There will be another Blake Lively

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This is the third and final part in my series about actress Blake Lively and her sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit against her It Ends With Us director and co-star Justin Baldoni, who countersued her for defamation. Part one was about Reddit suppression. Part two was about mainstream media manipulation. Part three looks at misogyny, identity, and the women impacted beyond Lively.

On January 1, I went to my friend Matt Bernstein’s apartment and filmed a podcast about Lively. It was a week after the New York Times article that exposed the alleged smear campaign against her. During the episode, we talked about how Lively’s privilege allowed her to combat the campaign in a way no other victim in recent memory has. 

Matt and I talked for hours. After we wrapped, I went to show him a TikTok of an egregious example of misogynistic language a woman attacked Lively with last summer. 

But when I opened TikTok and it automatically took me to my FYP (the “For You Page,” a feed of videos curated by the app’s personalized algorithm), it showed me a video posted that day that already had millions of likes. The video was a woman claiming that Baldoni’s complaint against the Times disproved Lively’s allegations. 

“So many of you guys were so mad at me saying ‘You’re not a girl’s girl,’ ‘You don’t believe in women when they tell you these things,’ ‘Just because you don’t like her doesn’t mean that she’s not also a victim,’” the woman in the TikTok mimicked dismissively.

My stomach dropped. It was happening again. Just like Depp v. Heard. Just like all the other cases. People who support victims try to educate other people about solidarity, bias, and the myth of the “perfect victim.” Sometimes, it seems like it’s working. Then the work gets thrown back in our faces.

Less than two weeks later, Business Insider reported that data collected by Sprout Social showed both stars’ reputations were tanking online. But as the months rolled on, Baldoni’s fans have only grown and strengthened their ranks, while people who trusted the Times reporting have largely moved on to other topics. Lively continues to be hit with an unending firehose of abuse online and off. 

This is what happened to Amber Heard between 2016, when she publicly obtained a restraining order against Johnny Depp, and 2022, when she was eaten alive by the public during the defamation trial she lost in the U.S. The cases look similar for several reasons. One, Depp and Baldoni share a crisis publicist. Two, some of the same content creators are driving the conversation. And three, both cases have saturated social media platforms to the point where it can become impossible to ignore.

This piece explores the ways the mechanisms working against Lively and other celebrity women also work against everyday women who don’t have their resources or platforms. It also considers how race, class, and gender factor into abuse and smear campaigns. While the “Me Too” movement today is defined by celebrity, it was started by a Black woman advocating for Black girls in her community. Women of color and women who aren’t famous are more vulnerable and less visible victims.

A uniting factor in these cases is that women are some of other women’s biggest supporters—and detractors. The cases I examine here all start with allegations of patriarchal violence, and the response to them has upheld the power men have to oppress women. They also feature women gaining status and making money by enabling male violence, whether it’s on social media or as a Hollywood insider. Victims’ attempts to seek justice become for-profit entertainment at their expense.

There’s an incredible irony in the fact that Lively was initially condemned for not taking the issue of domestic violence seriously enough while promoting the fictional story of It Ends With Us. As punishment, the masses have humiliated and abused her for real and undermined her real allegations of sexual violence. It’s fun for them.

How TikTok sets the narrative

Attorney and content creator Reb Masel, who has almost 2 million TikTok followers, saw the same video I did on January 1. The next day, Masel posted a response. She refuted the TikTok’s entire underlying argument, pointing out that the woman speaking had no legal expertise and was distorting and fabricating how the system worked.

“To a lawyer, that was like watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ for a surgeon,” Masel said in her video. But it received a fraction of the views and engagement that the original did.

This is how misinformation has always spread, including before the internet existed. A confident, uninformed, and/or malicious person speaks with authority and reaches a wide audience. A person trying to correct them after the fact reaches far fewer people with the truth. TikTok gives us the ability to observe and perpetuate this spread of misinformation on a global scale. But it doesn’t actually give us the opportunity to stop or correct it.

You might think that one way to combat social media-driven smear campaigns is to make the same kind of content in support of victims. There are people doing just that. But they face an uphill battle on an uneven playing field.

Anna Bash is a TikTok creator with just under 100,000 followers. As a member of the creator fund, she said she was able to pay her rent from money she made on TikTok. In December, a video Bash made about Baldoni surpassed 1 million views. In it, she watches clips from a nearly 30-minute video Baldoni made to propose to his wife in 2012, which he posted on YouTube (it has 14 million views). “If your boyfriend makes you watch a 30-minute video of himself as a proposal to you, you need to run, girl,” Bash said. “This is all about him, it has nothing to do with her.”

Bash’s TikTok got so much attention that there were a few online news articles written about it. At that point, Bash said, mostly positive feedback was interrupted by a stream of negative comments with such similar sentiments that they were almost “robotic.” She shared screenshots of comments with me that said Lively is “difficult to work with,” a “textbook narcissist,” was “hopping on the MeToo bandwagon,” and “sounds more like she was sexually assaulting him.” Other comments told Bash to “get off the internet” and suggested she was being paid by Lively.

