Just as sexual misconduct cases are notoriously hard to prove affirmatively, false allegations of sex offenses are arguably harder to disprove. And unlike in a criminal court that presumes innocence absent actual evidence, most cases brought in the court of public opinion rely on a miasma of “he said” versus “she said,” with the balance often tilting against the accused in the aftermath of the #MeToo era.
Hence, A-list actress Blake Lively’s increasingly failed attempt to blow up the career of her B-list costar may prove the most consequential Hollywood hoax since Jussie Smollett staged himself as the victim of a hate crime he invented. Just as the media made an example of themselves in their rush to venerate Smollett as a Black Lives Matter martyr, the New York Times’s slovenly stenography of Lively’s lies may prove the crucial overcorrection to the post-#MeToo disregard for due process.
FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT
As wives and girlfriends everywhere may recall from this summer, Lively starred in the blockbuster romance It Ends With Us. Based on a bestselling novel about a love affair that devolves into violent abuse, It Ends With Us was optioned in 2019 by actor Justin Baldoni, who was encouraged by the book’s author to play the male lead. Though the film was a commercial success, earning $351 million on a $25 million budget, rumors ran rampant over the oddly uncomfortable press tour. Lively and the rest of the cast unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram and seemingly refused to appear with him at promotional events, and despite the film’s intense subject matter, Lively seemed to be marketing it as a fashion event, telling girls to “wear your florals” and buy her booze line, which she marketed by naming a cocktail after the fictional wife-beater Baldoni plays in the film. Furthermore, Baldoni, who also directed the film, was erased from the movie poster. All in all, the release coincided with catty commentary deeming Lively a diva and rehashing past rumors of her prior rudeness to other costars and reporters. The whole saga seemed to die down without any real conclusion.
That is until the New York Times dropped a seemingly explosive expose the weekend before Christmas, painting Baldoni and his business partner Jamey Heath as sexual predators and alleging that his PR team orchestrated the negative press against Lively over the summer. The New York Times broke the story of Lively’s legal complaint against Baldoni and his team, and the paper asserted it verified the authenticity of Lively’s claims by reading corroborating texts and emails.
“During shooting, Blake Lively, the co-star, had complained that the men had repeatedly violated physical boundaries and made sexual and other inappropriate comments to her,” reported the New York Times. “Their studio, Wayfarer, agreed to provide a full-time intimacy coordinator, bring in an outside producer and put other safeguards on set. In a side letter to Ms. Lively’s contract, signed by Mr. Heath, the studio also agreed not to retaliate against the actress. But by August, the two men, who had positioned themselves as feminist allies in the #MeToo era, expressed fears that her allegations would become public and taint them, according to a legal complaint that she filed Friday. It claims that their P.R. effort had an explicit goal: to harm Ms. Lively’s reputation instead.”
The New York Times spent the bulk of its piece on the full sexual misconduct lawsuit that followed her initial complaint. Lively claimed Baldoni and Heath entered her trailer “uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding her infant child” and that Heath played her a video “of a fully nude woman with her legs spread apart” that Lively thought was “pornography.” In the most serious allegation, Lively insinuated Baldoni crossed physical boundaries during a slow dance scene “in which no sound was recorded.”
“Mr. Baldoni chose to let the camera roll and have them perform the scene, but did not act in character as Ryle; instead, he spoke to Ms. Lively out of character as himself,” claims Lively. “At one point, he leaned forward and slowly dragged his lips from her ear and down her neck as he said, ‘It smells so good.’ None of this was remotely in character, or based on any dialogue in the script, and nothing needed to be said because, again, there was no sound — Mr. Baldoni was caressing Ms. Lively with his mouth in a way that had nothing to do with their roles. When Ms. Lively later objected to this behavior, Mr. Baldoni’s response was, ‘I’m not even attracted to you.'”
None of this was Weinstein-level conduct, though the media ran with it as though it were, leading Baldoni’s podcast host to quit and his elite talent agency to dump him. Still, if true, such behavior would make him a little creepy.
But these allegations are not true. They’re not even unproven. Thanks to Baldoni’s bevy of exculpatory evidence, we can ascertain that the most serious of the claims are verifiably false and the plaintiff categorically not credible. Baldoni has dropped the receipts in his $250 million libel lawsuit against the New York Times, his $400 million extortion, defamation, and invasion of privacy suit against Lively, her A-list actor husband Ryan Reynolds, and publicist Leslie Sloan.
