Last month, a judge threw out the actor Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit against his former co-star Blake Lively. From the way many online spectators have treated her, you’d think she was the one who was losing.
The ruling was part of a legal saga that began when, just after the release of Ms. Lively and Mr. Baldoni’s film, “It Ends With Us,” in 2024, something odd happened: The typical junket interviews and online chatter about the film turned against Ms. Lively, casting her as bossy, flippant and difficult. In December, Ms. Lively filed a legal complaint against Mr. Baldoni and his team of hired publicists, claiming that the bad P.R. was, at least in part, coordinated by them after she spoke up about on-set sexual harassment. According to her complaint, they had orchestrated a smear campaign using tabloids and social media. (A lawyer for Wayfarer, the studio of Mr. Baldoni and his producer, has called Ms. Lively’s claims “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious.”)
Mr. Baldoni, in turn, sued her and her husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds, for defamation and lost. (His suit against The New York Times for covering her complaint was also dismissed.) But the damage was already done. She has been caught in a storm of public discussion about her appearance, her personal relationships and whether she was acting mean during press junkets.
Her experience is fast becoming a matter of course in high-profile cases involving accusations of sexual violence or harassment. Public figures who speak up now can face retaliation and recrimination not just from their alleged abusers, but from an online public that’s thirsty to see them torn apart.
We’ve seen this before. Remember how Amber Heard was treated during Johnny Depp’s defamation case against her?
Throughout Ms. Heard’s trial, YouTube channels uploaded hundreds of videos that were eligible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue; her lawyer argued that “lopsided” social media coverage played a role in her eventual defeat. Now, what Ms. Lively’s legal filings suggest is that at least some of the drama surrounding high-profile celebrity imbroglios can be essentially cooked up and then amped up. Drama is a calculated strategy, designed to cast public doubt on accusers’ claims and tarnish their reputations, while also grabbing eyeballs. It seems inevitable that this environment will deter other women from coming forward.
Private messages included in Ms. Lively’s legal complaint, reported in the Times, reveal that among publicists working with Mr. Baldoni, there was talk of how to “bury” Ms. Lively using “manufactured content” posted to social media and pieces planted in the tabloid press. While it’s impossible to know exactly how much anti-Lively content was a product of Mr. Baldoni’s team, what is undeniable is that a cottage industry of ambitious influencers, right-wing media professionals and the traditional tabloid press has sprung up to blast those claims to national prominence and cash in while doing it.
A feminist YouTuber who goes by Ophie Dokie calls this the “misogyny slop ecosystem,” in which pop culture sleuths on TikTok and Reddit, gossip hounds like Perez Hilton and even the press junket reporter Kjersti Flaa (whose awkward 2016 interview with Ms. Lively exploded on YouTube last August) pump out weekly, or even daily, anti-Lively content that nets millions of views. Their theories often wind up in outlets like the Daily Mail.
“We are in a culture that rewards misogynistic thinking that is baked into everybody,” Ophie Dokie told me. “The thing that makes it an ecosystem,” she said, “is the amount of bits and pieces that they are recycling and repeating from each other.” Even if there is no new update to the case, these drama-mongers collectively offer an endless slew of takedowns and speculation, keeping their audiences hooked.
This ecosystem has become, effectively, an essential tool for defending men accused of sexual violence or harassment, for it can generate a rabid kind of fandom that’s hellbent on defending them. Wall-to-wall content by their army of supporters may help them in the courtroom, and, more important, creates an atmosphere of doubt about their alleged culpability that permeates public opinion.
For one recent example, look no further than a recent affidavit filed by Bryan Freedman, a lawyer for Mr. Baldoni. Mr. Freedman wrote that he received a phone call on Valentine’s Day from a person “very closely linked” to pop superstar Taylor Swift, who is a friend of Ms. Lively’s. According to the unnamed person, he claimed, Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds’s lawyer had contacted Ms. Swift’s lawyer to ask the singer to post a statement of support for Ms. Lively. If she didn’t, he said, Ms. Lively’s camp intimated it would release private texts. Ms. Swift has not posted any statements about Ms. Lively’s case against Mr. Baldoni and Ms. Lively never released any of her texts with Ms. Swift.
But the claim that Ms. Lively’s lawyer threatened Ms. Swift, which the lawyer denied, still spread through the celebrity news ecosystem. Tabloid papers ran headlines that repeated Mr. Freedman’s claim. Reddit posts racked up hundreds of comments. Gossipmongers leered, wide-eyed and grinning, into their camera lenses. The views, likes and shares poured in. Insults that are typically reserved for women who make allegations against powerful men were slung in Ms. Lively’s direction: “Vindictive.” “Manipulative liar.” “Narcissist.”
It didn’t matter that within 24 hours of the affidavit’s submission, the judge in the case granted a motion to strike it, saying “the sole purpose of the Letter is to ‘promote public scandal’ by advancing inflammatory accusations, on information and belief, against Lively and her counsel. It transparently invites a press uproar by suggesting that Lively and her counsel attempted to ‘extort’ a well-known celebrity.” It also didn’t matter that Mr. Freedman did not identify his source, so the public couldn’t assess that person’s credibility for themselves. The damage had already been done. How many people saw the judge’s dismissal? How many of them believed the judge’s reasons for it?
Some of Ms. Heard and Ms. Lively’s supporters accuse Mr. Depp and Mr. Baldoni of following a playbook called “DARVO,” which stands for “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.” The term was coined by trauma psychologist Jennifer Freyd in 1997 to describe the way abusive individuals deflect blame onto their victims. Ms. Freyd told me in an interview that multiple people, even fans, can join in on using DARVO against a particular target.
The global assault on Ms. Heard’s credibility from many corners of the internet was an example of collective DARVO. The rhetoric it made popular became part of the way people talk about claims of abuse, one that has carried into Ms. Lively’s case and beyond.
Now, the way social media can discredit accusers in celebrity cases has begun to trickle down to relatively unknown ones.
Men without pre-existing platforms can film videos of women at their lowest (like when they’re screaming or crying on the floor) and post that unflattering footage online, where it can go viral overnight. The women are often compared to Ms. Heard and the videos of them can then become fodder for so-called men’s rights activists who already make content attacking celebrity women. Some of them are more than happy to give wide attention to a narrative against a private figure, usually a woman, that accuses her of lying and being abusive herself.
All this is possible because many Americans have aggressively rejected the gains made under the #MeToo movement, which prized believing women who spoke publicly about sexual violence. Backlash against figures — public or private — who speak up reinforces the status quo and paints the accused men as the real victims. The women who repeat rhetoric that excuses possible male violence are rewarded with views and praise online, while those who speak out against it are added to the list of targets for the online mob to punish. The resulting information environment is so one-sided that women who don’t want to trip into the firing line might just decide it’s easier to stay silent.
Fear of being dragged by these self-appointed internet sleuths can also make women think twice about coming forward at all. There was always the cruel reality of being disbelieved and framed as the villain within your local community. But now, anyone’s witch trial can go viral, opening them up to the kind of “total global humiliation” Mr. Depp envisioned Ms. Heard would get in a 2016 text message.
Almost a decade later, his and Mr. Baldoni’s crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan, who is accused in Ms. Lively’s lawsuit of helping to orchestrate the media attacks on her, marveled over how quickly social media had turned on the actress: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.”
Kat Tenbarge writes Spitfire News, a newsletter about internet culture, politics and media.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Blake Lively vs. the ‘Misogyny Slop Ecosystem’ appeared first on New York Times.
