Let’s talk about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

While it seems frivolous to discuss some celebrity drama over a movie with everything else happening in the world, there are reasons that this case has so fully captured the world’s attention.

Lively is a woman who is the epitome of privilege. Powerful, beautiful (with specific traits—tall, blonde, blue eyes), rich (and born rich), famous, extremely well connected in Hollywood and outside of it.

Baldoni is a man who self-proclaimed as a feminist, a good guy, a nice guy. He’s very good looking and though not anywhere near as famous as Lively, he still has access to endless money.

Lively has accused Baldoni of sexual harassment in the workplace under California definition, which seems to be defined as either a single egregious incident or a lower-key persistent pattern of lesser infractions of harassment. These accusations were addressed during filming, but Lively claims that Baldoni then preemptively hired a team of people to smear or bury her during the film’s promotion as retaliation.

Baldoni denies that he harassed her, and claims that she took over his movie. He claims that people hated on her through her own actions.

All, of course, can be true. He can have harassed her and others on set by acting inappropriately, and she could have used that extra power to take over the movie, and he could have aided in the smearing, and she could have aided in her own smearing.

Also, Baldoni’s team could just be right. The world loves to hate a woman that they perceive as even a tiny bit “difficult.” And TikTok is working overtime to find every possible clip where Lively is even the slightest bit unlikable.

Some of what’s really being litigated in the Court of Public Opinion now is:

– What is sexual harassment? Where’s the line?

– Are the accusations false or overblown? Should Baldoni lose his career over them?

– Was Lively wrong for using her power and asserting her vision over the movie…And basically winning? With the studio, with the cast, with the box office audience?

I have my own strong opinions over what likely happened between these two humans, and I hope both get their day in court. But I was thinking about why those opinions are so strong in the first place:

— Because watching a woman with the most privilege and protection and resources being eviscerated in the public for every tiny thing she did wrong is trauma-inducing for so many of us.

— Because watching a video where Lively is clearly deeply uncomfortable with acting choreography that’s not even a little bit in the script—and trying to brush off Baldoni’s unwanted advances under the guise of “creative differences”—is also way too familiar. Listening to people say that his behavior is fine when what I’m watching is soooo…Not fine, is also trauma-inducing. Why did he keep pressing her to act in ways that she stated she didn’t want to? Why did he belittle her views of romance and falling in love? Why didn’t he stop and ask if she was comfortable with the scene?

— Because watching Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman turn to extremist right wing pundits like Megyn Kelly (who is a client of Freedman’s) and Candice Owens as well as gossip King Perez Hilton (also a client of his) for support in driving their “narrative” is deeply disturbing and disappointing. Seeing more (mostly white) women being funneled into these misinformation pipelines over celebrity gossip is the opposite of what women or this country needs right now. (No matter what happens with Baldoni, this is his unforgivable sin in my book. It shows me that he’s neither a feminist nor “man enough” and he was always just another male grifter trying to monetize and manipulate women out of their money without actually contributing to their liberation.)

— Because other “good men” like Neil Gaiman also have had their actions come to light…And the magnitude of what women are up against is exhausting.

— Because in the midst of dealing with a tranche of misinformation and hostility and damage from the government, I’m seeing how deeply entrenched supremacy and misogyny are STILL rooted in so many people, including people I thought were safe. Including people who are concerned about the White House activity and even voted against this administration, but are ready to throw Lively under the bus completely because they are uncomfortable with her using the power she had to do what she thought was right for the film.

— Because the Lively pile on is so frustrating and so full of its own misinformation and so fully DARVO, AND you literally can’t convince someone that they have been manipulated even when you show them DARVO, and that’s pretty much the summation of trying to talk to people who voted for Trump too. It’s another situation where facts don’t seem to matter more than hatred, and it’s so exhausting to think about.

There are no solutions, and I imagine that people will continue to hate on Lively until she disappears or wins her case, and Baldoni will reemerge as a right-wing media figure because he actually has no other choice since his career as a feminist at least is over.

But I know I’ll continue following all of this with dismay at how so many people in the US think about the issues at hand.

If you want to read a fairly neutral lawyer’s breakdown of the actual motions on the case, I found this woman who is doing them over on Threads and Substack: https://morewithmj.substack.com/.