The Blake Lively story that isn't being told

This article is free with reader support. If you want to discuss it in a members-only chat, read future paywalled stories, and support my journalism, consider a $5 subscription! You can also sign up for free.

Welcome to the first edition of Spitfire News! 

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a story about media manipulation and misogyny, two of the overarching themes in our culture right now. This is part one, and I have a part two and three coming. 

Despite President Donald Trump and his unelected advisor/chief propagandist Elon Musk actively dismantling the U.S. federal government, millions of Americans are choosing to invest their energy into smearing a famous actress who sued her male co-star and director for workplace sexual harassment and retaliation in January. 

For the past six months, social media platforms have been flooded with accounts pillorying Blake Lively. Lively starred in Gossip Girl and It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover adaptation that came in no. 17 at the worldwide box office in 2024. Lively’s lawsuit is against Justin Baldoni, who was previously mainly known for appearing in the CW show Jane the Virgin. He acquired the rights to produce, direct, and star in the movie based on Hoover’s bestselling book. Baldoni counter-sued Lively for defamation.  

If it sounds like a redux of the smear campaign against Amber Heard that peaked during her 2022 defamation trial against Johnny Depp, that’s because this is a new chapter in the same playbook. Baldoni’s crisis publicist Melissa Nathan, who Lively is also suing, worked for Depp during the trial. Some of the same YouTubers who covered the trial through a strictly anti-Heard and pro-Depp lens have been churning out hate videos about Lively, earning millions of views and thousands of dollars. And anti-Lively sentiment has dominated the comment sections on platforms like Reddit and TikTok. 

Lively’s suit alleged that Baldoni and his business partners paid between $75,000 and $175,000 for a “social manipulation” campaign that included astroturfing (when multiple inauthentic accounts pose as an organic grassroots movement) and boosting online content disfavorable to Lively while suppressing negative content about Baldoni. In August, days after Baldoni and Nathan discussed these strategies and prices in text messages (screenshots were included in Lively’s lawsuit), the internet began to writhe and seethe with unbridled hatred for Lively. 

In January, after Lively went public with her allegations and Baldoni filed his countersuit, I saw an even bigger swell of online abuse targeting Lively. This time, I also noticed information about members of Baldoni’s team being suppressed. 

This story exposes injustices against people in the entertainment industry and people who are subjected to biased coverage of them online. It is yet another example of the misogynistic response to women reporting sexual harassment and retaliation, which further harms victims and emboldens perpetrators. Today, this cycle of abuse is broadcast to the world as a modern witch trial.

Lively’s lawsuit also offers a peek behind the curtain in the business of social manipulation, a little-understood but widely influential industry that can sway a vocal majority on topics ranging from politics to business to entertainment and beyond. Social manipulation is weaponized by Trump and his allies in their path to destroy the American system of government, only to be received with thunderous applause. These tactics are tested on victims of harassment and abuse.

To illustrate that, we begin in the dark recesses of Reddit comments.

‘Crushing it on Reddit’

Lively’s allegations were shared most widely via a bombshell December New York Times article, written in part by Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvey Weinstein reporter, Megan Twohey. In her suit, Lively obtained text messages between Baldoni’s crisis publicists, Nathan and Jennifer Abel, that outlined a plan to influence the discussion about Lively and Baldoni on social media. 

Specifically, Lively alleges that Nathan and Abel sought out the services of a “fixer” named Jed Wallace. A text obtained from Abel’s phone said Wallace was working to “shift the narrative” against Lively and her husband, Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds, on social media. According to Lively’s complaint, on August 9, the premiere of It Ends With Us, Nathan told Abel that Wallace said, “We are crushing it on Reddit.”

Fast forward to the end of 2024. In the days following the New York Times piece, I began searching for information about Wallace on Reddit and noticed some of the comments containing his name and business, Street Relations, were being downvoted into oblivion. 

On Reddit, users can vote up or down on posts and comments, affecting their ranking and visibility. Each post and comment has a number next to it showing the net value of these votes. When posts and comments are heavily downvoted, the number plunges into the negatives. In comment sections, negatively weighted comments are collapsed, so readers have to manually open them to read them. 

In December, a Reddit user who also noticed this phenomenon happening with Wallace posted a comment that said, “Let the record reflect, that’s Jed Avery Wallace of Street Relations, Inc [...] Everyone say ‘Hi, Jed Wallace’!” 

When I discovered this comment, it had already been downvoted to -82. In another subreddit, the same user posted about their experiment and said the comment had gotten around 10 upvotes before being mass downvoted on the hour. They wrote that their comment about the experiment was also being downvoted.

“We should all be smarter about manipulation of the Reddit algorithm, but of course, no one will learn,” the user added.

The practice of using multiple accounts to upvote or downvote Reddit posts and comments to manipulate their visibility is referred to as vote manipulation or brigading. Users who volunteer as moderators for the various Reddit communities (subreddits) encounter it frequently.

