Blake Lively and the Amber Heard Effect

What does Tiffany Trump need a crisis PR person for? - Well. (upbeat music) - Hello, hello, and welcome back to a bit free. I am Mad Bernstein. I'm so happy that you're here. Happy New Year. We are recording this on New Year's Day, which I do just want a little bit of recognition for because I think that's commitment to the craft. Thank you very much. So I was home for the holidays and I was with my parents and I was like, did you guys hear about the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni situation? And my parents are pretty checked out from pop culture and they were like, we were pretty checked out from pop culture. We don't really care about this. They're just two celebrities. My dad was like, I think I might have seen something in the New York Post. Unfortunately, he does read the post. It's something we're working on as a family unit. And so I was trying to explain to them why the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni lawsuit battle situation, which we will explain to you in full as this podcast continues, is what I think is much bigger than a celebrity drama. It's much bigger than rich movie stars warring, even though that is technically what it is. I think the implications are much bigger. I think it harkens back to conversations we've had on this podcast about sexual abuse, about amber herd, about celebrity PR campaigns, about the Me Too movement. And that is why I wanted to sit down and make an episode about it. It's also perhaps the most requested episode I've ever gotten. And so I called up the only person that I could imagine calling up to do such an episode. Cat 10 March is back here, not just on the podcast, but in my living room, recording with me in person, which is so special. Cat is a journalist at NBC News who does a lot of coverage around these cases. She is brilliant. Cat also notably is the first guest I ever recorded with. The first episode I recorded for this podcast, which was the second episode to ever go up, was amber herd and the myth of the perfect victim. And that was also the first time that Cat and I ever met. And now she is one of my closest, closest friends. So Cat, thank you so much for being here. I know that you have spent at this point like hundreds of hours pouring over the details of everything we're gonna talk about today. - It is an honor to be here. I was so excited when you asked me to talk about this because I had so many thoughts and I did not have a venue to express them, but this is the perfect one. - A vocal fry disclaimer. - Ooh. - We're gonna do a vocal fry disclaimer. (laughing) - In past episodes with Cat, people have left some really unnecessarily brutal and cruel comments about specifically Cat's vocal fry. And we just wanted to address this top of the episode. If you have an issue with vocal fry on this podcast, we don't care. - We don't care. (laughing) - We don't care. - Do you have any like insight on vocal fry and misogyny? - So it is a thing. It is a known phenomenon that people hate women's voices. And oftentimes vocal fry is the reason. Vocal fry is a real thing. I first started, I mean, basically as long as I've been a public figure, people have been coming at me and saying that they hate my voice and that I have vocal fry. And I actually did like a session with not a therapist, but like a vocal trainer. He was like, yes, you do have vocal fry, but it's not something that you can necessarily fix. So there is a link between vocal fry and misogyny where people are more likely to pick up on it in women, people are more likely to use it as an excuse to not listen to women. But I also, like, I mean, if you really hate it so much, then I guess I get it because there are just some things that people are more sensitive to than others. - Sure. - But I don't know. I think it's kind of silly. - We don't care. - We don't care. (laughing) We don't care. We have real things to talk about and then we're gonna talk about them. - Oh, also the vocal trainer or whatever it's called. He said that the best way to do something about it is to have more confidence in what you're saying. And I thought that was really interesting because it almost makes it more of a psychological thing. And of course, women might be more likely to have vocal fry because women are, of course, more likely to be less confident in what they're saying. But I feel like that doesn't always apply to me because I am often very confident in what I'm saying. - I was gonna say that. (laughing) - And that was when I was like, I always can't fix this. (laughing) - Well, I wanna start this episode by saying that I have never had great interest in Blake Lively as a public figure. I didn't watch Gossip Girl. If you have feelings about that, feel free to express them, I can take it. But Blake Lively, to me, was someone who I knew best for her Met Gala appearances. I think Anna Winter always places her sort of towards the end of the red carpet arrival schedule 'cause she always has like the biggest most extravagant dresses and she's, of course, which is very beautiful, extremely successful actress. That's kind of the extent of my Blake Lively knowledge. And then all of a sudden, this past August, my social media feeds on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, even though I don't use it all that much, were just filled with all of this anti-Blake Lively content. She is apparently hard to work with on set. She is a fake feminist. She was mean to an interviewer in 2016. And it was just like a viral hit after viral hit on Blake Lively. I couldn't get away from it and I am not someone who pays attention to this woman. And I was very confused. And I feel like maybe that's where this should begin. - Yeah, I mean, I similarly did not watch Gossip Girl and I think that Blake Lively, in my mind, was always someone I associated with Taylor Swift because they're good friends. - Oh, she was part of the squad? - Yes. And she's one of the people in Taylor Swift's inner circle who has remained there the longest. And Taylor Swift has a song where the characters in the songs are the names of Blake Lively's children. So they are really close. That didn't give me a particularly positive or negative view of her. She was just someone who existed. And similarly, over the summer, I did not care about the calling Hoover Book. I did not care about the movie. These are things outside my own pop culture purview. It's like a different demographic. But similar to what happened in 2022, the social media feeds start getting filled with hate content toward this woman to the point where I actually in conversation with a friend, she brought up like, oh, I guess Blake Lively is like a horrible person. And that made like honestly like the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because whenever there's a woman who is facing this type of scrutiny and there's not like a clear reason why she's a bad person, it's just all of a sudden everyone is saying that they don't like this woman. That to me is always a red flag that's something weird is happening. - You're right. It was a lot of this like, you know, all of a sudden you get called a mean girl. And there's this sort of like political, morally righteous posturing to why you don't like some famous woman. And it kind of comes out of thin air a lot of the time. And when the volume of content that's being put out, it's like it reaches you by osmosis. It's like maybe you didn't like Blake Lively before and maybe you aren't even paying attention closely enough to any of this content to really pinpoint why you don't like her. But suddenly the vibe has zoured. - And there were certain things that I picked up on about this discourse as I was seeing it. And I was not choosing to engage with it. But when you're on social media all the time, you are fed things. And so whether you want to engage with them or not, they are entering your field of vision and you are thinking about them and you're reading and hearing what people have to say. So some of the things that stuck out to me about reasons why people were mad at Blake Lively and didn't like Blake Lively, there were a couple things that I previously knew about her. There were some new reasons why people didn't like her that struck me as a red flag because they were the types of rhetoric that I had encountered in the past around other celebrity women in really well-documented cases where there's something more nefarious going on under the surface. So the things that I already knew about Blake Lively were that she and Ryan Reynolds got married on a plantation back in 2012. - Awful. - Awful. And this is something that Ryan Reynolds had apologized for in 2020. And they had acknowledged it. And so we all kind of knew that that was out there and pretty universally people were like this is a bad look. - Yeah, white people, we got to stop with the plantation weddings enough. - And there were also other things kind of being dredged up from that time that I didn't know about like that Blake Lively had a blog that romanticized the antebellum. - Okay. - Not good. - Not good. And so these were things that I think were already out there but were sort of being resurfaced and re-commented on at this time, but they were like, subplots to what the biggest issues were. - Which was that Blake Lively is a mean girl. Is that, I mean, is that, that felt like broad strokes, what the consensus was. That was like the crime. Wasn't any of the racist shit, which is reprehensible. - It was definitely more broad characterizations of her as someone unlikable, which is generally speaking a pretty gendered characterization because when we talk about people being mean, mean girl is the characterization for a reason. We don't have an equal characterization for men. It's infantilizing because she's a woman. It's also questionable because what does that even really mean? Who would she mean to? And so here you start to see like things coming out more specifically. You start to see resurfaced clips from interviews from seven, eight years ago, where she's having sort of tense back and forths with journalists. And you start to see things that she said on the promotional tour for it ends with us that people took issue with. And it ends with us was the inciting factor that led to all of this backlash. - Exactly. This sort of like mania of anti-Blake Lively content is all contextualized within this movie that came out at the time called It Ends With Us, which is I'm going to tell you everything I know about. It ends with us. This is going to be a very quick segment because it's not that much. - Yeah. - But it's a book, it's so okay. It's a movie adapted from the book by Colleen Hoover. It is a book about a violent, domestically violent relationship and they made it into a movie. And some people