It is easy to force people to hate a beautiful blonde woman with an aspirational job
I have a complicated relationship with my TikTok algorithm, and never more so than this week when the app decided that I needed to be bombarded with videos vilifying actress, drinks entrepreneur, and film producer Blake Lively.
In case you’ve taken a step away from the internet to enjoy the festive period, Lively has filed a lawsuit against her former It Ends with Us co-star, Justin Baldoni, alleging sexual harassment during filming and a campaign to damage her reputation.
The legal filing includes text messages allegedly showing Baldoni, who plays Lively’s abusive husband in the film, and a PR crisis management team coordinating a smear campaign against Lively. (Baldoni’s lawyer denies all the allegations as “false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt”.)
After the news of Blake’s legal action broke this week, my TikTok feed, usually filled with recipes, interiors and silly skits, was suddenly drowning in videos where men and women filming themselves in their bedrooms claim that Lively is the devil incarnate.
In the words of Taylor Swift, one of Lively’s best friends: “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.” Amber Heard, whose ex-husband Johnny Depp used the same PR crisis expert as Baldoni during their defamation trial, was also vilified on social media.
Thousands and thousands of hours of content, designed to convince the viewer that a woman is lying about being abused. And from the state of the commentary online, my God is it easy to force people to hate a beautiful blonde woman with an aspirational job.
I’m not sure that many of Lively’s critics have spent time reflecting on what motivates their enjoyment of someone else’s suffering, but if they were to undergo a little self reflection, I’d assume it’s a combination of jealousy, and a perception that is somehow “deserved” – that the natural consequence of success is a smackdown.
Many of the major celebrity commentators on social media have developed a very modern way of criticising celebrities. Where once upon a time Heat magazine would put a red ring around a woman’s cellulite, now a freelance content creator will claim that someone is “problematic”. These people know that they can no longer say “there’s just something about her I don’t like” because it’s rooted in sexism. So instead they’ll find ways that a celebrity is morally wanting, and then, as soon as she’s been convicted in the court of public opinion for Not Being Nice, it’s open season.
Public opinion on Lively turned sharply in August 2024 while she was on the press tour for It Ends with Us, when she became the Main Villain of the internet.
Rumours of a feud between the two leads had simmered on gossip sites. But suddenly, just as Lively was everywhere promoting the film, criticism of her began to grow. She launched a hair care line at the same time that she was promoting a film with a domestic violence storyline, which online critics were quick to describe as disrespectful and insensitive. She was criticised for promoting her alcoholic drinks company too, and for not doing more to raise awareness of domestic violence during her interviews.
Then a clip surfaced of Lively being “rude” to a journalist during a press junket back in 2016. In the clip, the journalist comments on Lively’s pregnancy bump, to which Lively responds “and your little bump!” to the journalist, who was demonstrably not pregnant.
Between the hair care line and the old junket clip, the consensus on Blake transformed from “she and Ryan Reynolds are quite funny on Instagram” to her being difficult to work with, demanding, and even vain.
This week, her legal team presented a vast swathe of evidence pertaining to her onset experiences with Baldoni. Much of the discourse about Lively’s allegations in her legal complaint centres on the idea that sexual harassment on set – including Baldoni allegedly making sexual and inappropriate comments to her, improvising unwanted kissing, being forced to film a birth scene with almost nothing covering her genitals and an open set – “couldn’t” have happened. Because she’s rich. Or perhaps because she’s powerful.
Either way, the whispers say the same thing: she was a producer on the film – why didn’t she stop him? She’s suing him rather than Sony – surely that shows that she’s being vindictive? Basically, all sorts of questions that women all over the world are asked when they speak up about experiencing harassment or abuse, just in a higher tax bracket.
If you’re not an avid social media user, or a connoisseur of pop culture, you might be tempted to suggest that none of this matters, that it’s just another facet of celebrity gossip best ignored.
But that’s just not true – this is so much bigger than just mean swipes on TikTok and snarky tweets. This is about the idea that a woman has to be assessed for her goodness, for everything she’s ever done publicly and privately, before she can make a credible accusation – alongside a vast body of evidence.
Which is exactly the reason that these cases keep happening time, and time, and time again.