To the contrary, three days later, Bash said she was suspended from the TikTok creator fund where she made most of her income. Bash shared screenshots that showed her TikTok account was in good standing without prior warnings or rule violations on previous videos about Baldoni. Nonetheless, she shared a screenshot showing her appeal was denied. 

“It was just thousands lost,” Bash said. “It’s my rent money, it’s my livelihood.” Bash wonders if she was targeted in a false-flagging campaign to trigger an automatic suspension from the creator fund for triggering so many misconduct reports. TikTok didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok are positioned as neutral spaces where anyone can share their opinion on equal footing as long as they don’t violate community guidelines. But in practice, that’s not the case. Once a specific narrative framing like “Depp good, Heard bad” or “Baldoni good, Lively bad” gets traction, creators benefit from sharing that viewpoint. The algorithm is trained to suggest content with this skew to new and returning viewers, like how I got served the pro-Baldoni, anti-Lively TikTok immediately upon opening the app. And Lively’s defenders face online harassment and targeted attacks. 

The thing that gets the narrative framing to stick can be organic or coordinated. A group of mid-sized creators who know each other and make similar content can easily direct narratives by getting ahead of the story and attacking prominent people on the other side. They can draw conclusions before hearing the evidence and in whatever way fits their preconceived bias. They can turn people into characters. Some of the same people who created and collaborated on pro-Depp, anti-Heard content immediately seized on the Lively case with the same framing, because it resulted in huge attention and profit for them a few years ago.

This niche goes by different names, including “drama and commentary channels,” “pop culture justice” channels, independent journalism, and so on. It intersects with men’s rights activism, the manosphere, and conservative media. But it has resulted in creators and audiences who are always hunting for new women to throw on the pyre. Those women don’t have to be famous. 

The social media smear campaign next door

In 2023, I reported on a woman named Samantha White. Sam is an everyday single mom who started using TikTok in 2020. Over the course of that year, Sam’s marriage turned abusive. She reported her ex-husband to the Coast Guard base he worked at for emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. In response, he denied the allegations and accused Sam of emotional and physical abuse. The Coast Guard investigated and found Sam’s allegations met their criteria, while her ex-husband’s didn’t. He was discharged for misconduct. A few days later, at the end of 2022, Sam’s ex began posting videos of her online.

The videos featured Sam in distress during confrontations toward the end of their abusive relationship, when she was trying to leave. They went viral, with people mocking Sam, giving her cruel nicknames, and labeling her as a “crazy” woman who her ex had to escape. Sam had already made TikToks about healing from abuse, and she posted her story and evidence. They received a tiny fraction of the views her ex received, and his videos were spreading—to the front page of Reddit and to men’s rights activists. Someone left a Post-it note on Sam’s door in 2023 with a link to a YouTube Shorts video of her and the words “You need to see this.”

One of the most persistent men’s rights creators who has been making videos about Sam for more than a year is a woman named Chloe Sunderland, who has close to 2 million subscribers. According to her YouTube channel she’s currently engaged, but back when I interviewed her, she was a single mom like Sam. They both said they had left abusive ex-husbands and both of them were interrupted during our calls by their young kids.

Sunderland acknowledged to me that her videos drove the false perception that women were more abusive than men, and she told Sam in messages that she didn’t care that Sam’s ex-husband had been kicked out of the Coast Guard for abusing her. She sounded meek on the phone and brash on YouTube, where she can make money from bashing Sam.

After I wrote my article, Sunderland made derogatory content about it. After that, Sam wrote Sunderland a letter asking her to cease and desist, but Sunderland just turned it into more content. Sam said she spoke to a few lawyers, but they weren’t interested. And she said she even reached out to the police in Canada, where Sunderland lives, but they blew her off. 

“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, it’s not that big of a deal,’” Sam told me over the phone in February. “But it is a big deal, because even if it’s all online, it follows you. I get comments to this day. It will still haunt me five years down the road.”

Today, Sam is much happier than when I first spoke to her two years ago. But she had to sacrifice the way she existed publicly to be happy. When Sam makes TikToks now, she doesn’t post them. She had to shrink, retreat, and anonymize herself to exist online, where she had always been able to connect with other women before. She had to desensitize herself to online abuse, “box it up and shove it in a closet” in her mind, so she could be a good mom.

“It was very textbook of my ex-husband to attack me online, because he knew how important my online presence was to me. I did that way before he came into my life,” Sam said. “So for him to start a smear campaign against me and ruin my reputation, that was so typical.”

She’s right. It’s so typical for abusers to act this way that there’s a name for it: DARVO, which stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. In practice, abusers will often admit to doing what victims said they did, but they will deny it was abusive. They will attack the victim with false claims, positing that the victim is the real aggressor and perpetrator. This is what Sam’s ex-husband did. It mirrors how Baldoni responded to Lively. And it’s echoed by every person online who likes, shares, and joins a smear campaign.