have criticized Colleen Hoover books as romanticizing domestic violence. That's kind of the extent of my knowledge. - Yes. I am not the type of person who would read a Colleen Hoover book, but again, I was aware of them because they were such a popular phenomenon online. - Can you characterize what that means, though, for both me and anyone listening who's unfamiliar with Colleen Hoover's books? - The genre of these books. It's like, I think it's something that traditionally has been known as like a beat read, which is to say, their books that are aimed toward women and their books that are supposed to be really engaging like really mainstream, open to a mainstream body of readers. They're not like super intellectual books. They're just like fun, light, quick reads, which is kind of weird with the topic of this book because it is a book about domestic violence. But I think that's part of why people took issue with it is like, there's something very unserious about the way that domestic violence is being framed within this material. So I did watch the movie like a week ago and I thought it was interesting. From the way that I had heard people describe it, I was really unsure of how domestic violence was going to be portrayed. And I do think that there are some things about the portrayal of it within the source material that seemed to me realistic. And then there are other things about the portrayal that I think are really unrealistic. And I think that's what people took issue with is it has this sort of happy ending where the character who is being abused in this relationship when she comes forward to the sister of her abuser, who is her best friend. She's met with so much support and validation. And when she comes forward to her family and friends, she receives all this support and validation. She gets kind of rescued by a former partner. And at the end, it's like a happy ending where the abuser just kind of is like leaving her alone and she and the baby get to go on and have their fairy tale ending. And I think that that sequence of events is unrealistic for a lot of people who experience domestic violence. That's why I think people took issue with the source material. And it's deeply ironic that this is the text where all of these real life events are being juxtaposed with this story about domestic violence that's been heavily criticized. Yeah, a little bit of foreshadowing. And I promise we'll keep this moving. You guys know, brevity is not my strength. Nor is it cats. We can yap forever. But something that people, a particular piece of anti-blyke live, anti-blyke-lavely, anti-blyke-lavely content that's circulated heavily. On the cover of the book, it ends with us. There are flowers. Flowers, as a visual motif, were heavily integrated into the marketing campaign around the movie. Think Barbie, Oppenheimer, Pink Black. Every movie is now trying to be this in-person event now that you do with your friends, and you dress up, and it's themed. I don't think that that marketing tactic should have ever been applied to this movie. But nonetheless, it was. And there was an interview where Blake is doing promotion. And she is like, get your florals on and come on down to the movies. And people were like, why are you talking about a movie of this subject matter that way? And on its face, I was like, yeah, that-- yeah, I mean, it's pretty tasteless. But also, as with everything, the criticism went too far. It was really weird to me because this extreme criticism of Blake lively, in regards to this whole situation, struck me as really odd and really targeted, because I feel like, compared to how people talk about and react to other press cycles for other movies that discuss sensitive topics, I was like, why is everyone focusing and hyper-fixating on this one thing that this woman said about this movie? There have been tons of popular movies that deal with issues of domestic violence, maybe not as heavily as this one. But for example, I remember the movie hit Anne, which came out also last year and was super popular and had Glenn Powell. The main female character in that movie is also experiencing an abusive relationship. And similarly, everyone loves Glenn Powell. And they joked about not that necessarily, but the press tour for the movie was super fun and light-hearted. And people didn't, to my knowledge, take issue with that. So it just struck me as weird that people were choosing to be so critical about this movie and Blake lily specifically, and it was just like, why do people care so much about this? The other thing that struck me as weird is, I think that sensitivity around domestic violence is really important, but it's not something that I've come to expect from the internet, or from people in general. Like, generally speaking, people are not sensitive around topics of domestic violence. So it was almost like this wasn't an opinion that people would normally have unless they were seeing it everywhere and just kind of parroting what they were seeing online. Like, it did not feel that organic to me, because if people really cared so much about sensitivity around domestic violence, you would expect that to be consistent around other topics revolving around domestic violence, and it's not. It's like consistently the opposite. And so I was like, what is it that is really driving all of this hatred toward Blake lily? Because the TikTok that I know is not a space where people are respectful around narratives and stories and cases involving domestic violence. So I was like, there has to be something else, and maybe it's just the fact that this is so viral, that when viral things happen, like, virality begets virality. If there's a trending topic, people online are gonna talk about it, and they're gonna parrot what the most popular opinion is, and it becomes a cascade of inescapable, repeating the same opinion, the same outrage over and over and over and over again, and that was from the beginning sort of my take on this whole thing, was I was like, this is more about just repeating the narrative online, than it is about having a real conversation around sensitivity and domestic violence. - Well, and you mentioned sort of organic versus inorganic, and organic as it turns out, this was not. (laughs) - That was a very good segue. The New York Times publishes a lengthy report about how Blake Lively has filed a complaint against Justin Baldoni, the studio that he owns, which produced this movie called Wayfarer Studios, his PR people basically alleging that not only was there all sorts of sexual misconduct and harassment by Justin and his producer on set, but also that there was a coordinated smear campaign against Blake Lively that Justin and his producer bought and paid for and put into action that resulted in so much of this viral content taking up so much space and even the most unsuspecting internet users' mind. And suddenly, I was like, oh, like that's why I saw all this stuff that I didn't care about, to be honest. - Yeah. - Also, I just feel this way so many times when I see like outrage over celebrities like attitude, I don't care if Blake Lively is a mean girl. I don't know if Blake Lively is a mean girl or what a mean girl even entails, but if Blake Lively is not a nice person, I don't care. I don't, I don't, it's just, maybe this is a bad tangent. I'm gonna cut this tangent. - One thing that I think about, which I think is super relevant because it gets brought up all the time, like the internet loves how Robert Pattinson in particular does interviews for press for movies. The internet loves this idea that Robert Pattinson would bash Twilight and that he would make fun of Twilight and the internet loves that he would like tell these like tall tales to reporters and then later he came out and said that he made it all love because he felt that the interview questions were so vacuous and he was like disassociating things that like quite frankly are rude but funny and when a man like Robert Pattinson conducts himself like this in interviews people love it they respond so positively to it but if a woman were to do the same thing then she's called a mean girl and that to me gets at the heart of this issue which is that it is a gender double standard that unlike disproportionately penalizes women for behavior that is rewarded in men yeah Rachel Zegler comes to mind yes she criticized the source material of snow white and everyone is like so you're ungrateful and by the way you're not even white it gets off the rails really fucking quickly it happens to female celebrities all the time it happened to Anne Hathaway like it happens to Jennifer Lawrence over and over and over again female celebrities are just held to a completely different expectation that is totally outsized from the reality of what's happening which is that as you were saying it doesn't really matter how Blake lively conducts herself in these press interviews it's not that important of a subject but people choose to endlessly scrutinize the way that celebrity women conduct themselves and it's like people have said this but they're taking their cherry picking examples from a really long career and they're looking at encounters where they're like pulling out examples of the worst behavior they can find and I find that that practice in itself tends to disproportionately affect women because in her decade plus long career of course they're gonna be times when she's not like perfect of course they're gonna be times when she's you know responding in a way that people can take issue with she's human being but she's held to this in human standard of respectability I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to rocket money for sponsoring this podcast and making episodes like this possible and for you know being a very useful app that might be especially useful to you as we head into the new year and you might be looking over your budgets it's happened to all of us right where you sign up for something whether it be a streaming service a news subscription and only fans and then you eventually stop using it but you forget to unsubscribe so you keep getting charged for it quietly in the background for no reason but the subscriptions that you're paying for every month don't need to be a mystery hidden in the folds of credit card bills rocket money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions monitors your spending and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings rocket money will show you all of your subscriptions that you're paying for each month and help you cancel the ones you don't want anymore with just one click in the app you get a dashboard where you can see everything in one place you can create budgets and you get notified when your subscription prices increase rocket money has over five million users and has saved