Cast your mind back to the summer, and you might recall how one famous woman seemed suddenly to emerge as public enemy No 1. That woman? Actor Blake Lively.
If you spent any time scrolling through social media, you might have seen TikTok stars enumerating every mistake that Lively, 37, had ever made in public. You’ll have spotted Twitter/X threads claiming that her upbeat promotional tactics for her movie It Ends With Us, a film that deals with an abusive relationship, didn’t appropriately chime with the solemnity of its message.
Online sleuths combed the internet for evidence of an alleged feud with her co-star and director Justin Baldoni. Instagram commenters criticised her, too, for launching a haircare brand in the middle of all this. Lively was, it seemed to have somehow been decided, the celeb that it was totally fine to slag off for apparently being “annoying”, “too much” or “tone deaf”.
This weekend, though, brought a new development in this saga, when it emerged that the actor is suing Baldoni for sexual harassment. Lively’s lawsuit alleges that his behaviour on set caused her “severe emotional distress”, and claims that he then embarked on a campaign to “destroy” her reputation (in response, Baldoni’s lawyer described the allegations as “false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt”).
It’s the sort of celebrity news that prompts a slightly queasy feeling when you read it; when you realise that the drama that was being exploited for TikTok views and the dopamine buzz of sharing gossip turns out to be more serious and complex than we previously thought. And it arguably raises important questions about how we respond to women in the public eye: namely, why are we always so quick to assassinate their character (and why is this still such a rich source of entertainment)?
In order to get to grips with that, first we need to take a closer look at the backlash against Lively that brewed around the release of It Ends with Us. First, eagle-eyed fans spotted that Lively, along with IEWU author Colleen Hoover and some other cast members, appeared not to be following Baldoni on social media in the lead-up to the film’s release. The cast appeared divided on the red carpet. Lively, by far the film’s most established star, seemed to try to lean into more uplifting aspects of the story, while Baldoni earned praise online for talking about its themes of trauma and abuse.
Then, Lively took some heat from social media users for promoting her various commercial interests – including a new haircare line, as well as her drinks brands – at around the same time. Celebrity interviewer Kjersti Flaa unearthed a short but excruciatingly awkward clip recorded during a promotional chat with Lively back in 2016, titled “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job”. Lively appeared to be the worst thing that any famous woman can possibly be – unlikeable (Flaa, I should add, has vehemently denied any involvement in an alleged smear campaign against the actor).
It opened the floodgates for everyone to elaborate on every previous reason for which they might have disliked the woman formerly best known as the leading lady of Gossip Girl. To say that we love to tear women down has become a cliché, and yes, often this line is used as a convenient defence when women actually do bad things. But many clichés are clichés because they’re rooted in truth. Sometimes it feels as if we are just waiting for the smallest excuse to unleash a tide of criticism against a woman for the heinous crime of being annoying in public.
Sometimes it feels as if we are just waiting for the smallest excuse to unleash a tide of criticism against a woman for the heinous crime of being annoying in public
It is convenient for us to be given the collective go-ahead to hate on someone like Lively, because it allows us to indulge in that most satisfying of emotions – schadenfreude. She is about as conventionally beautiful as it is possible to be, is extremely wealthy, is happily married to another film star, Ryan Reynolds, and has children who are namechecked in Taylor Swift songs.
She has, of course, made some very public mistakes (her and Reynolds’ 2012 wedding on a former plantation in South Carolina remains a source of controversy). She might not come across winningly in every interview recording, and she might, like many of us, be prone to making the odd ill-judged remark. The fact that those supposed missteps seemed like just cause for “cancellation” says much more about us than it does about her.
What’s especially frustrating about seeing the cycle of gossip, backlash, then back-pedalling occur is that we should, and do, know better. We’re in the midst of a vogue for rehabilitating the reputations of female stars that were knocked down years ago, and discussing how unfair that treatment was.
When Anne Hathaway starred in The Idea of You earlier this year, her role was heralded by a flurry of weighty think pieces and discussions about how bizarre and downright cruel it had been to attack her for being a bit earnest and self-serious in the mid-2010s. The “Free Britney” movement, a slew of documentaries and Spears’s autobiography The Woman in Me have shone light on just how unfairly Britney was treated by the media a decade earlier.
But despite this, we remain absolutely rubbish at spotting these patterns when they are happening in real time. You can see something similar (and similarly noxious) playing out in the current tabloid portrayal of Ariana Grande, where salacious and gossipy speculation about her weight is being framed with a sprinkling of faux concern, as if to legitimise invasive conversations about her body.
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the rush of watching another woman’s popularity take a nosedive. We fill in the gaps and presume that they are the villain. So next time this happens (and if we can make one 2025 prediction with any degree of certainty, it’s that a famous woman will find herself at the heart of a brutal backlash), let’s pause and ask ourselves a few questions before rushing to delight in someone’s potential downfall. What do we actually know about this scenario? Why do we feel so vehemently about a woman we’ve never met? And why are we so keen to knock them down a peg?