Blake Lively

I'm just going to quote Yoda on this, because this was already discussed earlier:


Baldoni and Wayfarer allegedly engaged in an orchestrated campaign to damage her reputation preemptively... because they were concerned she'd go public with the sexual harassment stuff.

Yeah, as I've been saying since the beginning, that's the single-most important thing we actually know.

As is par for the course, we have a lot of rumors and claims and things we can't really know the truth of. But we have a few actual facts, and one of them is Baldoni doing something extremely underhanded. Like, borderline conspiracy level stuff I wouldn't believe if it hadn't already been subpoenaed. That's 10x more important than backbiting diva rumors from a decade ago, or what have you.

It's nuts to care more about things which would be underhanded if true than something which we know is already both of those things. It is the single firmest and most significant fact we have about any of this, and only motivated reasoning would choose to ignore it in favor of the other stuff.

Everything you posted with the blind items aren’t relevant to the case and, as I have pointed out before, is just character attacks.
Again, I doubt any one thinks Lively is such a saint.
Furthermore, you haven’t acknowledged my earlier post about the lawsuit against Baldroni regarding stealing someone’s script idea for his debut movie. Which is is odd, considering that’s actual fact and not merely a blind item rumor.

Yep. Explicitly mentioned this a couple of times earlier (no response, per usual):
This was all predicted: that we'd all exhibit some thoughtfulness and nuance about her misdeeds, and that somehow none of it would be noticed. This is how it always goes.

In another thread he completely hallucinated people saying something about a lawsuit (I pointed this out and it was never acknowledged), so it's a relatively small lift to hallucinate people cheerleading Lively blindly, as an inverse of what he's doing.

Don't you know the exchange rate is that 50 rumors or accusations = 1 actual fact?

Though even that's being too generous, because at one point he posted something, presenting it as a fact, and when you actually read the article it's just another claim. And on another occasion he said something was "confirmed" that, again, just turned out to be a currently unsubstantiated claim.

So there's only two possibilities: either this is deliberate obfuscation/dishonesty, or it's just a lot of lazy skimming and grabbing hold of whatever seems helpful and throwing it out there. My money's on the latter, because that's the kind of thing that happens when people needlessly attach their pride or reputation to disputes that they have nothing to do with. It becomes impossible to admit nuance or mistake. You have no choice but to constantly double down.

If more people could actually learn that their initial gut feelings arent made of magic (and are in fact frequently wrong), and then get around to actually putting in the effort to learn how to construct an argument, it would be shocking how many terrible, horrible, dreadful opinions would vanish almost immediately.


This will never ever happen though, so the rest of humanity will have to wear these people like albatrosses around their neck until the end of time.


Who knows, maybe that's how these sorts of people can feel like they actually made an impact in this life: By slowing everyone else down. Maybe it's a point of pride with them to turn discourse into a lead footed trudge. Maybe this is what they think intelligence looks likes (hint, it's not).

Unfortunately most people think they're particularly tough to fool, the same way most people think they're above-average drivers. They all live in Lake Wobegon, though for the rest of it's just that first syllable.

I don't expect to disabuse people of this so I usually move on to the next layer:

Okay, someone believes they can sniff out the truth particularly well. Let's not even dispute that, let's just ask: if you were wrong, how would you know? What things do you watch for? And if you find you're literally never wrong, always know right away, and find every conclusion obvious...isn't that inherently implausible?

There's another layer beyond that, too, where we ponder how likely it is that such remarkable truth-detection abilities could coexist with a total inability to articulate or defend them to anyone, but that's a little murkier.

This ties into the above, I think: one of the ways you can short-circuit your own self-corrective mechanisms is by deciding the fervor of opposition is, itself, evidence that you're right. And sometimes it is. But it's also what you get when you're completely wrong. And if someone doesn't have an explanation as to how they know one from the other (or, worse, floats past the question every time its asked, as if they can't even begin to consider it), that's a pretty big red flag.

Well, these are civil suits, not criminal ones. No one is being arrested.

In a civil suit, you can sue for things like emotional damage. You can sue for an employer creating a hostile work environment.

Lively's version of events is that she was subjected to an unprofessional working environment (including several incidents that would fall under harassment), and that in a preemptive act of retaliation, Baldoni hired a PR firm to damage her reputation.

Because the PR firm didn't, as you say, "defend [him] to protect his career." Defending him would look like responding to allegations, maybe creating positive buzz around the way he ran the set, etc. What the PR firm did was work to drum up sentiment against Lively. The fact that they were using old interviews and gossip about things that happened a decade ago speaks to the fact that this was a smear campaign, not a "defense" campaign.

I'll be more open to Baldoni's side of things when the three women who are credited as intimacy coordinators in the cast & crew list come forward and confirm that they were hired before Baldoni signed the contract amendment.

Exactly right. It's absolutely bananas to try to handwave that away as just "describing what she did" to "defend" themselves. As if there's no difference between making claims or putting out statements and literally creating fake identities to create a false sense of public opinion.

Yep, this is a big point. And I want to specifically highlight it, preemptively, because if they do settle we all know that'll be used as "proof" (or "confirmation") that Lively didn't want something to come out, even though Baldoni's claims here are an equally good explanation for why he might want to settle.