over five hundred million dollars in unwanted subscriptions and it saves its members up to seven hundred and forty dollars a year when using all of the app's features if you want to start budgeting and saving for the new year you can do that head over to rocket money dot com slash fruity that's rocket money dot com slash fruity now let's get back to the episode should we talk about the complaint yeah so the complaint is 80 pages long and cat and I both read it we are more inclined to reading things like this than the source material by Colleen Hoover that's just where our interest lie lucky for you we are both steeped in complaint information before we talk about the complaint I want to introduce to you the cast of characters so that you're familiar with them cat tell me if I have this right Blake lively female lead in this movie Justin Baldoni her co star and male lead in the movie Jamie Heath who is the producer of the movie and a close sort of long-time collaborator of Justin Baldoni's they have a podcast together called man enough where they breach about healthy masculinity which the irony of these things will soon collapse Jennifer Abel who is Justin Baldoni's publicist and Melissa Nathan and her PR firm tag Blake Justin and Jamie all have like kind of varying degrees of ownership over the movie because Justin Baldoni is the male lead in the movie he plays the role of the abusive character but he's also the director of the movie and he owns his production company Wayfarer which bought the rights to the book to make the movie in the first place so he's kind of the driving force behind this entire production and he has one of the biggest leadership roles on the set and he's in this position of power that is outsized compared to Blake lively she also I believe has a producer credit on the film but she isn't the director she isn't the person who has the rights to the book and I think that a lot of people have sort of put them on like similar playing field when they consider this movie but Justin Baldoni has all of these different hats that he's wearing throughout this production yeah and some people actually I would argue even place Blake on a higher pedestal because she's more famous and more rich but it's important to note that Justin Baldoni owns the studio that's putting this on and as far as I'm aware is accountable to nobody he also has really wealthy backers like there is this character who will come into play later who has I believe like a billion dollars who is like funding Justin Baldoni so yes like Blake lively and Ryan Reynolds have like a lot of wealth and a lot of power but when it comes into play like who has the most power on this set Blake lively is arguing that Justin Baldoni is the one who has the power so the filming process for this movie is it basically happens in two parts which are pre and post writers and actors strike the first part of the filming happens in 2023 before the strikes occur and shut down production and while they are taking a break from filming and while the strikes are going on Blake and Ryan raise all of these concerns about behavior on set specifically sexual misconduct by Justin and his producer Jamie Heath Blake calls for a meeting when they all reconvene where she makes a list of all of these things I've been happening on set and it's not just like you know no sexual harassment it's like she makes a bullet point list of very specific things that have happened that she says cannot happen again and you know basically puts all of these guardrails in place for when they return to filming you know say the second half of the film or however they filmed it this list is in the complaint and it includes things like hold on let me pull it up one no more showing nude images or images of women including producers wife to Blake lively and/or her employees to no more mention of Mr. Baldoni's or Mr. Heath's previous quote pornography addiction or Blake lively's lack of pornography consumption to Blake lively or to other crew members three no more discussions to Blake lively and/or her employees about personal experiences with sex including as it relates to spouses or others no more inquiries to miss by Mr. Baldoni to Blake Lively's trainer without her knowledge or consent to disclose her weight some of them get extremely specific number eight is no more mentions by Mr. Baldoni of him quote-unquote speaking to Blake Lively's dead father there was one that was basically like no more hours long meltdowns from Justin and Blake's trailer which just felt like extremely pointed yeah so this meeting convenes and they get back to filming they finish filming the movie in early 2024 the movie comes out in the summer of 2024 and really the second part of this complaint is about how she alleges that Justin Baldoni Jamie Heath and their studio hired the same PR firm that Johnny Depp hired when he was in litigation with Amber Hurd to create a smear campaign against Blake Lively out of fear that she would make public her allegations against him and the way that he behaved on set and within this sort of like list of cease this behavior that's included in the complaint it also includes you won't retaliate against Blake Lively for bringing any of these issues to your attention and in the complaint they have a copy of this that has Jamie Heath's signature on it now later down the line the lawyer representing Baldoni has suggested that this list isn't exactly what they saw during the meeting or that there has been some sort of like different characterization of some of this stuff but everyone agrees both parties agree that a meeting did take place that concerns were raised and that afterward Blake has said like things on set cool down and everything was fine afterwards indicating that in her view things weren't fine before this meeting to me while I was reading this you have like the documentation that's attached and then within the complaint you have sort of like a narrative retelling of some of the allegations from on set and some of them really stood out to me at like shocking. For example, Blake alleges that during the filming of a scene where her character is giving birth, she says that initially the character was supposed to be wearing clothes as one typically does, and that while they're filming Justin who is the director and Jamie who is one of the producers, are like actually we want your character to be naked while she's giving birth. And Blake says that she was uncomfortable with this so according to the complaint and this is corroborated by Justin and Jamie, Jamie Heath like pulls out a video of his wife giving birth and like shows it to her and is like no look my wife was naked when she gave birth to our child so it's totally fine. And then Blake compromises by having clothes on like under her chest. She's like nude in this scene and she alleges in the complaint that Justin had one of his friends come onto the set and play the OBGYN during this delivery scene. Crazy. And also she alleges that it wasn't a closed set during the scene so while she just has like a tiny strip of material covering like her genitalia, there are all kinds of people walking in and out of the background. She's like totally visible and that they had live feeds of what was happening on screen, going to crew members iPads. So people are able to like there's just so much access to this scene that's kind of been thrust upon her where she wasn't prepared to be basically like partially nude. And also they she alleges that this billionaire who backs Justin financially is flown in that day to come watch this scene. So some of the stuff that's being alleged in this complaint I think is it's shocking and I think that like it undergirds this idea of sexual harassment taking place on set and it's something that is really lost in a lot of the discourse around. Well was Blake lively like being nice to interviewers like seven years ago and then you find out that this is the type of stuff that's being alleged juxtaposed with what people were taking issue with Blake for it paints a much darker picture. Yeah absolutely. I mean another one that I pulled here this is from the complaint. They were talking about how Justin Baldoni wanted to add sort of gratuitous sex scenes that weren't part of the script. The complaint says when Miss Lively objected to these additions Mr. Baldoni insisted he had added them because he was making the film quote through the female gaze. Although he agreed to remove the scenes he made a last ditch attempt to keep one in which the couple orgasm together on their wedding night which he said was important to him because he and his partner climax simultaneously during intercourse. Mr. Baldoni then intrusively asked Miss Lively whether she and her husband climax simultaneously during intercourse which Miss Lively found invasive and refused to discuss. Here's another. Mr. Baldoni also routinely degraded Miss Lively by finding back channel ways of criticizing her body and weight. A few weeks before filming began, and less than four months after Miss Lively had given birth to her fourth child, Miss Lively was humiliated to learn that Mr. Baldoni secretly called her fitness trainer without her knowledge or permission and implied that he wanted her to lose weight in two weeks. Mr. Baldoni told the trainer that he had asked because he was concerned about having to pick Miss Lively up in a scene for the movie but there was no such scene. We could spend hours just reading the complaint but one thing that is notable fast forward last night at like three in the morning I got home from from my New Year's party and I was like scrolling Twitter drunk in bed and I saw that Justin Baldoni has now sued the New York Times for $250 million for publishing this and I think that what's important to note is that he never refutes anything that the New York Times published. I find that one of the most fascinating aspects of how this is all playing out is in the way that publicists and lawyers sort of frame things because initially when Blake Lively filed this complaint Justin Baldoni's lawyer issued a broad denial which is difficult you see this and I would say most cases involving celebrity allegations and then last night when Justin Baldoni and all the other people in the case who are all represented by this same lawyer Brian Friedman when they file their suit against the New York Times they go into explicit detail about some of the things that are alleged and they're kind of saying like oh well this conversation happened but it wasn't really inappropriate like they're kind of acknowledging some of this happened but it's being framed incorrectly and so there's a lot of really interesting I think back and forth in how these legal documents and these statements to the press are serving as a meta narrative that in itself is like