In a statement, a Reddit spokesperson told me “Spam, vote manipulation, and impersonation are strictly prohibited on Reddit. We are constantly monitoring and iterating on our spam and threat detection process to ensure authentic engagement and voting.”

Between the premiere of It Ends With Us in August and the New York Times story in December, the biggest subreddits for discussing pop culture turned on Lively. They included r/Fauxmoi, one of the only subreddits that was largely supportive of Heard. Lively’s lawsuit noted that in August, comments on r/Fauxmoi pushed the narrative that Lively and Reynolds “steamrolled” Baldoni during production.

After the New York Times story, subreddits like r/Fauxmoi had a brief period of reckoning. Comments discussed Reddit manipulation and feeling tricked by Baldoni’s PR team. But as Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman waged an aggressive media campaign, r/Fauxmoi and other mainstream subreddits reverted right back to criticizing Lively. As I monitored the threads, I noticed that comments supportive of Lively were frequently downvoted below ones that carried water for Baldoni. 

In lieu of these larger spaces facilitating discussions about the alleged smear campaign, people who were supportive of Lively gravitated toward much smaller, explicitly pro-Lively subreddits. One of these communities catalogued evidence of anti-Lively, pro-Baldoni social media manipulation, some of which was in their subreddit.

I interviewed two of this subreddit’s moderators about the suppression efforts they had observed and experienced. They have already been repeatedly harassed and threatened, so I granted them anonymity to speak and withheld the name of the subreddit.

“It was actually making us second-guess ourselves, because that’s what that kind of thing does. It makes you think you’re wrong,” one of the pro-Lively moderators said. 

At one point, Reddit intervened on their reports related to a pro-Baldoni subreddit that was created last August, soon after Wallace said they were “crushing it” on Reddit. The pro-Baldoni subreddit had been directing attacks on the pro-Lively subreddit, against Reddit’s sitewide rules. The Reddit spokesperson said the company sent a warning to the pro-Baldoni subreddit for “community interference.”

In addition to the blatant attacks, the two moderators had documented unusual downvoting and false flagging on comments related to Wallace and Freedman, Baldoni’s lawyer. 

What gets buried 

In 1986, when Freedman was a student at University of California at Berkeley, he and two of his fraternity brothers were accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting and battering a 17-year-old girl. Freedman paid a $40,000 settlement to her, without admitting liability, and said the allegations were made “without substantiation.”

The pro-Lively moderators shared screenshots with me showing that at least half a dozen posts and comments in the subreddit that included links to articles about Freedman’s settlement or information about Wallace had been falsely flagged to them as spam and targeted harassment. Their screenshots showed that more than a dozen posts and comments containing the same information were also downvoted into the negatives. 

On Reddit, if you search the link to this Business Insider article about Freedman’s settlement and look at the comments including it, you can see that at least nine comments across six subreddits in the past month containing this link have been downvoted into negative values ranging from around -10 to -30. 

“We made these posts and literally watched as they were downvoted,” one pro-Lively moderator told me. “They would have twenty-plus upvotes and we just watched as they went to zero within fifteen minutes. It was very, very, very quick.”

When a user posted pictures they found of Wallace online in the pro-Lively subreddit, the post wasn’t just flagged for harassment. The moderators also got a direct message from a different anonymous user asking them to take it down, which read in part: “This images [sic] expose the Subject to harassment, putting his family at risk. The existence of these images in the context its being presented is harassing in nature, with the intent of instigating further exposure as evidenced by several comments. We formally request that these images and posts be removed immediately. Thank you for your assistance and cooperation.” 

On Reddit, individual accounts have public achievements that document account milestones. The account that asked for the pictures of Wallace to be removed was created in 2022, but only actively started using Reddit in January. The account had no posts when I checked it.

The moderators didn’t think the pictures of Wallace constituted harassment, but they felt coerced. 

“We did end up taking the post down because we were just kind of creeped out, and it’s a weird situation,” one of the moderators said. “We also want to protect our subreddit.” 

It struck me that the evidence they collected on Reddit after Lively filed her lawsuit was in service of suppressing information related to Wallace and Freedman, as opposed to Nathan or Abel. 

While reading a cease and desist letter Lively’s lawyers sent Freedman in late December, which was filed in court in late January, I learned that Wallace and Freedman were apparently already “very close” before August. Nathan said that to Abel in a text message that month, asking to add her to a group chat with Wallace, “Just in case you need him to connect you to Bryan.” Freedman is also representing Nathan and Abel.

So, who is this mysterious Wallace, anyways? 

According to an anonymous source who spoke to Variety, Wallace is a “‘Ray Donovan’ type fixer employed by powerful people.” An anonymous entertainment executive told Business Insider Wallace is “‘the guy you hire if your kid is stuck in Bolivia or something.’” Freedman said Wallace had the skills and resources to coordinate a medical evacuation in remote Italy.