‘Two totally different realms’

Another thing Heard and Lively have in common is they are both white actresses. The “Me Too” stories that get the most media attention, from tabloids to YouTube to cable news, are the cases involving celebrities. The victims who get the most attention are white women. The kind of attention they get is often abusive, but it still obscures the broader scope of the Me Too movement and smear campaigns.

Me Too was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a Black woman and activist in New York City, to address rampant sexual violence against Black girls. The movement as a hashtag was started by actress Alyssa Milano in 2017, and Me Too has been most widely defined by high-profile cases about sexual violence, abuse, and harassment ever since. Me Too has also become defined by the entertainment value these allegations present to the public, even though it’s retraumatizing at best for the victims.

This era of Me Too minimizes the movement’s origin with Black women and girls and continues to minimize Black women and girls even when they are celebrities. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion was shot by fellow rapper Tory Lanez in 2020 and obtained a restraining order against him this year on the grounds that he continues to harass and drive a social media smear campaign against her from prison. Meghan Markle has been harassed and smeared by racist hate accounts, tabloids, and Royal Family fans since 2016.

Black women are also disproportionately more likely to experience workplace sexual harassment, according to analysis from the National Women’s Law Center. Adrienne Lawrence, a USC Annenberg instructor who wrote a book about workplace sexual harassment, told me everyday victims and victims of Lively’s stature are “in two totally different realms.”

“Blake Lively has her celebrity, her wealth, her whiteness, her beauty, all these forms of far-reaching privilege,” Lawrence said. “The everyday survivor of workplace sexual harassment doesn’t have these privileges or resources, they do have to wonder ‘Am I going to be able to feed my children if I decide to stand up for myself?’”

“I believe this is why it’s incredibly underreported, because people don’t have that power,” Lawrence continued. “Only a certain segment of our community can do that. Otherwise, you’re struggling the rest of your life.”

The fact that Lively has been undermined to this degree goes to show that even a white, blonde, conventionally attractive married woman in the spotlight can’t meet the impossible standard of the “perfect victim,” Lawrence said. While Lively’s privileges don’t trickle down, the attitudes toward women reporting sexual harassment do.

“It’s the thought that you’re lying. It’s the thought that you may have made a play for power. It didn’t work out in your favor, and now you’re trying to tarnish someone’s reputation,” Lawrence said. “There’s no such thing as this ideal, perfect victim.”

In Bash’s TikTok comment sections, Lively’s detractors often brought up her whiteness. Some brought up how Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds got married on a plantation, which Reynolds apologized for in 2020.

“That’s something I can’t forget,” Lawrence, who is a Black woman, said about Lively romanticizing the Antebellum era of slavery in the U.S. 

As a legal analyst and former litigator, Lawrence foresees Baldoni’s team using Lively’s past controversies against her during court. The case is expected to go to trial in 2026, but the judge suggested it could happen earlier because of the continued avalanche of media attention. Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman has maintained that the online backlash against Lively is “organic,” so they may try to put all kinds of criticism in front of the jury, even if it only serves to deflect from the credibility of Lively’s sexual harassment and retaliation allegations. Given the universal scale of the social media scrutiny, the jury may have already been swayed against Lively.

“If someone is viewed as problematic, it’s difficult for a lot of people to see them as a victim, because that would be more nuanced,” Lawrence said. “I think that played a role in society’s willingness to say ‘I knew it. She lied about it,’ in addition to how our society is programmed to disbelieve women.”

This undermining of credibility only goes one way for the majority of people talking about the case. Baldoni’s problematic history isn’t weaponized against him and his supporters the same way Lively’s is weaponized against her and her supporters. Lively is guilty in the court of public opinion without a chance to defend herself in a real court, while Baldoni benefits from a level of support he’s never previously received without having to prove his allegations. Men also benefit from the presumption of innocence no matter what happens in court, as we’ve seen in cases like Megan Thee Stallion, where Lanez’s supporters contest his guilty ruling, and with Depp and Heard, where his supporters dismiss a judge’s ruling in Heard’s favor in the U.K.

It remains clear to me throughout all of these cases, while the victims vary in their privilege and capacity to harm others, that they have all been crushed by misogyny. Lively’s suit contains screenshots of subpoenaed text messages between Baldoni’s publicists, one of whom is Melissa Nathan, who also represented Depp. After the premiere of It Ends With Us and the resulting hate train against Lively, Nathan wrote, “it's actually sad because it just shows you have people who really want to hate on women.”

In some ways, Lively is the least relevant person in this playbook, because her role could be played by any woman. The specifics are unique to her, but the purpose of her public humiliation ritual is not. She must be punished for attempting to undermine a man’s power. 

“Society is structured to enable the victimization of women,” Lawrence said. “It’s one of those moves of ‘How do we get back to the status quo? Can we put this person back in their place?’ Especially so other women don’t get some idea in their head that they deserve to be treated well, too.”

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