a form of publicity designed to make you think okay Justin Baldoni didn't do anything wrong he denies everything but if you are like us and you like read complaints for fun then you're like oh this is actually different this is more nuanced they're sort of acknowledging that some of this happened they're just trying to sort of reclassify it. So the first half of the complaint really focuses on all of the bad behavior on set and the second half is about the smear campaign which ensued would you like to take the reins here because I feel like this is your bread and butter. This is a really fascinating kind of peak under the hood of what happens in the world of Hollywood PR and it's stuff that we normally would not be privy to because behind the scenes separate from the sexual harassment that Blake lively alleged you had kind of like a war of the PR worlds happening where Justin Baldoni's initial publicist who is a woman by the name of Stephanie Jones who runs her own really successful PR firm called Jones Works she represented Justin and Wayfarer his studio for years. Now earlier this year one of the women who worked for her Jennifer Abel who is Justin's current publicist she previously worked for Stephanie Jones but she left and formed her own sort of PR firm. Stephanie Jones alleged in a separate lawsuit that was filed after Blake's complaint that Jennifer committed like contract violations and was stealing clients out from under her and one of those clients is Justin Baldoni. There's a lot of lawsuits here and I hope you're taking notes because there will be a test. It's really complicated and it's so interesting because I think that normally the assumption is like oh the public wouldn't care about this type of stuff but this case is really showing that people are just as interested in the behind the scenes publicists as they are in some of these like minor celebrity figures. Well because I think that people are realizing and for me the moment that I realized this was the Amber Heard trial how much public opinion first about celebrities but also perhaps about bigger things perhaps about politics can be shaped by these teams of PR people who are run by people who we don't know. I didn't know who Jennifer Abel was two weeks ago. I didn't know who Melissa Nathan was two weeks ago and yet millions of people online have formed opinions and meet viral content based off of these opinions that have been shaped by a group of people who are just in a slack channel with each other deciding how they're going to shape public narrative. And as a journalist who has covered entertainment topics throughout my career I feel like I'm more privy to sort of the machinations of how Hollywood PR and PR in general works than members of the general public and I think that there's kind of like an unintended byproduct of all of this where I think that it's good that people are able to see how some of this stuff works behind the scenes because a lot of how it works is you have publicists reaching out to journalists and feeding them information off the record or on background that then informs articles in places like TMZ and the daily mail and the New York Times and then the audience reads that stuff but they don't really see how the sausage gets made. And through this we're able to kind of see how it starts with Justin Baldoni's publicist and then it becomes like an article in page six. Where my dad picks it up. Yes, literally. The reason why we have sort of this unprecedented access to this and a lot of what's been going on going viral online around this are these screenshots of text messages that Justin Baldoni's PR team are sending each other. And the reason we have these text messages, the reason that they're in the complaint is because Stephanie Jones complied with a subpoena where she former boss of Jennifer Abel confiscates work phone. Stephanie, like, you know, Jennifer, we're talking about like the third subplot lawsuit and cats like the most excited she's ever been about. So it's so crazy and I could go so deep into it but I won't because we're limited in the amount of time we have. I mean, well. So Jennifer Abel, while she's like leaving Stephanie Jones's PR firm to start her own competing PR firm, her phone basically gets seized. And because of a subpoena process, that is like a quid pro quo between like Blake, Lively and Stephanie Jones, they get these text messages and they're able to put them in this complaint that's released to the public. I have talked a little bit about this, you know, this complaint and the ensuing lawsuits on Instagram, and I did get a number of comments from people who I would imagine did not want this all to be true. Who were like, well, those text screenshots could have easily been fabricated. I get why people think that, but what you have to understand is this isn't like influencer drama, where people aren't beholden to any sort of ethical standards, or standard of proof or accurate. When you're talking about a legal venue, the lawyers who submitted this complaint on behalf of Blake Lively, if they fabricated text messages, they could lose their legal licenses. Like, it would be really unlikely for a separate lawyer who was hired to do something that would put their entire credential in jeopardy. And we now know, because we have responses, that these aren't fabricated text messages, they are real. Now, Justin's lawyer, who's also representing his publicists, they argue that these are cherry-picked, that they're taken out of context, that they don't include emojis, or tap back reactions, or preceding text messages, that maybe change the context around them. But we know that these are real text messages, and they don't contest all of them. Like, there are a few of them where they're like, "Oh, well, you didn't add this emoji. You cut the emoji out." But they don't say that about all of them. There's a lot of text messages that they're not contesting, that reveal how articles were shaped. Do you want to explain basically how he hires, like, first of all, what is tag and how he hires them, and why? Am I putting too much on you? No, no, no. So, Jennifer Abel, like I said, she used to work for Stephanie Jones, and over the course of this summer, she forms her own separate PR agency and pulls Justin over as a client. Now, Jennifer Abel separately is working with another publicist named Melissa Nathan. Melissa Nathan is the owner and the founder of the agency group, which is tag. And Melissa Nathan is the person who's previously represented Johnny Depp. She's previously represented Drake. She's previously represented a number of people involved in the Trump administration and the Trump family. She previously represented, like Tiffany Trump. Can you just explain, like, on the highest level for someone who's really tapped out of all of this, like, what the job of a PR person, like Melissa Nathan is? So, there are a lot of different types of PR, which is public relations. Melissa Nathan is a crisis publicist. And so, this is interesting, because even within the world of crisis communications, there are different types of crisis professionals. Well. (laughter) Can't take how much time do you have? You know, I went to school for journalism, and in my journalism school, and in a lot of different journalism schools, you can study journalism or you can study PR. Like, there are two separate tracks. And they come from, like, a similar place where it's your communicating information to the public. That's your job. As a journalist, ideally, you are not beholden to anyone's interests. You don't have conflicts of interests. You're speaking for the greater public, and you're speaking for the greater good. As a PR person, you are beholden to a specific interest, which is the person who hired you, or the company, or the entity. And so, anyone who is a public figure, and increasingly private figures too, will employ PR people to help shape narratives and convey information to the public and other kinds of stakeholders. And crisis work is sort of based in the idea that if you have a negative public reputation or something happens that puts your business or your reputation or the narrative around you in jeopardy, then you hire someone like this to help you course correct and change how the public or stakeholders view you. And so, crisis and PR are not inherently bad. There are tons of cases where people are employed to do things like PR. It's not something that you would think of as nefarious. And similar to journalism, people have, you know, like a growing distrust and growing sort of negative view of this entire industry, which I think a lot of people who work in this industry would say is, like, really unfair. But when you have stuff like this happen, it paints sort of a broader brush over what crisis PR is. And so, over the past week, I've talked to some of the crisis professionals who have used us sources in previous articles. And they've talked about how, like, crisis PR itself also isn't inherently nefarious. A lot of times, if you own like a major company or if you're a politician or if you're a relative of a politician, you might hire a crisis publicist before anything bad happens. Like, you might hire a crisis strategist to help you plan for if someone goes online and spreads some nasty made up rumor about you. How are you going to respond to that? That's what a crisis PR person would help you with. Crisis publicity in Hollywood is kind of a different beast because Hollywood, which also now encapsulates things like influencers, the narrative oftentimes is the product. If you're an influencer, your whole job is how the world perceives you. And it increasingly, as any type of celebrity, your whole product is yourself and how the world around you, people on social media perceive you. And so crisis publicity is something that is commonly referred to a lot of times as spin, which is like if there's stories out there, how do we change those stories or how do we put stories out there in a way that makes our client look good? Or in this case, how do we put stories out there that makes someone our client had an altercation with look bad? So Justin hires this PR team led by Melissa Nathan and long story short, not that short. I know we've been recording for an hour already. But it's incredibly successful. They see the backlash that Blake Lively is getting for promoting the movie in this lighthearted way, right, telling people to go wear florals. Meanwhile, the public is not made aware until recently that promoting this movie in a lighthearted way was in the marketing materials provided by the distributor of the movie. So Blake Lively was contractually obligated to maintain that tone in her promotional interviews, but never mind that Justin Baldonian, his PR team are like, well, if the public is responding so badly