How Blake Lively killed #MeToo
Her crazy crusade against Justin Baldoni has exposed the truth about Hollywood’s faux feminism.

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Whatever it says under ‘self-sabotage’ in the dictionary, someone should take it out and replace it with a photograph of Blake Lively. And add a pic of her husband, Ryan Reynolds, too for good measure. For nothing has ever backfired as fantastically as Lively’s crusade against her fellow actor and director, Justin Baldoni. She essentially tried to #MeToo him, accusing him of every unwoke transgression from fat-shaming to sexual harassment, and no one’s buying it. In fact it’s now Lively’s own behaviour that’s got tongues wagging in the court of public opinion. As one tweeter said after catching up on the latest in the Lively / Baldoni hoo-hah: ‘Blake Lively is absolutely fucked.’
It all started with a movie called It Ends With Us. It came out last year. It was a romantic drama with themes of domestic abuse directed by Baldoni and starring him and Lively as lovers. Even before the film was released, rumours swirled of a feud on set. It seemed to centre around costuming. Apparently, Lively insisted on taking charge of wardrobe, leaving Baldoni and others concerned that she was dressing her character too ‘frumpily’. Lively was papped on set in ‘pants over another pair of pants’ and ‘a mustard-yellow blazer’. According to Pop Sugar, the pics ‘[sent] fans into a frenzy’. People really have too much time on their hands.
The feud exploded into public view in December, when Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni. It turns out it was about more than her shit clothes. There was, she said, a ‘hostile work environment’ on set. Worse, Baldoni and one of the movie’s producers had engaged in ‘repeated sexual harassment and other disturbing behaviour’. Sounds serious. And, initially at least, it was treated seriously. The #MeToo script kicked in. There were pained news reports about the boorish maltreatment of this Hollywood queen. But then the wheels came off. Why? Because Baldoni did something unusual. Instead of playing the dutiful male part in the #MeToo melodrama – ie, shamed star who tearily promises to ‘do better’ before heading off for rehab in the desert – he basically said: ‘This is bullshit.’
He countersued Lively. Her accusations are ‘categorically false’, he said. He has now launched a website brimming with the emails and texts he and Lively sent each other during filming. None of us knows for sure what happened on set. But Baldoni’s hyper-transparency has certainly cast doubt on some of Lively’s claims. Consider her claim that the producer showed her what she thought was ‘pornography’ – a video of a ‘fully nude woman with her legs spread apart’. It turns out it was the producer’s own home vid of his wife giving birth, which he showed Lively ahead of her birth scene in the film. Birth videos might not be to everyone’s tastes, but porn they are not. As Baldoni’s website says, ‘to characterise [an image] with a newborn baby as pornography is perverse’.
Other things also don’t add up. It’s reported that Lively was ‘fat shamed’ by Baldoni. Yet this seemed to involve little more than Baldoni asking his personal trainer, who is a close friend of Lively’s, how much Lively weighed, so that he could prepare for a scene in which he had to lift her up. He didn’t want to inflame his ‘lifelong back injuries’ by lifting above his ability. Listen, if I had to lift a grown-ass adult off the ground, I too would want to know how heavy they were. That’s not ‘fat shaming’, it’s self-protection. Yet that didn’t stop Lively’s husband, the Deadpool dude, Ryan Reynolds, from allegedly barking at Baldoni: ‘How dare you fucking ask about my wife’s weight?’ It sounds to me like Baldoni was back-shamed, made to feel like a freak for not wanting to put his fortysomething back out.
Then there are the claims of sexual harassment. These, too, seem to be falling down. Lively, in her legal claim, referred to a slow-dance scene where Baldoni was ‘behaving inappropriately’. ‘At one point, he leaned forward and slowly dragged his lips from her ear down her neck as he said “It smells good”’, the claim says. That does sound creepy. Except… Baldoni has now released the raw footage of that scene and it tells a very different story. It’s 10 minutes long. Lively can be heard saying it would be ‘more romantic’ if they engaged in conversation while dancing. She jokes about getting her spray tan on him. He replies, ‘It smells good’, and – here’s the killer – they both laugh at his comment. It’s hard to dispute Baldoni’s claim that ‘both actors are clearly behaving well within the scope of the scene and with mutual respect and professionalism’.
Even liberal media outlets, the kind that cheered #MeToo, have raised an eyebrow after viewing the raw footage of that supposedly harassing scene. ‘Explosive on-set video casts doubt over Blake Lively claims’, says one. Baldoni has done something radical. In the face of today’s mantra-like instruction that we should always ‘Believe women’, he has essentially said: ‘Believe me.’ Or he’s at least laid out the evidence – reams of it – and said: ‘Decide for yourselves.’ He is implicitly tempting us away from the regressive idea that every accusation of sexual harassment should be instantly believed, and invited us instead to view the evidence, weigh the evidence, and make a judgment based on knowledge rather than feeling. After a decade of being compelled to slavishly nod along to every #MeToo accusation, or risk being branded a ‘rape apologist’, it feels refreshing.
It feels like the spell of #MeToo has been broken. Yes, that cultural moment exposed some genuinely misogynistic behaviour and even crimes – Harvey Weinstein’s, for example. But it also gave rise to a Salem-like culture in which accusation alone was sufficient to destroy a life – a man’s life this time, rather than a woman’s. ‘Is the accuser always holy now?’, John Proctor famously asks in The Crucible. ‘Yes’, replied the ideologues of #MeToo. The Lively / Baldoni spat points to a restoration of critical thinking over religious-style denunciation. It’s not that we should now say ‘Believe men’ or uncritically trust that Baldoni is a fab guy. It’s that we should believe in ourselves and trust in our own capacity to weigh the evidence and make up our own minds. Never again should we let ourselves be marshalled to a moral crusade that demands we suspend all free thought.
Forget It Ends With Us – it feels more like #MeToo is ending with Lively’s crusade. Is this a vibe shift? Perhaps people have tired of seeing the rich and influential use the language of oppression – ‘shaming’, ‘harassment’ – to fortify their cultural power. Perhaps we just no longer have the moral bandwidth for another Hollywood ‘harassment’ story in this era of energy downturn and economic woe. Whatever the reason for Lively’s campaign coming unstuck, it feels like a good thing that her claims were greeted with scepticism, not devotion. Is normalcy back? Here’s hoping.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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