Imho, absolutely nothing makes Baldoni look more suspicious than his decision to mount a full-blown smear campaign against Blake preemptively - why would a person who hadn't done anything wrong resort to that?

This is literally this only place I'm reading about/engaging with this story, but I'm genuinely curious as to whether anyone has reached out to them. Like, "Hey, Cindy, can you confirm the date you were hired?". Feels incredibly open-and-shut.

There is a difference between behavior being unwise or unprofessional, or lacking in judgment, and being illegal and subject to damages in a civil proceeding. It may have been all of those things for Baldoni to hire a PR firm to disparage Blake Lively. I certainly would not have done that, and as many here have noted, there are ways he could have, both pre-emptively or after the fact, defended himself without doing this, but what about it makes it illegal for him to do so? The other aspects of Lively's complaint that I understand, it is illegal to commit sexual harassment and to foster a hostile work environment tied to that harassment, but what makes hiring the crisis PR firm unlawful? One element that has been discussed which may be part of the answer to the question was that it was done pre-emptively, before allegations had been made against him, and that that's what is unlawful about it. This is reasonable, if true, but, how pre-emptive was it? He didn't do it until after the premiere, where he had been completely isolated from all of the cast and crew and forced to watch the film in an entirely different area with his friends and family. He didn't do it until after Lively complained to the studio and they signed an agreement that he would not sexually harass her or do other inappropriate things for the rest of filming. So, an argument could be made that he knew that she was planning to sue him or otherwise use the incidents that happened on the set to damage him, and that he was being proactive in hiring the PR firm to get ahead of what he already had known for some time was going to happen. Why would that not be a reasonable reading of these same set of facts? Again, this I don't think was wise, but why was it illegal? Also, typically, unless allegations are untrue, it's often not thought of as illegal behavior to speak or write about them. If Baldoni distributed published clips of video interviews that Lively did, even if bad for Lively, and facilitated by Baldoni, that wouldn't be slander or libel, which would be legally actionable. Is Lively alleging that he propagated untrue stories? Not that I've seen. So, I'm still seeking to understand more about why what he did, even if true, is illegal. I still feel like we haven't really answered this question.

Possibly nothing. The issue is the dissonance in seizing on relatively standard backstage powergrab stuff on one hand, and completely ignoring something even more underhanded (and less precedented) on the other.

I have no real strong opinion on the legality of it all. My best guess is that there was little to nothing illegal on either side. My problem is with ignoring some kinds of professional misconduct in order to focus on others, or implying an equivalence between the standard power-wrangling stuff and elaborate astroturf campaigns, which are on another level even when both are true, nevermind when the former is mostly "where there's smoke there's fire" and the latter is literally established fact.

I always took illegal proceedings against someone the result of their behavior being unwise or unprofessional, or lacking in judgment to begin with. Aren’t most if not all crimes usually the result of the above? *Which would indeed make his actions illegal, right?

Personally, this part doesn't bother me at all. If we work backwards from assuming Baldoni is the victim here (whatever that means), it still "fits" that he would see that he was about to be accused or leveraged or whatever and tried to get ahead of it. Doesn't make it okay, mind you, I still think it's a step beyond basically all the other accusations, but even a mostly-innocent person might resort to something like that if they felt their livelihood was about to come under attack.

Under the circumstances, it would seem to me to be a pretty clear case of deliberate defamation.

Mind you, I'm not saying it meets the legal standards for being considered deliberate and willful defamation, that's a standard that only a judge or a court could determine.

Well, it is illegal for employers to engage in retaliatory behavior against someone for reporting wrongdoing, for example. Part of the contract that Baldoni signed specified no retaliation against Lively. If the PR campaign is considered retaliatory, then Baldoni might be in violation of that contract.

It's also considered defamation of character to say something you know is false that damages someone's reputation. So, for example, Baldoni saying that Lively refused to meet with an intimacy coordinator, then complained about it is something that makes Lively look unprofessional and could impact her future work. If this is a lie, then Baldoni may be guilty of defamation of character.

Looks like Baldoni made good on his thread to start a website, where he would supposedly "expose all the truth".

But the reviews, so far, are very underwhelming...

In the latest developments, the federal judge in charge of the case threatened today to move up the case if the matter continues to be "litigated in the press".

Also worth noting, all of the cases that have been brought before the courts have now been consolidated. It's all going to be one big case, going forward.

My two posts were ten days apart. They were written on the same day; it took me over a week and half of attempting to post my second part before it actually posted. So I haven't been able to do much reading of anyones posts so basically what I have had to do is type up a post...save it then run two tabs open in the hopes that my post registers.

When the forum wasn't loading I couldn't do anything...nothing to read just a white page with an error note. Now it's gotten better and it'll work on second try. It's slow but it's gotten better. I know you would miss me if I was gone.

So the conversation aspect of this discussion isn't going to be great. Right now I'm assuming my posts are going to have to be final word(ish).

Anyways moving on...

We got more facts in this case, now I see FilmBuff posted the Deadline article which is kinda clickbait but I'll get into the other stuff that's happened with this case.

I really don't see how it's clickbait at all.