to that, we are going to focus our social media content just in social media content entirely on the seriousness of domestic violence. So much so that there's a text in here that Justin sends to his PR team, he proposes the idea, and I thought this was fucking crazy, he proposes the idea of collecting DMs that his followers consent to him survivors of domestic violence that he can then publish to promote the movie. Even his own team are like, Justin, you're doing way too much. This is not a good idea, so they didn't follow through with that one, but they seed all of these articles in different publications like the New York Post where Melissa Nathan, the head of this PR firm has a sister who is an editor there, which was also crazy. There are price negotiations between Justin Baldonian's camp and Tag, and I think it looks like they paid somewhere between $75 and $175,000 for this treatment, which to be honest, given how huge this got doesn't sound like a lot of money to me, like I would have thought it was like millions. So Tag and Justin Baldonian and Jamie Heath and Jennifer Abel, they're all extremely successful in this effort, and there are these texts between Justin and between the PR people that are published in Blake Lively's complaint, one where Melissa Nathan says he doesn't realize how lucky he is right now, we need to press on him just how fucking lucky he is. And here I believe she's referring to the allegations Blake made against him, the whispering in the ear, the sexual connotations, like Jesus fucking Christ, other members of the crew and cast feeling uncomfortable watching it, I mean there is just so much. In other texts she writes, and the socials are really, really ramping up. It's actually sad because it just shows you how people really want to hate on women. And I thought that was sad. This is Justin's PR person, a woman, weaponizing people against another woman because it's her job and communicating to other women that she's doing this with about how sad it is that they're so successful in this effort. I don't know, there's so much here, and again, this episode could be three million hours and at the rate we're going it might be, but I really was wondering with that text where Melissa Nathan says it just goes to show you how willing people are to hate women. I was like, what is it like to put your head on the pillow every night and know that this is your job? Yeah, so I think it's really interesting that in the response from the lawyer who represents Melissa Nathan and Justin Baldoni and Jennifer Abel, they are really harping on the fact they're like, oh well, they didn't actually do all of this bad stuff to shift the narrative, the narrative just organically developed because of misogyny. They say that like, oh well, Blake bought all of this on herself, it was all organically responding to things that Blake did, it's all Blake's fault, yada yada yada. But I do think that there is something to be said about the fact that over and over and over again on social media people willingly do engage in these sort of misogynistic slants. Like Justin's lawyer argues that the stories they discuss in these text messages weren't actually always a result of their efforts. We do know that like they're being paid sums of money to have conversations with journalists who work for outlets like the Daily Mail, who work for outlets like TMZ. And if you read these outlets or if you know about these outlets, they traffic in negative salacious stories about celebrity women. But the online social media response is so much bigger than that. And I think a lot of it is authentically fueled by people's underlying double standards and expectations for women. Yeah, it's like this inorganic calculated strategy to dog pile on a woman plays well into the hands of organic misogyny that is already taking place online, especially fueled by page 6 in the Daily Mail, but also TikTok comments. Yes, like I was revisiting some of the TikToks about this. And it's like a lot of TikTokers have responded to this and a lot of content creators have responded to all of this by saying, I didn't make negative content about Blake lively nor did I hold a negative opinion of her because anyone told me to or anyone paid me to. I just felt that way about her. And I think multiple things can be true at once. For example, I was watching this one TikTok from over the summer. I don't know if I can say this. So stop me if I can't say this. This woman called Blake lively a contasaurus and I'm like, what yeah, I think you can say it. It's not a real word. Right. I'm like, well, yeah, no one told you to say that, but the fact that you would use that word as a descriptor at all is indicative that we have this invented language. Like we're constantly inventing new ways to negatively characterize women. Not a contasaurus. I was like, what? And it's funny because I saw separately someone referred to Justin Baldoni. I can't remember what word they used, but they used like a negative word to describe him in a Reddit comment. And someone responded and was like, do you really think it's fair to like characterize him in this negative way when we don't know all the facts? No one in the comments of that TikTok was like, is it really fair to use this language about like, lively people were eating it up? There's this culture of mass participation in dog piling of women specifically where the very criticism of Blake lively as being like a mean girl or a negative person is so reflected in the way that people are actually responding to her like the language and the excitement and everyone piling on to her is the exact behavior that they're purporting to criticize in her, but it's actually the behavior of the mob. And just to be clear, all of this is happening this whole coordinated campaign. This is not because they were like, we should pay $100,000 to make people hate Blake lively a little bit for fun. It is because they are afraid that she will make public her allegations against him and the way that he behaved on set. And their goal in all of this is discrediting her in the public eye and making her so unlikable to the point where it would be useless for her to try to come forward. There's this phenomenon when we look at gender violence where when someone is victimized before they even come forward, before they even express to anyone that they feel as though they were victimized in a situation, perpetrators will seek to undermine their character publicly to discredit them before an allegation even comes out. We see this in cases ranging from campus sexual assault to cases involving massive cultural moments. It's a tried and true tactic that perpetrators use to discredit preemptively so that nobody believes the allegations by the time they finally reached the public if they ever do. When I read this New York Times article and then the complaint in full, I have basically the same thought which was like he and his people spent $100,000 to do what is so commonly done for free on a much smaller community-based level by abusive people to discredit, right? Making rumors, making someone out to be an incredible person so that you can get off the hook and that's one of the many reasons why I was like no, this is not just a celebrity story because when we buy into the smear campaign, which I again, I think this can happen on a college campus. You don't need page six, you don't need Melissa Nathan and when we participate in these smear campaigns and we don't think critically about what we're consuming, it's a disservice to anyone's ability to ever come forward. This is something that we've talked about before on this podcast that I think is a really useful framework for understanding a wide variety of sort of rhetoric that we encounter and it's called Darvo. So Darvo stands for Denai Attack Reverse Victim Offender and it's a pattern that was coined by a woman who studied domestic violence to explain some of the behaviors that perpetrators of violence use to discredit and further harm their victims. And once I learned about Darvo, I kind of started to see this pattern everywhere, not just in interpersonal relationships, but also more widely in sort of cultural responses to people who are disproportionately victimized. So frequently when we have celebrity men and women, I see these like Darvo patterns emerge somewhat organically because it becomes a cultural script that people fall into and follow without even consciously realizing it. And so the denial of stage is sort of this idea that even if we don't know that someone has been victimized, that a woman has been victimized, we're sort of immediately discrediting the idea that something bad could have happened to her, we're sort of not even considering it as a possibility in our mind, we're immediately moving to the next phase, which is to attack and the attacks come in a wide variety of ways. But with Blake Lively, we see constantly this gendered rhetoric in terms of how her character is being painted. And it's a way that women in particular and especially women who fall along different categories of marginalization are attacked by the public. Even if it's for things that aren't actually bad, like being too ambitious or taking too much ownership over a product or being viewed as bossy or being viewed as too much, with the reverse victim and offender, you see this too where it's like even before these allegations were made public, the way that Justin Baldoni was being framed by the public at large was he was being framed as this sort of victim before we even really had any idea of what was going on on the set. I remember this whole idea of body shaming, Blake Lively kind of reached the public over this summer, and I remember seeing a lot of women feeling bad for Justin Baldoni online, saying that like, "Oh my gosh, she had a bad back." And so it was really important that she know how much Blake Lively weighed because he's like the victim in this situation where a woman possesses gravity. And it's like, you see this inclination over and over again to sort of view people who have structural power as victims, and to view people who lack forms of structural power as aggressors and as perpetrators, even if logically it doesn't make any sense. And we talked about this at the beginning, but it's like because Blake Lively is viewed as more famous and wealthier than Justin Baldoni, people imagine her as having all the power in this situation. But when you actually examine the circumstances more closely, it's like, well, Justin Baldoni was the director. He was her boss in this setting. Also, structurally, no matter how wealthy or famous a woman is, she's still a woman, so she still experiences the consequences of structural misogyny, regardless of how much money she has, or regardless of how beautiful and wealthy and famous she is. I do think sometimes that's missing in the left's understanding of these cases, especially as it pertains to rich and famous women, because I think sometimes people on the left, especially men on the left, will think that a wealthy woman can escape the bounds of misogyny and gender based violence through her wealth, and that's not true. I would like to take a quick break from the show to thank the sponsor of today's episode Blueland. Did you know that an estimated 5 billion with a B plastic hand soap and cleaning supply bottles are thrown out every year? I didn't. And with most of those cleaning products being 90% water, it's heavier to ship, which increases carbon emissions and the price we have to pay for shipping. 