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Blake Lively

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I voiced my opinion on her allegations. I have heard her spin on the situation and his. I believe him. I’m not married to my opinion and am open to new information. I could be wrong. I have said about the same thing three times. Each time you come at me. You’ve done this to me in other threads and I don’t appreciate it. I probably won’t be interacting with you again.
You voiced your opinion, and so did I. How is that "coming at you"? I am not "coming at you," you're entitled to your opinion and I've never said otherwise. All I'm saying is that when someone has been accused of a serious crime, it is in everyone's best interest to make sure the accusation is investigated and, if that party is found guilty, then punished to the fullest extent of the law. And if that person is found not guilty, well, then the person is exonerated from the accusations.

Also, why it's important that if this goes to a jury, the members of the jury must not have formed an opinion about the accused based on media reports, because that is usually considered disqualifying.

Simply stating that I believe in the importance of the justice system isn't "coming at anybody," it's just me stating an opinion.



Trouble with a capitial 'T'
It's a good thing these type of cases are decided in a court of law, not in the court of public opinion.
That's an excellent answer...I've said that before too, that I hope this is not settled out of court. A court hearing will render a legal verdict which is known to the public.



I don’t believe sexual harassment is actually being prosecuted in either case. Blake is coming after Baldoni for an alleged smear campaign and Baldoni is suing Blake for taking his movie and career away from him.
The charge of sexual harassment was reported after Blake felt she had been smeared in the media. It’s a tool in her case. Just as the unexpurgated documents and texts are the tools being used in Baldoni’s case.
If anything this story is about the uses and abuses of PR.



Well, I'll say this: if someone thinks this stuff is inherently unknowable and just has a hunch about who to believe, okay. Especially if they can admit that a hunch is just a hunch. I have no such hunch either way and don't really believe power dynamics alone tell the story. If anything they probably bias us because most people are inclined to believe the less famous or powerful person out of reflex.

But an acknowledged hunch, at least, is superior to hyper-focusing on meaningless things and pretending the conclusion is evidence-based, rather than vibes-based.



Trouble with a capitial 'T'
I don’t believe sexual harassment is actually being prosecuted in either case. Blake is coming after Baldoni for an alleged smear campaign and Baldoni is suing Blake for taking his movie and career away from him.
The charge of sexual harassment was reported after Blake felt she had been smeared in the media. It’s a tool in her case. Just as the unexpurgated documents and texts are the tools being used in Baldoni’s case.
If anything this story is about the uses and abuses of PR.
Have you read the linked news stories in this thread? Initially there were big ongoing problems on the set of It Ends With Us at that point Blake did not file a lawsuit and did not mount a 'smear campaign' what she did was called for a meeting of the people involved in the movie and requested that: "no more showing of nude videos or images of women, including the producer's wife' to Lively or her employees.That people on the set stop discussing Baldoni and Heath's previous 'pornography addiction' and Lively's 'lack of pornography consumption.
That no one should be talking about their sex lives, their genitalia or 'personal times that physical consent was not given in sexual acts, as either the abuser or the abused." She also requested a representative from the parent studio to oversee the production to assure a safe work environment. That was professionally and properly handled.

Bandoni on the other hand secretly hires a PR firm to defamation of Blake Lively in social media. Only then did Blake file a law suit which also is the professional and correct way of handling things.

Opinion: it's not surprising a self confessed porn addict is going to obsessively talk about sex in a work environment. No woman or man should have to tolerate that.



Have you read the linked news stories in this thread? Initially there were big ongoing problems on the set of It Ends With Us at that point Blake did not file a lawsuit and did not mount a 'smear campaign' what she did was called for a meeting of the people involved in the movie and requested that: "no more showing of nude videos or images of women, including the producer's wife' to Lively or her employees.That people on the set stop discussing Baldoni and Heath's previous 'pornography addiction' and Lively's 'lack of pornography consumption.
That no one should be talking about their sex lives, their genitalia or 'personal times that physical consent was not given in sexual acts, as either the abuser or the abused." She also requested a representative from the parent studio to oversee the production to assure a safe work environment. That was professionally and properly handled.

Bandoni on the other hand secretly hires a PR firm to defamation of Blake Lively in social media. Only then did Blake file a law suit which also is the professional and correct way of handling things.

Opinion: it's not surprising a self confessed porn addict is going to obsessively talk about sex in a work environment. No woman or man should have to tolerate that.
This is an excellent point. Wayfarer (Baldoni's production company) were handed a "production rider" after the strikes were over, outpointing conditions for the return to set. Baldoni did not, at the time, deny the veracity of all the examples of inappropriate behavior that were used in the document:

After the dual Hollywood strikes ended, Lively's attorneys allegedly handed Wayfarer's legal team a document titled "Protections for Return to Production," which detailed the actress' terms for resuming filming as detailed in a 17-bullet-point list. It included provisions such as "No one will enter, attempt to enter, interrupt, pressure, or request entrance to (Lively's) trailer while she is in a state of undress for any reason."