Contrary to Lively’s claim that Baldoni entered her trailer uninvited while she was breastfeeding, Lively texted Baldoni, “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.” That ostensible pornography Heath showed was a video of him and his wife submerged in a tub during their home birth, which, according to a still published by Baldoni with Heath’s wife’s consent, does not show any visible genitalia or private parts.
But the most exculpatory exhibit disproving Lively’s lies is the filmed scene of that slow dance montage, during which, Lively didn’t realize, audio actually was recorded. Below is a snippet of a 10-minute video released by Baldoni’s legal team, the entirety of which is making the rounds across social media.
Contrary to Lively’s claim that Baldoni broke character first, was kissing or caressing her unprompted, and creepily claiming she smelled good for no other reason but to objectify her, Lively was the one who seemed to break character while Baldoni was trying to direct her. Most damningly, Baldoni was clearly trying to make Lively feel less uncomfortable when she lamented that she was “probably getting spray tan” on him, and only then did he say the spray tan smelled good.
The fact that Lively didn’t realize that Baldoni had the audio of this moment gets to the real reason why she has tried to destroy his entire career: She wanted to be the boss of the film. Unlike Sony, the author of the book, and the rest of the cast members who were charmed enough by her celebrity clout and connections (Lively famously got Taylor Swift to provide a song for the film’s trailer) that they allowed Lively to steamroll the entire production, Baldoni would not balk. He tried to remain in charge of his own film until Sony quite literally granted Lively her own final cut of the project and let her ban Baldoni from his own premiere party. Even in the aforementioned scene, we see Lively not only refusing to heed the director’s guidance but also trying to dictate his actions in defiance of his status as the boss.
Lively, a household name of a starlet and high fashion favorite, could not stand deferring to Baldoni, a successful TV actor but the far more secondary celebrity nonetheless. And even when she forced Sony to steamroll Baldoni for her, she could make fans forget all her discourteous decorum to her lesser costars, let alone to the plebians of the press. The New York Times concocted its own boogeyman of Baldoni’s PR team to claim that the backlash against Lively was a manufactured feat of “social manipulation.” But her own words and actions, up to and including during the movie’s promotion, did all that work for him.
Consider a now infamous clip of a journalist asking how a fan who encountered her in public could talk to her about the film’s themes and surviving domestic violence. Lively, who is curled up on a chair and snarling as though she would rather be anywhere else in hell than sitting for this interview, asks if the little people would deign to ask for “my address, or my phone number? Or like location share?”
Lots of women come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct with insufficient evidence to prove their claims. While the accused should obviously be allowed to maintain that presumption of innocence absent that evidence, the accuser should not be assumed to be intentionally lying, and both ought to have the right to return to their normal lives after such a claim is adjudicated.
The case of Lively is quite different. She chose to strong-arm the intellectual property of the man who optioned, directed, and starred in a film over the course of half a decade, and then when the public soured on her behavior, she lied that he and his business partners were sexual predators. Three separate allegations she made under penalty of perjury have been discredited with video, photographic, or written evidence, and three strikes should be enough to negate the veracity of her entire suit. If Lively did not want to tackle a subject as serious as domestic violence or act in scenes with kissing and close conduct, she should not have accepted the role in this film. And if she doesn’t want to be subject to a superior, she probably should not agree to work under any other director. Luckily for her, her botched attempt to blow up Baldoni’s life likely means that she won’t have any offers any time soon to consider.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
While actual instances of sexual assault remain more common than false accusations, according to the data, the expansion of that misconduct definition into the legally dubious may undercut the evidence. According to scholars of patently false assault accusations, the liars in question have roughly three to four motivations: revenge, personal gain, producing an alibi, and mental illness. Given the seemingly possessive conduct of Reynolds and Lively’s flirty text messages to Baldoni, Baldoni may believe that Lively had all four rationales.
But personal interest is at least logical. The real quandary is why the storied Grey Lady chose to make herself Lively’s useful idiot. In response to Baldoni’s suit, the paper rejected the notion that it had advanced access to Lively’s initial complaint. The New York Times clearly didn’t have access to the unfettered record of texts and emails between the Baldoni and Lively camps. If it did, it would likely have produced the exculpatory evidence below Lively’s more salacious claims. Rather, the New York Times fell prey to a more pernicious and pervasive form of confirmation bias that indeed colors its coverage of Tinseltown to Trump: the convenience of a PR-packaged morality play, one that casts the beloved blonde as our damsel in distress and the lesser leading man as the resident monster. The real sin for the New York Times is the lazy journalism that ought to have the rest of us reconsidering how many other corners it has cut when the stakes are far higher.