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And literally every time I refill one of those bottles with water from my sink and pop in a new tablet, I'm reminded of how much plastic I would be using had I not switched over. If you would like to try out Blue Land, you can go to blueland.com/frudy and get 15% off your first order. That's 15% off your first order at blueland.com/frudy. Now let's get back to the episode. Speaking of how people are being portrayed and received by the public throughout this entire story, Justin Baldoni is not just another guy. He's not just another movie actor, a list, be list, whatever you want to call him. Justin Baldoni has spent years crafting an image of himself as a sort of professional male feminist. And I alluded to that at the beginning of this podcast when I mentioned that he has a podcast of his own called Man Enough, where he and Jamie Heath, the producer who's named in this complaint and who showed Blake Lively a video of his naked wife giving birth while they were on set together, they have this podcast called Man Enough where they preach about healthy masculinity, men holding men accountable. Justin Baldoni has done a lot, a lot of personal branding. I would say especially in the wake of me too of like how can I be a model for other men, which on its face I don't think is a bad thing. I actually think especially for like a hot rich straight guy is potentially a very good thing. So he has this very popular podcast. He gave a TED talk called why I'm done trying to be man enough. He wrote not one, but two books, the 2021 book Man Enough redefining my masculinity, which randomly I was looking at these books and the reviews. This is such a random cameo. Man enough by Justin Baldoni has an endorsement from Sean Mendes, who wrote Man Enough filled my heart with courage to do and be better. "Using truth and love this book was absolutely necessary for me to read. If you're like me and searching for a push in the right direction, you've found it." So Sean Mendes loved the book, and the 2023 book geared to teenage boys called Boys Will Be Human, a Get Real Gut Check guide to becoming the strongest, kindest, bravest person you can be, and on the Amazon description of this book, particularly poorly aged. The book is advertised as warning. This might be the most honest book you've ever read, which is just kind of rough. Now, I read reviews from people of all genders, frankly, on his podcast and his different videos and stuff and his books from people who like Sean Mendes felt like it helped them. And I don't want to have a black and white conversation about men who make work like this or Justin's work in and of itself. And I also don't want to fall into the trap of becoming so cynical that you start to believe that anyone who loudly professes their belief in something is, you know, doing so inauthentically, I've met people who have adopted that worldview, and I think oftentimes it's a worldview that leads to just total apathy poisoning. And for what it's worth, like Kat and I are both people who loudly profess what we believe in all the time. And yet, when Blake's complaint broke, there were many, many women familiar with Justin's work over the years who had a really similar reaction, which is that I never trust men like this. And this is why we can't trust men who are really preachy about how good of men they are. And I feel like this is part of the story. Like, I think this was really well encapsulated by this one Reddit post where someone wrote, a guy whose entire brand was dedicated to being a progressive male feminist turns out to be a creep. Surprise, surprise. I'm really glad that you brought this up because it's definitely a sentiment that I've seen expressed by a lot of people, including like, I think a male guardian columnist wrote this whole thing where he was like, I almost puked when I saw how big of a male feminist Justin Valdoni was. And although I understand that kind of need your reaction, I also think that it's flawed, particularly because over the past several years, as I've written and studied abuse dynamics, I've encountered a lot of men, not a lot, but I've encountered several men who have much, much, much smaller platforms than Justin Valdoni, who do actually dedicate themselves to doing this kind of work, both in understanding abuse and researching and spreading awareness about abuse. And also, I've encountered men who aim to educate other men as a way of preventing these types of situations from happening in the first place. And I think that it would be doing a disservice to this field, to paint all of these men as inauthentic, and all of these men as having like, you know, a covert reason why they're doing this that isn't actually in line with practicing what they preach. I think that when it comes to stuff like this, what really matters is looking at the substance of what people are saying and doing rather than just having like a surface level reaction to any man who talks about or is interested in feminism. Because something that I noticed when I was reading some of the things that Justin Valdoni has written and listening to some of the things that he said is that it seemed to me a lot of it was really surface level compared to the men who I've seen who have much smaller platforms doing this type of work. It's much more research-based analytical, looking at statistics, looking at data, looking at theory and psychology and law and politics. And I think that it really matters what the actual substance of what they're saying and doing is. Because I think that we have to actually critically interrogate things instead of just look at them at face value and like draw emotional based responses from things. You tell me what you think. But I feel like part of the reason why so many, especially women had this response to the news about him. I feel like part of it is that when you are to some degree steeped in the language of feminism and of progressive causes like Justin Valdoni has been for years, you know how to talk about it in the right way and you know how to sort of skirt around your own creepy behavior by cloaking it in this sort of like progressive lingo. Like you know how to talk the talk? Yes. I think that this is absolutely 100% a real phenomenon where people weaponize language, specifically the language around social justice that has been popularized on the internet and in the media over like roughly the past decade or so. Like we repeatedly seen people do this where they learn the language of a community and of a specific progressive stance and they use this language while simultaneously privately exhibiting behavior that is the very same thing that they're preaching against. So it's not to say that this isn't like a well explored phenomenon at this point, but rather just to say that I think people need to be critical. We were talking about this earlier. There's like a really funny tweet that went viral recently and I'm not going to say it verbatim. Oh no, wait, no, I'm pulling up the tweet. Yeah. It's like one of those internet parables. People be saying things so definitively. Like man, I think it depends. And that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone can say like I'm a feminist and then talk about how much they love their wife. But you have to actually look at the words that they're saying and evaluate like, is this substantive? Is this meaningful? Is this actually aligned with feminist thought? Are you specifically referencing the 2015 open letter that Justin Baljone wrote to his wife where he thanks her for giving him a child and then encourages other men to like love their wives more? Yes. Not the not the deep cut. I mean, it's just what I have to say about that letter. Not only is it not unusual for men to feel this way about their wives after they are pregnant and give birth to their children, but it's also not like an inherently feminist position to hold. You can actually argue that like glorifying pregnancy and giving birth to children is like not in line with feminist thought. Feminism is also like extremely complicated and people within feminism have really differing views on like what is feminist and what is not. So it's really easy to just be like, I'm a feminist and therefore everything that I say is feminist. People don't even agree on what being feminist necessarily means. I think I think among the most jarring texts that were revealed in the complaint sent by Justin Baljone and there were a number up there was Justin Baljone saying in preparation for Blake coming forward with her allegations, he planned to deploy the neurodivergent angle where he was like, actually I was just misreading cues and everything that it I did to her was a result of my neurodivergence. That was up there. But the real one that is just so jarring to me when considering all of his quote unquote feminist work was right when he hired the PR team, he sent a screenshot to them in a group chat with his publicists of a viral thread from Twitter where it was all the times Haley Bieber has exposed herself as a mean girl. And he said in this group chat with his publicists, this is what we need. This is what we need to do to Blake Lively. We need viral pop crave threads about all the times Blake Lively has been a piece of shit to her co-workers or whatever. You were mentioning there are different definitions of feminism, but there is no world where sending a screenshot of a viral hate thread about a woman and suggesting that you need to recreate that about another woman fits into any of these visions of feminism. - Yeah, I thought that was really telling. And it's super fascinating to me going through these complaints and looking at the various examples from like Stan Twitter and influencer culture and TikTok that are being pulled out. One thing I think that's like really stood out to me about this is like these celebrities are actively consuming the same viral content on the same internet that we're all on. And they're picking up what like Stan Twitter is doing and the effect that it has. It showed me something that I