Lively and Heath, as a representative of the film, signed off on the terms in a contractual rider. During a Jan. 4, 2024, meeting, "the parties discussed a list of twenty examples of the behaviors that gave rise to the contract rider from (Lively's) contemporaneous notes," Lively's suit states and goes on to note, "Neither Mr. Baldoni nor Mr. Heath denied the veracity of Ms. Lively’s examples."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/enter...t/77262111007/



Agreed. There is no way to know until the facts are proven. These lawsuits on either side are allegations that support a self-serving narrative. However, if it is true that Baldoni’s lawyers release every video, text message and email between Blake Lively and himself, as his lawyer is stating that he will do, does that not lend credence to his case that there may be some truth to what he is claiming happened? We are not seeing the same willingness to be fully transparent with Lively and her lawyers.



Unless the overlapping cases are settled out of court, then sooner or later evidence will have to be produced, no?

Let the evidence be shown - and evaluated - in a court of law, and let the courts make the appropriate determination as to whether or not the accusations are substantiated.



Agreed. There is no way to know until the facts are proven. These lawsuits on either side are allegations that support a self-serving narrative. However, if it is true that Baldoni’s lawyers release every video, text message and email between Blake Lively and himself, as his lawyer is stating that he will do, does that not lend credence to his case that there may be some truth to what he is claiming happened? We are not seeing the same willingness to be fully transparent with Lively and her lawyers.
Possibly, yeah.

I'm calling it now, by the way: some things will come out that make Blakey Lively look Not Great, and people will inanely seize on them as evidence they were right even though nobody's suggesting she's a saint and none of it has any direct logical relationship to the core claims.

At this point all we can do is evaluate a) the actual facts that have come out, and b) people's thought processes, which can be valid or invalid regardless of what comes out later.



Re: "willingness to be fully transparent" - the original complaint states that "multiple" members of the cast and crew on the movie were the victims of the alleged sexual harassment.

Could it be that Blake's legal team has had to be careful so as to not disclose the identities of other alleged victims?

Given how quickly public opinion sometimes turns against victims of sexual harassment (even in cases where it is later proved to have taken place), I would not rule out the other victims of the alleged harassment wanting to remain anonymous.



Have you read the linked news stories.
Oh yeah! I have been following this story from the jump. I certainly found Blake’s stories about what was happening on the set concerning.
I have also heard the stories about the ins and outs of the PR battle. And seen Baldoni’s lawsuit filed against Blake. I’m not suffering from a lack of info.

One thing I find interesting, and it’s early days yet, there are no other allegations against Baldoni. Usually when a sexual predator is finally outed other victims speak up. I’m not insensitive to people’s reticence to come forward in such cases as has been implied. But no one has come forwarded with other stories against this guy from other film or tv sets. This kind of abuse is not one and done. It’s a lifetime project.

The most recent unveiling of a sexual predator is in the world of nerds and fantasy. Neil Gaiman was outed by Tortoise Media 5 months ago and recently by Vulture. He has had stories and women have been subtly warned against him for decades. Now his cover has been blown. That stuff would curl your hair.



While I'm waiting to hear more (like a lot of people), something that I find a huge red flag is the idea of having a movie where the director is also an actor in sexual scenes with other actors in the production, and (I believe this is a known fact, and not a point of debate) no intimacy coordinator. Additionally, that same person is writing the script.

That on its own seems like an inherently bad idea.

And if any of the allegations related to that point---that he was (1) "improvising" during their sexual scenes and/or (2) adding additional sex scenes to the script that weren't there to begin with and/or (3) that he was not taking now-typical privacy precautions during sex/nudity sequences---yikes.

Honestly, the point of view I'm most interested in is that of other people involved in the production (other cast and crew, not Baldoni's partners or Lively's personal/private assistants). The other actors and crew involved in the birth scene, for example, can say if Lively was given privacy covering while nude, whether monitors were turned off to give her more privacy, if assurances were made that no one had cell phones out, etc.



In regards to the question about "other allegations" not having been made against Baldoni - as someone said somewhere in the thread (I forget who), just "follow the money".

Baldoni's partner in Wayfarer Studios is billionaire Steve Sarowitz, who according to Forbes magazine, has pledged to spend as much as $100 million to "ruin" the lives of any accusers.

