A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - Blake Lively and the Amber Heard Effect

00:00:00.000 What does Tiffany Trump need a crisis PR person for? 0.99

00:00:04.240 Well. 1.00

00:00:10.340 Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

00:00:14.460 I'm Matt Bernstein.

00:00:16.100 I'm so happy that you're here.

00:00:17.880 Happy New Year.

00:00:18.900 We are recording this on New Year's Day,

00:00:21.940 which I do just want a little bit of recognition for

00:00:24.740 because I think that's commitment to the craft.

00:00:26.580 Thank you very much.

00:00:27.800 So I was home for the holidays and I was with my parents and I was like, did you guys hear

00:00:34.300 about the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni situation? And my parents are pretty checked out from pop

00:00:39.640 culture. And they were like, we're pretty checked out from pop culture. We don't really care about

00:00:44.760 this. They're just two celebrities. My dad was like, I think I might've seen something in the

00:00:49.520 New York post. Unfortunately, he does read the post. It's something we're working on as a family

00:00:54.480 unit. And so I was trying to explain to them why the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni lawsuit battle

00:01:02.700 situation, which we will explain to you in full as this podcast continues, is what I think is much

00:01:09.800 bigger than a celebrity drama. It's much bigger than rich movie stars warring, even though that

00:01:16.320 is technically what it is. I think the implications are much bigger. I think it harkens back to

00:01:21.900 conversations we've had on this podcast about sexual abuse, about Amber Heard, about celebrity

00:01:29.420 PR campaigns, about the Me Too movement. And that is why I wanted to sit down and make an episode

00:01:38.080 about it. It's also perhaps the most requested episode I've ever gotten. And so I called up

00:01:45.680 the only person that I could imagine calling up to do such an episode. Kat Tenbarge is back here, 0.88

00:01:52.720 not just on the podcast, but in my living room recording with me in person, which is so special.

00:01:58.180 Kat is a journalist at NBC News who does a lot of coverage around these cases. She is brilliant.

00:02:05.040 Kat also notably is the first guest I ever recorded with. The first episode I recorded

00:02:12.360 for this podcast which was the second episode to ever go up was amber heard and the myth of the

00:02:19.380 perfect victim and that was also the first time that kat and i ever met and now she is one of my

00:02:25.440 closest closest friends so kat thank you so much for being here i know that you have spent at this

00:02:32.940 point like hundreds of hours pouring over the details of everything we're going to talk about

00:02:37.720 today? It is an honor to be here. I was so excited when you asked me to talk about this

00:02:42.860 because I had so many thoughts and I did not have a venue to express them, but this is

00:02:49.300 the perfect one. Oh, vocal fry disclaimer. We're going to do a vocal fry disclaimer.

00:02:57.700 In past episodes with Kat, people have left some really unnecessarily brutal and cruel

00:03:04.320 comments about specifically Kat's vocal fry. And we just wanted to address this top of

00:03:10.620 the episode. If you have an issue with vocal fry on this podcast, we don't care. We don't

00:03:20.800 care. Do you have any like insight on vocal fry and misogyny?

00:03:25.520 So it is a thing. It is a known phenomenon that people hate women's voices. And oftentimes 1.00

00:03:33.520 vocal fry is the reason. Vocal fry is a real thing. I first started, I mean, basically as

00:03:40.900 long as I've been a public figure, people have been coming at me and saying that they hate my

00:03:45.600 voice and that I have vocal fry. And I actually did a session with not a therapist, but a vocal

00:03:53.080 trainer. He was like, yes, you do have vocal fry, but it's not something that you can necessarily

00:04:00.240 fix so there is a link between vocal fry and misogyny where people are more likely to pick

00:04:06.600 up on it in women people are more likely to use it as an excuse to not listen to women

00:04:10.700 but i also like i mean if you really hate it so much then i guess i get it because there are just

00:04:16.580 some things that people are more sensitive to than others sure but i don't know i think it's

00:04:21.340 kind of silly we we don't we don't care we don't care we don't care we have real things to talk

00:04:28.300 about and uh when we're going to talk about them oh also the vocal trainer or whatever it's called

00:04:35.400 he said that the best way to do something about it is to have more confidence in what you're saying

00:04:41.220 and i thought that was really interesting because it almost makes it like more of a psychological

00:04:45.340 thing and of course women might be more likely to have vocal fry because women are of course

00:04:50.080 more likely to be less confident in what they're saying but i feel like that doesn't always apply

00:04:54.600 to me because I'm often very confident in what I'm saying. I was gonna say. And that was when I

00:04:59.740 was like, oh, we can't fix this. Well, I want to start this episode by saying that I have never

00:05:08.580 had great interest in Blake Lively as a public figure. I didn't watch Gossip Girl. If you have

00:05:15.440 feelings about that, feel free to express them. I can take it. But Blake Lively to me was someone

00:05:20.860 who i knew best for her met gala appearances i think anna wintour always places her sort of 0.89

00:05:28.380 towards the end of the red carpet arrival schedule because she always has like the biggest most 1.00

00:05:32.940 extravagant dresses and she's of course she's very beautiful extremely successful actress

00:05:37.820 that's that's kind of the extent of my blake lively knowledge and then all of a sudden this

00:05:44.320 past August, my social media feeds on Instagram, on Twitter, you know, on TikTok, even though I

00:05:51.120 don't use it all that much, were just filled with all of this anti-Blake Lively content.

