During the promotional tour for “It Ends with Us,” something was not right between Justin Baldoni, the director and star of the film, and Blake Lively, his co-lead. For one, Baldoni and Lively were virtually never seen together. Clearly, something had happened on set, and signs pointed toward most of the cast being Team Lively. But as fans watched videos of Lively promoting the film, public opinion started turning against her. The interviews were jocular, which seemed tactless, given that the film was about domestic violence. It was a bad look for Lively. And yet it didn’t fully account for the sheer amount of hatred directed toward her online.

 

During the promotional tour for “It Ends with Us,” something was not right between Justin Baldoni, the director and star of the film, and Blake Lively, his co-lead. For one, Baldoni and Lively were virtually never seen together. Clearly, something had happened on set, and signs pointed toward most of the cast being Team Lively. But as fans watched videos of Lively promoting the film, public opinion started turning against her. The interviews were jocular, which seemed tactless, given that the film was about domestic violence. It was a bad look for Lively. And yet it didn’t fully account for the sheer amount of hatred directed toward her online.

In late December, Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire, and Julie Tate published an article in the New York Times. The story revealed abuses Lively had allegedly experienced on the set from Baldoni and Jamey Heath, the film’s lead producer, and presented an intricate media campaign conducted to preëmptively “cancel” Lively in retaliation for her accusations of abuse on set. (Baldoni has sued the Times for libel and fraud.) Twohey is known as a key architect of the contemporary #MeToo narrative. In 2018, she won a Pulitzer, alongside Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow, for her reportage on Harvey Weinstein’s career of abuse and violence. It was the beginning of a movement, fuelled by women’s speech—confession mitigated through the media institution.

“We are no longer in the #MeToo era,” Doreen St. Félix writes. “The standard of ‘believing women’ did not really become a standard. Stories of harassment and abuse now receive a curdled, cynical, and exhausted reception.” The reportage that thrived in the late 2010s cannot break through on today’s volatile Internet, where information is misinformation and victims are offenders. In the online litigation of Lively v. Baldoni, the word that comes up repeatedly is not abuse, but “narrative.” “What matters is which side’s story is better suited to the politics of our time,” St. Félix continues. Read why Lively’s allegations were never going to be seen as brave, but, rather, as the kindling for a culture war.