth. Good publicists work hand in hand with researchers to get quantitative validation of their efforts. Whether it’s through ratings, FAM scores in TVQ or social interactions, up arrows are seen as positive outcomes. Sentinence? More debatable.
In a world where the likes of Kim Kardashian–a socialite who became a global brand after her mother leaked a sex tape of her going wild with a rap star–is considered the gold standard in terms of attention-getting and compensation, I’m simply not buying that either Lively nor Baldoni qualifies as angelic and chaste. And I’m certainly not going to accuse the likes of Freedman nor Nathan of having those qualities either.
As for the concept of how all of this might have stained or sullied anyone involved consider this thought, millennials: Someone named Howard Cosell was once simultaneously the most liked AND disliked television personality. He thrived for decades, even surviving perhaps the most ill-cast variety show hosting gig ever awarded.
It also just so happens that all of these lawsuits just happened to coincide with the film’s release month on Netflix, and it just so happens Baldoni happens to own the rights to the second of two books authored by Colleen Hoover, a point not lost on DISTRACTIFY’s Chrissy Bobic:
It Starts With Us is the name of the novel that’s a sequel to It Ends With Us. It continues to follow main character Lily Bloom as she co-parents with her now ex-husband Ryle Kincaid and tries to start a romance with her childhood love, Atlas Corrigan. Given the success of the books, it would make sense for another film to follow the first. But with the controversy and now legal troubles between two of the It Ends With Us stars, the future is questionable.
Questionable, of course, especially now. And none of this is to suggest that neither Lively nor Baldoni haven’t endured some degree of mental anguish, especially now that their dirty laundry is globally known. But profitable and cost-effective original theatrical releases aren’t all that common these days, and don’t think Sony doesn’t know that. And while it might not be creatively congruous for someone else besides Lively to play Lily Bloom, it’s not like there hasn’t been precedence in recasting involving Sony IP. If Darrin Stephens could morph into Dick Sargent from Dick York over a summer, some other CW star with a slightly higher threshold for brotalk could easily be coerced into accepting a role. And if even that possibility were raised, maybe there’s a price that Lively might be able to command that could eventually convince her to say “bygones”? Heck, Brangelina finally settled their squabbles. And maybe now that Freedman is front and center with his own publicity gambit, maybe he’d offer up part of his fee to help Baldoni pay that freight?
The fact of the matter–we’re talking about a modestly reviewed and critically panned movie months after it came and went and that someone like me now knows exactly who Justin Baldoni is and what makes him tick. And this wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last, time something like this unfolds to broaden awareness of people and projects. Sorry to everyone involved–actors, spouses, friends lawyers, publicists, reporters–if you think this level of scrutiny will make a material impact. It won’t end with THIS.
Until next time…