00:05:58.200 You know, she is apparently hard to work with on set. She is a fake feminist. She was mean to an 1.00

00:06:06.860 interviewer in 2016. And it was just like viral hit after viral hit on Blake Lively. I couldn't 1.00

00:06:13.620 get away from it. And I am not someone who pays attention to this woman. And I was very confused. 1.00

00:06:18.660 And I feel like maybe that's where this should begin. Yeah. I mean, I similarly did not watch

00:06:24.860 Gossip Girl. And I think that Blake Lively, in my mind, was always someone I associated with

00:06:31.000 Taylor Swift because they're good friends. Oh, she was part of the squad? Yes. And she's one

00:06:38.660 of the people in Taylor Swift's inner circle who has remained there the longest. And Taylor Swift

00:06:46.300 has a song where the characters in the songs are the names of Blake Lively's children. So they are

00:06:52.660 really close. That didn't give me a particularly positive or negative view of her. She was just

00:06:58.360 someone who existed. And similarly, over the summer, I did not care about the Colleen Hoover

00:07:03.520 book i did not care about the movie these are things outside my own pop culture purview it's

00:07:09.100 like a different demographic but similar to what happened in 2022 the social media feeds start 0.98

00:07:16.160 getting filled with hate content toward this woman to the point where i actually in conversation with

00:07:21.740 a friend she brought up like oh i guess blake lively is like a horrible person and that made 0.99

00:07:27.520 like honestly like the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because whenever there's a woman

00:07:31.980 woman who is facing this type of scrutiny and there's not like a clear reason why she's a bad

00:07:37.380 person it's just all of a sudden everyone is saying that they don't like this woman

00:07:41.000 that to me is always a red flag that something weird is happening you're right it was a lot of

00:07:47.020 this like you know all of a sudden you get called a mean girl and there's this sort of like political

00:07:53.460 morally righteous posturing to why you don't like some famous woman and it kind of comes out of thin

00:07:59.100 air a lot of the time. And when the volume of content that's being put out, it's like it

00:08:04.920 reaches you by osmosis. It's like maybe you didn't like Blake Lively before. And maybe you aren't

00:08:10.540 even paying attention closely enough to any of this content to really pinpoint why you don't

00:08:14.460 like her. But suddenly, the vibe has soured. And there were certain things that I picked up on

00:08:21.360 about this discourse as I was seeing it. And I was not choosing to engage with it. But when you're

00:08:27.800 on social media all the time, you are fed things. And so whether you want to engage with them or

00:08:34.340 not, they are entering your field of vision and you are thinking about them and you're reading

00:08:38.660 and hearing what people have to say. So some of the things that stuck out to me about reasons why

00:08:44.580 people were mad at Blake Lively and didn't like Blake Lively, there were a couple things that I

00:08:49.440 previously knew about her. There were some new reasons why people didn't like her that struck

00:08:55.320 me as a red flag because they were the types of rhetoric that I had encountered in the past around 0.99

00:09:01.420 other celebrity women in really well-documented cases where there's something more nefarious 1.00

00:09:06.520 going on under the surface. So the things that I already knew about Blake Lively were that she 0.99

00:09:13.540 and Ryan Reynolds got married on a plantation back in 2012. Awful.

00:09:18.380 Awful. And this is something that Ryan Reynolds had apologized for in 2020 and they had

00:09:24.320 acknowledged it and so we all kind of knew that that was out there and pretty universally people

00:09:30.040 were like this is a bad look yeah white people we gotta stop with the plantation weddings enough

00:09:36.540 and there were also other things kind of being dredged up from that time that i didn't know

00:09:41.220 about like that blake lively had a blog that romanticized the antebellum okay not good not

00:09:50.560 good and so these were things that i think were already out there but were sort of being resurfaced

00:09:56.760 and re-commented on at this time but they were like subplots to what the biggest issues were

00:10:03.040 which was that blake lively is a mean girl is that i mean is that that felt like broad strokes 0.98

00:10:09.280 what the consensus was yeah that was like the crime wasn't any of the racist shit which is 0.99

00:10:14.420 reprehensible. It was definitely more broad characterizations of her as someone unlikable, 0.99

00:10:22.620 which is generally speaking, a pretty gendered characterization. Because when we talk about

00:10:29.360 people being mean, mean girl is the characterization for a reason. We don't have

00:10:35.680 an equal characterization for men. It's infantilizing because she's a woman. It's also 1.00

00:10:42.780 so questionable because what does that even really mean? Who would she mean to? And so here

00:10:48.960 you start to see like things coming out more specifically. You start to see resurfaced clips

00:10:54.480 from interviews from seven, eight years ago where she's having sort of tense back and forths with

00:11:00.600 journalists. And you start to see things that she said on the promotional tour for It Ends With Us

00:11:06.760 that people took issue with and it ends with us was the inciting factor that led to all of this

00:11:12.960 backlash exactly this this sort of like mania of anti-blake lively content is all contextualized

00:11:19.940 within this movie that came out at the time called it ends with us which is i'm going to tell you

00:11:25.040 everything i know about it ends with us this is going to be a very quick segment because it's not

00:11:29.700 that much yeah but it's um it's a book it's so okay it's a movie adapted from the book by colleen

00:11:36.120 Hoover. It is a book about a violent, domestically violent relationship, and they made it into a

00:11:42.100 movie. And some people have criticized Colleen Hoover books as romanticizing domestic violence.