Later that evening, Lively alleges in a complaint leaked in mid-December and again in a lawsuit filed on New Year’s Eve, Sarowitz said to an unspecified audience “that he was prepared to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family.” When asked to comment, Sarowitz’s lawyer Bryan Freedman confirmed that his client is prepared to spend whatever necessary to defend Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and himself.

[...]

Sarowitz certainly has the money to fund this fight. He is worth an estimated $2.5 billion, $1.8 billion of which is tied up in shares of the publicly traded software firm he ran as CEO until 2011 and on whose board he still sits, with $700 million in cash and other investments, based on Forbes’ estimates.


Justin Baldoni (left) and Steve Sarowitz (right) at the Aug. 6 NYC premiere of their Wayfarer Studios film, It Ends With Us. According to a lawsuit filed by the firm, Blake Lively had their team “quickly ushered away” after the pictures were taken and then “relegated to a separate theater” to view the movie. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images)

https://www.forbes.com.au/news/billi...ively-scandal/
What's absolutely bonkers here is that Sarowitz's lawyer is pretty much admitting that this specific allegation is, essentially, true. Sarowitz is willing to spend as much as $100 million to "ruin the lives" of accusers like Ms. Lively and her family.

So, once again, following the money: why would any other person(s) who have been victims of any sexual harassment come forward with a formal accusation or lawsuit? They will immediately become the targets of this billionaire, and they will not be in any position to afford the kind of legal defense that would be required against someone who has admitted he would spend "$100 million" to "ruin" the lives of accusers?

If that's the kind of stuff Sarowitz is willing to admit publicly, can you imagine the kinds of things he might possibly do that he wouldn't admit to publicly?

And even if he didn't do anything beyond funding a series of lawsuits designed to bankrupt any other potential accusers, well, that's still pretty much to scare the living daylights out of any other potential accusers there might be out there.



Well Lucky Justin has an insanely wealthy boyfriend.
I'm not sure that the billionaire coming to Baldoni's defense against Blake and Ryan would completely stop others from coming forward. Once the gates are opened others tend to come forward. It certainly may take time for that to happen. They may not come forward through legal means, but they may share it on social media or through journalism. As I said, I am not married to my opinion.
I have had some hot takes about this situation. That I have been scolded for. One of them was that I believe Blake may be on the autism spectrum. I see her use other people's ways of navigating social situations and it always seems to blow up in her face. This is happens to those on the autism spectrum a lot. I am on that spectrum and it happens to me constantly. I also believe every woman has experienced sexual harassment at some time in their life. And I certainly find some predators use feminism as a way to groom women for sexual abuse.
As I had said before I don't know which person is in the wrong. Right now, my money is on Blake being the bad guy but we shall see.



I also believe every woman has experienced sexual harassment at some time in their life.
According to the most recent statistics available:
  • Most women — between 54% and 81% — report experiencing some level of sexual harassment at work.
  • Despite this prevalence, between 58% and 72% of victims don’t report instances of workplace sexual harassment.


It's not hard to see why most victims do not report workplace sexual harassment, and the average workplace doesn't typically have a billionaire "protector" willing to spend untold amounts to "ruin" the lives of accusers.



I have a couple of objections to the idea that it's significant other accusers haven't come out of the woodwork.

One is that I'm not sure whether this is something that usually happens or not. Obviously it seems like it usually happens, but maybe that's just because we hear about those cases disproportionately. "What seems to happen in the high profile cases I happen to have heard about" is not a good way to gauge the probability of something.

The other is that it has the functional effect of always being skeptical of any first-time harassment charge, even though there's always a first-time for those serial harassers. Maybe the reason we (seemingly) saw so many examples of this happening in groups is because for a long time it was barely talked about at all. One would logically expect that, the more we take these accusations seriously as a culture, the more common the reporting of first-time offenders would be, no?



Those are valid points re other accusers, but in this case specifically, it seems to me Baldoni and his Wayfarer partner have gone out of their way to try and damage the accusing parties as much as possible.

First, there was the "smear campaign" on social media, which has mentioned extensively in the first few stories. Then came the lawsuits against the NYT and against Blake herself - they may not be intended to result in a legal victory, and may simply be attempts to make it so that the lead accuser, and the main news source that reported on the allegations, incur large legal bills (and also to try to discredit Blake personally).

If the allegations of sexual harassment were simply untrue or largely exaggerated, wouldn't it make more sense to simply produce evidence of that?

Instead of trying to provide evidence that the alleged sexual harassment didn't actually happen, they are simply trying to make Blake look bad for unrelated reasons. And even if she had made some poor decisions in terms of the marketing of the movie, or whatever, those alleged mistakes wouldn't be even remotely on the same level as a movie director engaging in sexual harassment on the set (or the studio offices, or wherever the incidents allegedly took place).