already knew which was how consequential what all of us choose to do on the internet is, especially in an age of social media where everyone has the potential to go viral regardless of your credentials and regardless of like the substantive quality of what you're doing and saying. - Justin Baldoni is seeing the way that all of us react and respond to like pop crave tweets about a celebrity mishap. And like the PR group chats are ready to deploy those. - Yes. - As it suits their own narratives. Like I was reading different takes about this whole Justin Baldoni feminism conundrum. And I found one that I'm gonna read an excerpt of by a writer called Shay Orrent for Impact Boston. She wrote, "I am also reminded of the man I met in my first few weeks of college who made a performance of stopping to check on a drunk girl who was making out with someone as I left the party with him and whose sign on his dorm room door said consent is sexy. He tried to close that door. I got a bad feeling and let him back outside where he promptly ditched me. He would later become known on campus as someone who coerced and assaulted many of my peers. What I find most disheartening is this. I want men to be allies. And of course there are men who genuinely are. But it seems the louder their allyship is the less we can trust it. Which sucks, but there are a lot of very loud male voices on social media sending messages to young men and boys that recruit them to be part of the problem, to cut themselves off from their capacity to grow and empathize, to lean into anger and entitlement and to hate women. Whereas there are a few adult male role models who are having public conversations about healthy masculinity. Baldoni makes it less possible for real men to do that work. Men like him do have a tell though. It's how they treat women. Take their words and their politics with a grain of salt. Set a boundary with them and see what happens. Because ultimately, this is how we know whose feminism is genuine and whose isn't by listening to women. Men can give all the speeches they want, but the women in their home and their social circle and their workplace know who they are. And when those women tell the rest of us, they are doing us a huge favor, often at a great risk to themselves. Men like Baldoni have made it impossible for men who say the right thing in public to be trusted. In the end, the only thing he said that was worth our time was this, listen to women. I think that's a really well written way of phrasing what I think is one of my big takeaways from this, which is that if we actually want to combat abuse and misogyny, it requires a group effort from everybody, not just women, also men. But we also have to be aware of the fact that people can weaponize the idea that they are a part of the solution to hide that they are actually perpetuating the problem. So we have to be aware of that, but we also can't lose sight of the fact that there is no moving forward unless people actually believe in these things. And I think another thing that really struck me about this case, which is so similar with other hate campaigns against celebrity women, is that one of the big driving forces was other women online. When you look at the controversy around Blake Lively, when you go on social media, when you look at who's making content about this, when you look at who's in the comments, it's a ton of women, which speaks to the fact that for women who are relying on internalized misogyny, you can also claim to be a feminist while not practicing what you preach. - As we sort of zoom out here a little bit into the bigger picture and fit this into other things that you and I have talked about, when I posted about the Blake Lively Justin Belldoney case on Instagram, I put it in direct comparison to that of Amber Herd and Johnny Depp. And yes, the most surface level way to do that is to highlight the fact that Justin Belldoney and Johnny Depp hired the same PR people to smear women. But I think it's similar in a lot of ways. I wrote about that. And it was the single thing that drew the most comments on my Instagram post about this. People said repeatedly, "You're undermining your own argument in favor of Blake Lively by including Amber Herd in this." It's interesting because public support for Blake Lively has been relatively high. And there's this pervasive idea that this was nothing like the Amber Herd Johnny Depp trial. And I don't think that's true. And I don't think you do either, but I want you to make the case because you could better than I can. - Not only do I think that there are a lot of parallels between what happened to Amber Herd and what happened to Blake Lively, but they're essentially the exact same story. And I think if people fail to recognize that, then they're not really comprehending what happened to Blake Lively because so much of it follows the exact same pattern. Both Blake Lively and Amber Herd alleged abuse at the hands of a man in Hollywood. And what happened to both of them after that followed the exact same pattern. First of all, what I think people tend to forget about Amber Herd and what they tend to remake into a sort of revisionist history about Amber Herd is this idea that she had a majority of public support from the very beginning that only flipped after the 2022 defamation trial. And we both know that that's not at all the case. From the very second that Amber Herd's allegations against Johnny Depp became public, people already started hurling abuse at her and questioning and undermining the validity of her allegations. There's literally video of her walking out of where she got the restraining order, where people are screaming at her that she's a liar. But even before that, Amber Herd was a target because she was in a relationship with Johnny Depp. There was already online attacks aimed at her that had a misogynistic viewpoint that belittled her and attacked her just for daring to be in a relationship with a man of the stature in Hollywood as Johnny Depp. Similarly in the Blake Lively case, there were reasons that people didn't like Blake Lively well before it ends with us. Before these lawsuits became public, we were all there, we all saw it. The social media misogyny storm was fomented in the months before these allegations came out. So in both cases, you have this Darvo process already kicking into gear before the public is aware of the specifics of the abuse allegations that are the true heart of both cases. In addition to these cases following the same patterns in terms of what actually happened, yes, it is crucial that both Johnny Depp and Justin Baldoni employed the same PR person because we saw the same tactics that are detailed in these text messages and in their own defense outlined in both cases. We know that it's Melissa Nathan's job to interface with journalists at publications that covered both of these women in very similar ways. In both cases, mainstream media coverage inspired and influenced these massive online reactions. Very similarly, both of these took place in sort of a visual format on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube. And on these social media platforms, misogyny is monetized. It is profitable and popular to tear down female celebrities exponentially more so than it is to uplift them or defend them. And so you have a lot of different factors coming into play with both Blake Lively and Amber Hurd, but they're the exact same factors. - I feel like it's really important for people to understand and I was actually talking about this with my dad of all people. My dad who's exceptionally reasonable and willing to take in new information and adjust his opinion based on that, which I love him for a shout out dad. But Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have a lot more money than Amber Hurd has and influence and connections. Inversely, Johnny Depp has a lot more money and influence than Justin Baldoni does. And I feel like it's important for people to understand. Again, I just come back to this like the way we think about these cases and the people in them is not organic. Public opinion can absolutely, be bought and paid for. And some people can afford it and some people can't and some people can fight it and some people can't. And I do feel like part of why Blake Lively has had more success here is because she can afford to produce a fight like this. Exactly. The crucial difference between Blake Lively and Amber Heard's case is the very thing that caused public opinion to switch up on Blake Lively, which was the New York Times article written by one of the most well-known Pulitzer Prize winning journalists today who wrote the story that both took down Harvey Weinstein and launched the Me Too movement, which came out in conjunction with this complaint that was carefully assembled by Blake Lively's team that outlined all the tactics that were used to attack her. Amber Heard didn't have any of that. There was no giant New York Times expose that exposed disinformation used against Amber Heard at the time that all of this was happening. There was no one with the platform of the New York Times that came forward to say actually you guys are being fed a smear campaign about Amber Heard. During the time of the 2022 trial, there was such little information in support of Amber Heard online for several reasons. One of the reasons is because people who did speak up in support of Amber Heard were attacked and silenced. Like you. You said it. You won't say it. That will never claim persecution, but you are put through the fucking ringer. It's true. I mean, I saw at first hand the very first thing that I ever said online about Amber Heard is I pointed out that she had witnesses corroborating the abuse that she testified to during the trial. Just making an objective observation about any information that supported Amber Heard's case was enough to face relentless online attacks and it was not rooted in reality. It was all rooted in emotionally charged sentiment that was fueled by misogyny and it was also fueled by disinformation. And I think what we saw with Amber Heard involved a lot more of the disinformation element than what we saw with Blake Lively. With Amber Heard to this day, people still believe in all of these like false made up narratives that had even more virality online than the Blake Lively stuff did. When I was outlining for this episode, you know, I know that the second we bring up Amber Heard, the comments just become, you know, what about that she did this and what about that we are not going through the entire Amber Heard trial because we already did that in another episode. And it was the second episode that it was ever came out of this podcast. And if you want to walk through that with Kat and I then I don't know, you can go listen to that one. But I also