As she watched the tide turn online against Blake Lively in the It Ends With Us drama last summer, Justin Baldoni's newly-hired publicist mused to a colleague their team had a reliable weapon on their side: misogyny.
"Socials are really, really ramping up in his favour," Melissa Nathan said of Baldoni, according to emails obtained by Lively in a lawsuit and shared with The New York Times. "[Lively] must be furious. It's actually sad because it just shows you have people [who] really want to hate on women."
Nathan, a crisis PR professional whose firm has worked with Johnny Depp and Drake, among others, wasn't wrong. It's never been easier to destroy a woman's reputation using the internet. Most of the time, the people leading the charge are other women in woman-dominated online spaces, which have been insidiously weaponized and manipulated without those participating even realizing it.
This is what Lively is claiming to have experienced last summer, when rumors of a feud between herself and Baldoni on the set of the film It Ends With Us began to surface. Lively was the star of the highly-anticipated movie, the first adaption of a novel written by bestselling author Colleen Hoover, and undoubtedly was the biggest name. However, on set, the power largely rested with Baldoni, who not only co-starred in the film, but directed it. The production studio Baldoni co-founded, Wayfarer Studios, was producing the film as one of its first big projects, and had the backing of billionaire businessman Steve Sarowitz, who is co-chair of the studio.
According to the bombshell lawsuit, Baldoni and his producing partner Jamey Heath, subjected Lively and other women on set to a barrage of sexual harassment, bullied and fat-shamed her, and exposed her and her infant to COVID-19, which they both contracted (the full complaint, which details all the allegations, is worth a read). After production paused for the union strikes in 2023, Lively and her team sent Baldoni, Heath, and Wayfarer a list of provisions for ending the hostile work environment and demanded they agree to them before Lively would return to set (they did).
When the film ramped up for the release in 2024, according to the lawsuit, Baldoni and his team began to worry that it would soon become obvious that something had gone down on set. The entire cast had unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram and he was shut out from group events featuring Blake Lively and It Ends With Us.
The film itself is pretty good. Everything else? Kind of a mess.
So, the lawsuit alleges, Baldoni enlisted a cadre of PR professionals, including Nathan, to shift the narrative in his favor. Their main strategy? Make the internet -- and then society at large -- hate Lively (the actual phrasing they allegedly used was "bury" her). And they knew exactly what to do. After all, they had a blueprint.
"This is what we would need," Baldoni allegedly texted Abel, sharing an X (Twitter) thread accusing Hailey Bieber of bullying women. Using "social manipulation" and "proactive fan posting," the group discussed, they could turn the tides of online sentiment against Lively in forums like Reddit, X, TikTok, and Instagram.
The surprise here isn't that it worked, apparently even better than the team anticipated (sentiment against Lively has essentially been in the toilet since the August release of the film). It was that this is the first time that those who enthusiastically bought the apparent campaign are realizing they may have been manipulated.
"Played us like a goddamn fiddle didn't they?" said one posted in r/FauxMoi, the 4-million member subreddit for (former) fans of the celebrity gossip account DeuxMoi.
"I feel so disappointed in myself," wrote another. "I thought I was a critical thinker. I cannot believe how completely I was manipulated by this guy's smear campaign."
The Lively lawsuit thus is not only a bombshell news story, it's become a critical juncture for a now hugely influential and problematic online gossip mill that has, until this point, been completely without scrutiny by many who participate. The real question is -- will people continue to fall for it?
Over the past several years, this ecosystem has exploded in popularity, with real consequences. From my vantage point, it first began with celebrity gossip Instagram accounts or "tea" accounts on TikTok. On these accounts, people with zero industry connections and no actual evidence enthusiastically repeat anonymous "blind items" sent to them by anyone who chooses to write in, spreading unsubstantiated gossip that is then repeated by others desperate to get in on the clout. With trust in mainstream publications dipping and media literacy cratering, many intelligent people accept these stories at face value, many convinced that these accounts were somehow revealing behind-the-scenes intel that corporate media for whatever reason would or could not.
The Amber Heard trial was the first time we really saw the insidiousness of what these gossip mills could do. Armies of TikTokers and social media "reporters" followed the trial breathlessly and nearly all of them were against Heard, who had been sued by her former husband Johnny Depp for, he said, claiming he abused her. As I wrote at the time, the demonization of Heard online was ironic because it happened at the same time many maligned women of the past -- Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbit, Tonya Harding -- were getting a redemption arc.
While it's unclear what if any similar tactics were used by Nathan and her team against Heard when she was representing Johnny Depp, Heard herself clearly sees a similarity between the takedown of Lively online and what she experienced.
"Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying 'A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on,'" Heard, who moved to Europe following the near-total annihilation of her reputation, told NBC News. "I saw this firsthand and up close. It's as horrifying as it is destructive."
Since Depp v. Heard, we've seen gossip stories with similar vibes -- driven largely by social media, heavy on speculation, light on facts, taking down famous women -- drive conversation several times. Another example people are citing is the alleged "Hailey v. Selena feud," where fans of the pop star began a relentless campaign of hate against the Rhode founder based on unsubstantiated rumors and "analysis" of Bieber's social media posts. The online campaign was so effective that Baldoni's team, as noted above, apparently used it as inspo.
What the team was saying wasn't that any of these previous "takedowns" were necessarily driven by public relations firms. They were noting a very real fact: it is incredibly easy to turn the public tide against a woman using these channels as weapons. And the hardest part to swallow is that we as a society, especially women, have allowed ourselves to be weaponized.
It's easy to think that engaging with a blind item TikTok or sharing an Instagram Reel breaking down apparent drama behind the scenes is a harmless and silly pursuit. But by blindly engaging with these types of unverified and insidious content, there are actual, real life consequences. In the lawsuit, Lively's lawyers state she has been emotionally devastated by the campaign.
"There are days when she has struggled to get out of bed, and she frequently chooses not to venture outside in public," the complaint states.
And the blind acceptance of gossip, conspiracy, and rumors can lead to even darker paths. One of the biggest Instagram accounts posting against Heard during the trial, former mommy blogger House in Habit, has since become a mouthpiece for far-right conspiracy.
But there is good news: the power is ultimately in the hands of the consumer. And many people, it seems, are taking the Lively lawsuit as a reason to think differently in the future. After all, they can only manipulate the narrative if we make ourselves easily manipulatable.
"During the next big drama, we should all stop and question..." wrote one commenter online. "Everyone put on your thinking caps please and reconsider everything you thought you knew about this case. We have to think critically about this in the future too."