I have a couple of objections to the idea that it's significant other accusers haven't come out of the woodwork.
I also have to wonder about the nature of the dynamic that happened here.

So this is just me thinking aloud, but it strikes me in what I have read about this situation that there was obviously a back-and-forth power struggle between Lively and Baldoni. And part of me wonders if because of certain things that happened (Lively being put off by discussions about porn, Lively not wanting to talk about her own sex life, Lively being visibly/vocally put off by ribald comments), Baldoni realized that sex/sexual things was a way to make her uncomfortable and put her on the back foot. That things like walking in on her while partially undressed, "improving" during sex scenes, writing her more sex scenes, trying two different ways to get her to agree to be nude during the birth scene, etc might have been as much about "putting her in her place" as about harassing her out of purely lurid motives.

If she was trying to put her own mark on the film (and we can all agree to disagree about whether her making suggestions about wardrobe or being part of creating edits of the film are appropriate) and he sensed this, perhaps some of his actions can be seen in the light of trying to humble her. Asking her about her weight is a great example of this, in my opinion. It's something that a post-partum woman would be incredibly sensitive about, and even if he needed to know her weight for safety purposes (sure, James, sure), it sounds like he went about it in the worst way possible.

So it might not be about whether there are other women who have been sexually harassed, but more about whether there are other people who have been treated in a similar way.

Or, like you point out, it could be that this is just the first time he tried to take advantage of his power this way.



So this is just me thinking aloud, but it strikes me in what I have read about this situation that there was obviously a back-and-forth power struggle between Lively and Baldoni. And part of me wonders if because of certain things that happened (Lively being put off by discussions about porn, Lively not wanting to talk about her own sex life, Lively being visibly/vocally put off by ribald comments), Baldoni realized that sex/sexual things was a way to make her uncomfortable and put her on the back foot. That things like walking in on her while partially undressed, "improving" during sex scenes, writing her more sex scenes, trying two different ways to get her to agree to be nude during the birth scene, etc might have been as much about "putting her in her place" as about harassing her out of purely lurid motives.

If she was trying to put her own mark on the film (and we can all agree to disagree about whether her making suggestions about wardrobe or being part of creating edits of the film are appropriate) and he sensed this, perhaps some of his actions can be seen in the light of trying to humble her. Asking her about her weight is a great example of this, in my opinion. It's something that a post-partum woman would be incredibly sensitive about, and even if he needed to know her weight for safety purposes (sure, James, sure), it sounds like he went about it in the worst way possible
I think this is a very good point. On top of the reasoning above about why it might not be noteworthy that other victims haven't come forward yet, there's also the possibility that there aren't other accusers because it wasn't done for the reasons these things normally are. It might've just been psychological power play stuff, as opposed to something compulsive like it seems to be for serial sexual harassers.

Would not surprise me in the least that, as more comes out/is proven (as opposed to merely alleged), it turns out they had a mutually toxic working relationship where they were constantly trying to undermine each other, but that her end of that was unprofessionalism/egoism and his was trying to weaponize subtle forms of harassment.



Would not surprise me in the least that, as more comes out/is proven (as opposed to merely alleged), it turns out they had a mutually toxic working relationship where they were constantly trying to undermine each other, but that her end of that was unprofessionalism/egoism and his was trying to weaponize subtle forms of harassment.
I think that part of what makes this particular situation layered is the perceived power of the two.

Yes, on the superficial level there are people who are taking Lively's side because he's been accused of being a creep. There are people taking Baldoni's side because they're high on the idea that the world is full of women lying to destroy men.

But what deepens how people respond to both of them is also where you see power. I'm personally on the side of feeling as if Baldoni had more power as the writer, director, and the person who was physically touching Lively in intimate situations. The fact that he was doing things to her body (touching her in ways not agreed on, staging sequences to involve her being nude/exposed, etc) to me is what goes above and beyond petty politics. However, I also understand people who look at the situation and perceive Lively, with her A-list husband and Taylor Swift on speed dial, as being the one who had more leverage.

This is why I think that the accounts of people who were actually on set are so important. You can make a compelling case for either of them being the one with the upper hand, but getting the full context of the different situations described is what ultimately will be the deciding factor.

My personal, gut feeling though? If you showed a recently post-partum woman footage of a birth without asking her first AND asked her about her weight, she gets to take your movie and consider yourself lucky she didn't physically tear your head from your shoulders. (Do not fret, Baldoni defenders, I will absolutely not be on the jury in this case).