‘We can bury anyone’

First, a mea culpa. Last year I wrote a critical piece about the promotional campaign for the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s controversial novel It Ends With Us. The fact that Blake Lively appeared to be using a movie about domestic violence to promote her husband’s gin brand as well as her own haircare line, I noted, was pretty grim.

While I still stand by everything in that article, I should have thought more critically about the enormous amounts of backlash to the film that led me to write the piece in the first place. I should have interrogated why Lively suddenly seemed to have become public enemy number one. And I absolutely should have questioned why Lively was suddenly getting so much bad press when there wasn’t nearly as much focus on Justin Baldoni, the movie’s director and co-lead.

According to a legal complaint filed by Lively against Baldoni in December, and an attendant 4,000-word piece in the New York Times, Lively’s sudden metamorphosis into the villain du jour was by no means just an organic reaction to the arguably inappropriate marketing of It Ends With Us. Rather, the complaint alleges, it was a calculated smear campaign. Lively alleges that Baldoni sexually harassed her during the filming of It Ends With Us and, when Lively spoke up, he retaliated. Baldoni, it is alleged, hired the crisis management expert Melissa Nathan and her company, the Agency Group PR, to boost his image as a feminist while manipulating social media to demonize Lively.

“You know we can bury anyone,” Nathan allegedly wrote to PR executive Jennifer Abel in text messages included in Lively’s legal documents. Later, even Nathan seemed to be somewhat horrified by what she had helped unleashed. “The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don’t even agree with half of them lol,” she reportedly wrote at one point. And: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you [how] people really want to hate on women.”

It looks like there is no end in sight to the It Ends with Us legal wrangling. On New Year’s Eve, Lively filed a formal lawsuit against Baldoni, and several others associated with the film, alleging harassment and a coordinated campaign to attack her reputation for coming forward about her treatment on the set. On the same day Baldoni, along with other defendants in Lively’s lawsuit, sued the New York Times for its story on Lively’s allegations. Per Baldoni, he was the real victim and the newspaper and Lively were the architects of a smear campaign. Baldoni and his team allege the damning text messages between Nathan and Abel were out of context and “cherry-picked”.

Baldoni isn’t content with just suing the New York Times. He has hired Bryan Freedman, a high-profile entertainment lawyer, who has referred to himself as a “pit bull”, to aggressively defend him. In an interview with NBC that aired on Friday, Freedman said the legal action against the Times “will not be the last lawsuit” and they will also be suing Lively. Freedman, by the way, has had his own share of controversies. In a profile last year, the Hollywood Reporter noted that the lawyer was himself accused of sexual assault when he was a college student. Per the Hollywood Reporter: “In 2022, former Nickelodeon actress and #MeToo activist Alexa Nikolas publicized court records of a sexual assault case that Freedman had settled for $40,000, without admitting liability, three decades earlier.”

Let me be very clear: I have absolutely no idea about the veracity of the allegations in all these lawsuits. But I do know that this increasingly nasty legal battle seems depressingly like a rerun of the misogynistic hell that was the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial in 2022. (Indeed the crisis management team accused of trying to smear Lively also worked for Depp during his defamation suit against Heard.) And we all know how the Depp v Heard trial panned out, don’t we? A man was repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt while a woman was ripped apart by the media and the legal system. A man was allowed to be flawed while a woman was punished for not being the “perfect victim”.

Will Lively v Baldoni follow the same trajectory that Depp vs Heard did? It’s too early to say. But one thing is very clear: we live in a world where the powerful can all too easily manipulate public opinion to “bury” their enemies.

Andrew Cuomo is suing former aide who accused him of sexual harassment

“There is a long history of using defamation lawsuits to silence and punish accusers of sexual harassment. It is shameful that [former New York governor Andrew Cuomo] has apparently now chosen to go down that path,” said attorney Debra S Katz.

Kate Beckinsale says she has been ‘assaulted’ and ‘felt up’ on film sets

The British actor has said she was inspired to speak up about industry misogyny by Lively’s legal battle with Baldoni which, she said, “highlights this machine that goes into effect when a woman complains about something legitimately offensive, upsetting, harmful, whatever, in this industry”.

Tom Holland wants to be a stay-at-home dad

“When I have kids, you will not see me in movies any more,” the 28-year-old actor recently told Men’s Health, noting he’ll focus on golf and his kids. “Golf and dad. And I will just disappear off the face of the earth.” Sounds very wholesome. More trad-dad content please.

Anti-abortion laws have led to a spate of newborns being abandoned in dumpsters in Texas

Who on earth could have seen this coming? Oh yes, that’s right. Absolutely everyone.

Taliban bans windows overlooking places ‘usually used by women’

According to a statement by the Taliban government spokesman, new buildings should not have windows through which it is possible to see “the courtyard, kitchen, neighbour’s well and other places usually used by women”.

Babies are freezing to death in Gaza

Six newborns have died from hypothermia within a two-week period in Gaza, where Israel is still severely restricting aid deliveries and a displaced population are largely living in flimsy tents. Massacres are also still taking place daily in Gaza despite the fact that what has been described by many experts as a genocide now seems to be fading from the news.

Pakistan’s vulnerable trans community finally gets help for TB

The trans community is thought to have among the highest TB rates in Pakistan, a country with one of the biggest tuberculosis burdens in the world. Now new screening and outreach efforts are helping trans people get the treatment they need.

The week in paw-triarchy

Want to feel like a paw-per? A bunch of high-priced luxury dog clubs are popping up in New York offering amenities like triple-filtered dog water and artisanal treats. There are mutts in Manhattan with a better quality of life than 98% of the world’s population. It truly is a dog’s life.