What I found in my own attempt to reconstruct Wallace’s résumé from press releases, reporting, and internet breadcrumbs was far less cinematic (albeit apparently legal).

Wallace is listed as a media contact on press releases for dubious medical innovations from ayahuasca practitioners (for the uninitiated, that’s a psychedelic drug popular among West Coast elitists). Business Insider reported that Wallace represented Twitch streamer and hall of fame idiot Adin Ross. When a running forum suspected a T.V. journalist was faking a run across America, one forum member posted emails he said the journalist’s “PR guy,” Wallace, exchanged with him about the forum’s discussions. Oh, and in 2022, Wallace settled a lawsuit with Jackass star Bam Margera, who accused Wallace of administering an “inhumane” substance abuse treatment to him without training or credentials. Wallace denied the claims.

I can see why Wallace and Freedman would have crossed paths, since Freedman has represented a bevy of lowbrow figures accused of wrongdoing, from Perez Hilton and David Dobrik to Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly (more on that in part two).

‘Most importantly untraceable’

As I dug into the downvoted posts about them, I came across a 2018 research paper on political and apolitical Reddit vote manipulation co-authored by University of South Australia PhD candidate Mark Carman. Carman told me he got interested in Reddit manipulation during 2016, when pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald kept appearing on the platform’s “front page” of its most popular posts. 

As an example, Carman said it’s possible for film studios to get a new movie trailer on Reddit’s front page through paid vote manipulation that targets content with upvotes, not downvotes. If a post received even just ten inauthentic upvotes soon after it was published, he found it would perform dramatically better than other posts.  

“So it could be used commercially to get your stuff upvoted, it could be used politically to get your point of view upvoted,” Carman said. “It’s like a self-reinforcing loop. Once something is popular, it’s popular because it’s popular.”

In his research, Carman said he paid for an upvote service that charges per upvote (something like ten cents each) that he said likely utilizes human labor in countries like India. He said services offer downvotes as well, with a similar time frame that my Reddit sources described witnessing.

“I found that most of the votes started applying after about ten, fifteen minutes,” Carman said. “But they couldn’t guarantee that they’d all be applied until up to about an hour.” 

When Carman was doing this research in 2018, he said there wasn’t a lot of Reddit research in general and he couldn’t identify a specific astroturfing campaign, just the methods that could be used for them.

A Reddit spokesperson said the landscape and tooling to combat manipulation on the platform have evolved since 2018. They said Reddit looks for widespread patterns of behavior versus individual upvotes and downvotes on posts and that the platform “found no signs of scaled manipulation” related to Lively and Baldoni.

“We also take action against anyone who claims or advertises that they manipulate Reddit,” the spokesperson said. They said that there were some downvotes in the communities I flagged coming from suspicious users but that Reddit’s automated systems discarded those votes.

Since 2018, Reddit’s active user base has also more than doubled, and its anonymous forum threads are significantly more influential than they were in the 2010s. Some people add the word “reddit” to Google searches to find information from (presumably) real people on the social media platform versus SEO-driven slop. This trick became so popular that Google began scraping Reddit content for its own AI, which has replaced top search results with AI-generated answers. Reddit threads have a bigger impact than ever.

“My view of systems like Reddit is that yes, it’s easy to manipulate,” Carman said.

After the New York Times piece, Abel posted in a private Facebook group that her team “didn’t have to implement anything” related to the “social combat plan,” “because the internet was doing the work for us.” Anyone could be responsible.

When Nathan pitched Wallace’s services to Baldoni, her text described them as “most importantly untraceable.” Lively’s legal filings have implicated Wallace in her retaliation allegations. He in turn sued her separately for defamation in February. His lawyer and Freedman are betting she doesn’t have the evidence to definitively link any social media manipulation to their clients. They didn’t respond to my requests for comments.

Wallace’s strategy has been to lay low. He’s barely mentioned in Baldoni’s lawsuit. Freedman, meanwhile, is on offense against Lively. I’ll unpack that more in part two. 

If you’re interested in discussing this case and my findings in a members-only chat, please consider subscribing for $5. You’ll also support my journalism and get access to paywalled stories, including one coming later this week with my diary of a YouTuber commentary tour across the U.S. If you can’t afford the subscription, just send me an email at [email protected]. You can also sign up for free.

In the meantime, here is some stuff to read/watch/listen to about this:

• The “Who Trolled Amber?” podcast produced by Tortoise Media, the outlet that broke allegations of sexual abuse against Neil Gaiman. This series is about social media manipulation around Depp v. Heard and I was interviewed in one episode.

• A podcast episode I did about Blake Lively with my good friend Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity. We filmed this on the day Baldoni filed his countersuit, and by the time we were done, I could already see the tide turning against Lively on social media again.

• Taylor Lorenz wrote this piece for User Mag back in December about the damage done when the media won’t use the word “misogyny” when reporting on this case or others. User Mag also broke that Ashley St. Clair is suing Musk for custody of their child.

Thanks for reading this far and stay tuned for more!