just feel like people who are stuck on this like, well, yeah, Blake Lively, it makes sense to support her, but Amber Heard, that's a totally different thing. I feel like if you're stuck in that trap, then the police are coming for you. Can you guys hear the Amber Heard to this? I feel like if that's the conclusion that you've arrived at, then we're not seeing the bigger picture and that whether or not you will support, you know, someone who comes forward in the future, whether it's a big celebrity or not, is still dependent on how much you like them and how successful this American campaign was. I think that if you're unable to pick up on the parallels between Amber Heard and Blake Lively, then you're not going to be able to distinguish when this is happening again to another celebrity woman or another woman in the public eye because this is going to keep happening to women. And we know that it will because it's happened to so many celebrity women repeatedly, even within just the past couple of years. Yeah, I've been thinking I think about you a lot. I think about you a lot in general. But I think about you because you're someone who reports on a lot of these cases. And just since Depe Heard, you have Brad and Angelina, you have Megan Estallian and Torrey Lanez, you have this. And it's a really like, once you've identified what's going on as far as the PR of it all. Yeah. And people's willingness to take the bait every time there has yet to be a sort of raising of public consciousness around the cycle. Yes. And a public willingness at scale to zoom out, look at all of this and not participate in it next time. And I think that in all of these cases, there's two things going on that complement each other. One of them is the coordinated efforts from perpetrators or people who are accused, which involves publicity and it also involves social media and influencers and content creation and looking at how the accused party in each of these scenarios and their representatives, looking at their public relation strategy, looking at how they're choosing to communicate information to the public, the people who they choose to communicate that information, the information that they're feeding them, their own statements, how social media is like sending this information out to everybody absorbing it. That's one half of it. And with each of these cases, you see the exact same tactics and the exact same playbook. But the other side of this that is also crucial, which is the power that allows all of these campaigns to be successful is people's preconceived biases around women and around victims. If people didn't already have biases against women and against victims, then none of these campaigns would be successful. Because it requires people to agree with them and to connect with them. And crucially, it empowers them to take these like breadcrumbs of what they're hearing and reading and create their own discourse around it that perpetuates the same narrative. And that's what I think a lot of these content creators who have responded defensively to the New York Times article and to the complaint. When people are saying like, "Oh, no one told me to do that. I did it on my own." That's the crux of the issue. When people make content online that is designed to reach a wider audience, it requires that it fits into the narratives and the mindsets and the biases that everybody already has. The whole point of this is that if there wasn't already a receptive audience to this type of misogyny, it wouldn't go anywhere. And I think that's something that we see reflected in the fact that the text messages from Melissa Nathan expressing that people really just hate women this much. That's the heart of this story. And that's the heart at all of these stories. Because even though the facts differ and the allegations differ and the evidence differs, none of this would be possible if people didn't already have an anti-woman bias. That they were willing to filter and respond to this information with. That was really good. Thank you. And also bleak. Yeah. I guess I kind of want to wrap this up by doing what I often do at the end of these podcast episodes, which is giving someone who's listening to this, maybe their parents who feel that they exist in a world outside of the consequences of these sorts of celebrity scandals, like something to do, something that they can take away from this. I think that there's kind of two parts to what people should take away from this. And the first part is understanding what's going on and the broader implications that it has. Because this is about misogyny. And it also, even more broadly speaking, is about our information ecosystem and how easy it is for narratives to be perpetuated to the point where something inorganic is believed organically by huge amounts of people in the mainstream. And most frequently, like the patterns that we're examining have to do with anti-women-driven campaigns against celebrities. But this can also apply way beyond that. This can apply to everyday women and everyday people. It can also apply to topics that on surface level, it might not seem connected to, things like news and politics and areas that similarly are often governed by the information we consume on the internet and how it makes us feel. And so we should all be more cognizant of how these processes are playing out. The second part of this is the decision of what to do as an internet bystander. Because really, like we discussed, the comments that we leave, the content that we engage with, what we choose to vote on Reddit, what we choose to like, what we choose to share, that plays a massive impact. What we choose to quote tweet. We all play a role in this when we choose to engage with it. So I think at the very least, we can choose to disengage from it. You don't have to go out there and try to be a champion of who's right and who's wrong in every single one of these cases, especially if you don't feel like you have a sophisticated enough understanding of these dynamics, which are complex. But the very least that you can do and what I think we would all benefit from doing is disengaging from these types of campaigns. You don't have to pile on. You don't have to endorse this type of content. Frequently what I see happen with these types of things is once the opposing party comes out with their own narrative, like once Blake lively filed this complaint, people started to say, this is complicated. I don't know how I feel about this anymore because new information is coming to light. But the correct thing to do is to draw that conclusion before we get to this point. If you think it's too complicated now, then why were you weighing in before. I think oftentimes there's a response. to a woman bringing forward allegations where people say we need to wait for the other side. But did you wait for the other side the first time you wait in? Did you wait for Blake Lively's side when all of this was happening over the summer? Or did you just rush ahead and take part in this without really knowing what was going on? I think if people really want to have all of the information before they take a stance, then they need to consistently do that regardless of whether the person being attacked is someone who they feel is right or someone who they feel is wrong. The other thing I think about is like social media platforms incentivize us to just kind of mindlessly participate in whatever the discourse of the day is. When you're scrolling TikTok or any other social media platform, the design of that platform is intended for you to not stop and think about what you're consuming and what you're engaging with. And so we actually have to do something that's kind of difficult, which is like developed literacy around these platforms that we're using. And that applies to all of us, like we're not exempt from that. I know I'm not exempt from that. There were so many people online who expressed sentiments after Blake Lively's complaint of how did I let myself fall for this? Even people who recognized what was happening with Amber Heard were saying like, I can't believe that I saw it in that case, but I didn't see it in this one. And I think the fact of the matter is, it's really, really easy to get caught up in online discourse and online campaigns and that's a lesson for everybody because regardless of whether you're invested in celebrity news or not, if you're on social media, then this applies to you. - Absolutely. And the next time this happens and it will, it will be just as sophisticated as all of the ones that have come before with the added sophistication of knowing how people have come around to understanding what happened in these cases. So it's like, I just feel like we have to constantly be wary, especially if things that are posted in places like the New York Post, and then fed into like, pop creative or whatever, which sources the New York Post. - In the same way that when Johnny Depp was texting his team and the text that got released from Depp Be Heard, Johnny Depp was not on Twitter sending tweets to his manager being like, we need this type of smear campaign. - We need a Haley Bieber hate campaign. - But Justin Valdoni was. - Mm-hmm. - The people who are involved in manufacturing these narratives are becoming more and more sophisticated with every new cycle, which means that if we want to be responsible consumers, we also have to become more sophisticated with every new cycle. - It's like developing new antibiotics to an ever-evolving chlamydia. - That's a beautiful metaphor. (all laughing) - Did I land the plane there? (all laughing) - Uh, Kat, thank you for returning to the couch. - Thank you for having me. - It is always such a pleasure. I honestly can't imagine spending my New Year's Day any other way. - Me either. It's a beautiful New Year. (all gasping) - And the next time this happens, we're coming back. (all laughing) You're gonna have to hear more vocal fries. We're gonna have it. (all laughing) - Where can people find you support your work? - So I'm on most social media platforms. Right now I'm on Blue Sky at Catten Barge, which is the place where I'm investing most of my time. - I don't know how long the final cut of this episode will be, but based on the raw recording, it's a long one. So if you've made it this far, extraordinarily grateful. Hopefully we can put some new ideas into practice, y'all, 'cause I don't know how many more smear campaign episodes I have in me. Happy New Year. You know, this podcast is like a year and a half in and sitting down and recording again with Cat on a very cyclical topic. Just made me reflect about how far we've come in this little show. And I'm just so grateful that you've been here for the journey. And we'll see what this year brings. So until next time, I love you and stay fruity.