The actress Blake Lively is not someone I had a real opinion about before a few days ago, when the news broke that she had filed a legal complaint against Justin Baldoni, her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, for sexual harassment and retaliation. But I saw a video a while back in which she appeared to be hostile to a reporter making a seemingly innocuous reference to her pregnancy. My impression was that she seemed a little rude and needlessly antagonistic. I saw the video thanks to a Daily Mail article suggesting that she was facing a backlash — one that, unbeknown to me, was allegedly the product of a smear campaign by a public relations firm hired by Mr. Baldoni to damage Ms. Lively’s reputation in order to pre-empt her accusations about his wildly inappropriate behavior on set.
Much of what we know about celebrities’ lives is shaped by P.R. professionals who are paid handsomely to create and spread stories that are flattering to their clients and unflattering to their perceived enemies. Reputation management is big business: The time and resources spent in Hollywood and New York to buff, polish and protect a star’s image can be greater than what’s spent to protect the reputations of some chief executives or senators. It’s a ruthless business, too. Dishonesty is often tolerated, on the dubious basis that entertainment is a frivolity and the stakes are low, and things like talent and truth can be tarnished with the art of the smear.
I saw the brute force of celebrity P.R. tactics up close early in my career after I co-founded the website Gawker in 2002 — which mostly covered well-known New Yorkers in the spirit of Spy magazine, which had christened Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” — and freelanced for The New York Post’s Page Six gossip column. In the first months of Gawker, in spite of having just around 10,000 readers a day, we got a cease-and-desist letter from Marty Singer, a well-known entertainment lawyer who insisted that we take down an unflattering story about one of his clients. The threat never went anywhere because we had not published the story but had merely linked to it. These were the early days of the internet, and many people didn’t understand how hyperlinks worked. It’s unclear to me even now whether his firm understood this perfectly well but sent the cease-and-desist letter to try to intimidate us anyway.
At Page Six, the P.R. apparatus of blocking and tackling was even more apparent because the gossip industry is so intertwined with celebrities. P.R. people wouldn’t just defend their clients; they would try to plant flattering stories, derail unflattering ones or pit celebrities against each other to redirect attention.
Most of the plants were fairly innocuous — a sighting of a celebrity at an upscale restaurant or a note about what a celebrity was wearing. Others were more strategic, and publicists would sometimes try to negotiate more flattering coverage of one client by offering a scoop about another or a tip about a client’s rival.
Sometimes publicists would use access to celebrities as leverage. On one occasion a powerful New York publicist was so angry that the head of the column wouldn’t kill a story about a friend and former love interest that she threatened to ban its staff members from all of her high-profile events. In retaliation, the columnist she threatened published a salacious blind item about her and called her parties “horrific.”
No one is more sensitive about celebrity image making and reputation management than the celebrities themselves. I was once on a panel with the actor Alec Baldwin at the Hamptons International Film Festival for a documentary that was partly about Gawker, and he more or less lit into me onstage because he was resentful about an item that the site published years after I left, reporting that he had called his then-11-year-old daughter, Ireland, a pig in an angry voice mail.
He suggested that entertainment journalists were leeches determined to invade his privacy and that he tried to stay out of the spotlight. I laughed because, in my view, this was obviously not true. Mr. Baldwin and other stars appeared regularly in Page Six — often because celebrity publicists called to plant flattering stories about them. (His wife, Hilaria Baldwin, a former lifestyle correspondent for “Extra,” a show about Hollywood celebrities, acknowledged to me at a dinner after a panel that this happened but suggested that their P.R. people did it without their knowledge.)
Now that so much reputation management happens on social media platforms and elsewhere on the internet, the sources of information — and ultimately, the truth and the manufactured lies about a celebrity — are harder to sort through.
This was something Mr. Baldoni’s P.R. firm is accused of exploiting on his behalf via coordinated posts on various platforms. They allegedly used a technique called astroturfing, in which they used social media accounts to create the impression that Ms. Lively was difficult to work with and betraying feminism in some way while playing up Mr. Baldoni’s credentials as a self-proclaimed feminist who cared about preventing domestic violence. And his P.R. firm was largely successful until Ms. Lively’s legal complaint laid out the alleged smear campaign. Her business suffered, and so did her reputation. (Mr. Baldoni’s attorney said in a statement to The Times that the accusations of a smear campaign were “categorically false.”)
Why are these techniques sometimes so damaging? Celebrities, actors in particular, traffic in narrative. People want to know about them because they see them play out human dramas onscreen and feel they can relate to them. Viewers develop what social psychologists call parasocial relationships with them — one-way relationships in which people identify with and feel they understand another person, who, to put it bluntly, doesn’t know they exist. They think they know something about who a celebrity is because they relate to characters the celebrity has played, and they’re genuinely curious about the lives of actors beyond their onscreen roles. Celebrities deal with this by hiring P.R. people to manage their reputations or simply keeping a low profile.
For stars like Ms. Lively and her husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds, keeping tabs on their public image is a necessity because the way people perceive them directly affects the success of their work. They are not just people who have a job in entertainment; they are brands. The machinery to protect or upend those brands is often as or more extensive than it is for large, high-profile companies, in part because people relate to stars very personally in a way that they don’t relate to institutions or products.
My 9-year-old son plays a video game called Fortnite and was delighted to discover Mr. Reynolds popping out of an A.T.M. in the game because he thinks Mr. Reynolds is hilarious and likable. (I agree, but I don’t know him personally, and this could be the work of very good P.R. people and a generally positive parasocial relationship.) These parasocial relationships are crucial to the business of Hollywood, where a popular actor can make or break a big-budget movie.
In this sense, Ms. Lively had another thing working against her: the particular line women have to walk in the public eye. They must be likable in a way that men don’t have to be. It probably says something positive about her that the worst thing Mr. Baldoni’s P.R. firm could produce in terms of smearing her were clips and social media posts that suggested she was unlikable and nitpicked about her posture and tone, which is easy to do with any high-profile woman, especially one who’s been interviewed hundreds of times. Everyone has an off day or a clip that can be unflattering out of context. If you have an impression of Ms. Lively and it’s generally negative, it may be because, like me, you saw one of those clips and the sprawling campaign that put those clips in front of you was invisible to you.
The allegations Ms. Lively makes in her complaint are chilling. Among other things, she says that Mr. Baldoni kept insisting that she perform sex scenes that were not part of the script, touched and kissed her without consent, suggested she was too fat and old to play the part and absurdly called for her to be nude for a scene in which she delivers a baby, because, she says he insisted, that’s what women do when they give birth. (Ms. Lively is a mother of four, by the way. She is not exactly unaware of what that process looks like.)
She dealt behind the scenes with all that she says happened, and the irony is that you and I would know nothing about it if Mr. Baldoni hadn’t allegedly tried to harm her reputation and was successful in doing so — at which point she felt she had little choice but to sue him and make it public.
The complaint itself is a kind of reputation management, one that’s far more effective than an astroturfing campaign because it’s transparent. You know who’s making the allegations and why. You know that a court will evaluate facts and evidence — not just viral gossip and planted stories about a given celebrity, often shaped by people you never see. You know the verdict can’t be reversed simply by the subterranean digital warfare of P.R. executives. And you know the reputations of all parties, in the end, will rise or fall not on celebrity image making but on something far closer to the truth.
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