00:11:47.440 That's kind of the extent of my knowledge. Yes. I am not the type of person who would read a

00:11:52.460 Colleen Hoover book. But again, I was aware of them because they were such a popular phenomenon

00:11:57.680 online. Can you characterize what that means, though, for both me and anyone listening who's

00:12:02.960 unfamiliar with Colleen Hoover's books? The genre of these books, it's like, I think it's

00:12:08.720 something that traditionally has been known as like a beach read, which is to say they're books

00:12:14.020 that are aimed toward women. And they are books that are supposed to be really engaging, like

00:12:21.520 really mainstream, open to a mainstream body of readers. They're not like super intellectual

00:12:26.780 books. They're just like fun, light, quick reads, which is kind of weird with the topic of this

00:12:35.600 book because it is a book about domestic violence. But I think that's part of why people took issue

00:12:41.320 with it is like there's something very unserious about the way that domestic violence is being

00:12:47.500 framed within this material. So I did watch the movie like a week ago and I thought it was

00:12:53.820 interesting. From the way that I had heard people describe it, I was really unsure of how domestic

00:12:59.520 violence was going to be portrayed. And I do think that there are some things about the portrayal of

00:13:05.160 it within the source material that seem to me realistic. And then there are other things about

00:13:10.780 the portrayal that I think are really unrealistic. And I think that's what people took issue with

00:13:15.360 is it has like this sort of happy ending where the character who is being abused in this

00:13:21.400 relationship, when she comes forward to the sister of her abuser, who is her best friend,

00:13:28.220 she's met with so much support and validation. And when she comes forward to her family and

00:13:33.080 friends, she receives all this support and validation. She gets kind of rescued by a

00:13:37.800 former partner. And at the end, it's like a happy ending where the abuser just kind of is like

00:13:43.680 leaving her alone and she and the baby get to go on and like have their fairytale ending.

00:13:48.260 And I think that that sequence of events is unrealistic for a lot of people who experience

00:13:53.640 domestic violence. That's why I think people took issue with the source material. And it's

00:13:58.540 deeply ironic that this is the text where all of these real life events are being juxtaposed

00:14:06.820 with this story about domestic violence that's been heavily criticized.

00:14:11.280 Yeah, a little bit of foreshadowing, you know, and I promise we'll keep this moving. You guys

00:14:15.240 know brevity is not my strength nor is it cats we can yap forever but something that people a

00:14:22.220 particular piece of anti-blike live anti-blike lively anti-blake lively content that's circulated

00:14:28.820 heavily on the cover of the book it ends with us there are flowers flowers as a visual motif

00:14:37.160 were heavily integrated into the marketing campaign around the movie think barbie oppenheimer

00:14:44.280 pink black like every movie is now trying to be this like sort of in-person event now that you do

00:14:50.300 with your friends and you dress up and it's themed uh i don't think that that marketing tactic should

00:14:56.220 have ever been applied to this movie but nonetheless uh it was and there was an interview

00:15:02.260 where blake is doing promotion and she is like get your florals on and come on down to the movies

00:15:09.060 and people were like why are you talking about a movie of this subject matter that way

00:15:16.860 and on its face i was like yeah that yeah i mean it's pretty tasteless but also as with everything

00:15:23.520 the criticism went too far it was really weird to me because this extreme criticism of blake

00:15:31.720 lively in regards to like this whole situation struck me as really odd and really targeted

00:15:38.300 because I feel like compared to how people talk about and react to other press cycles for other

00:15:45.640 movies that discuss sensitive topics, I was like, why is everyone focusing and hyper fixating on

00:15:53.080 this one thing that this woman said about this movie? Like, there have been tons of popular

00:15:59.160 movies that deal with issues of domestic violence, maybe not as heavily as this one. But like, for

00:16:05.740 example, I remember the movie Hit Anne, which like came out also last year and was super popular and

00:16:11.620 had Glenn Powell. The main female character in that movie is also experiencing an abusive 0.59

00:16:16.360 relationship. And similarly, like everyone loves Glenn Powell and they, you know, joked about not

00:16:23.860 that necessarily, but like the press tour for the movie was super fun and lighthearted and people

00:16:29.060 didn't, to my knowledge, take issue with that. So it just struck me as weird that people were

00:16:34.520 choosing to be so critical about this movie and Blake Lively specifically. And it was just like,

00:16:40.180 why do people care so much about this? The other thing that struck me as weird is I think that

00:16:46.980 sensitivity around domestic violence is really important, but it's not something that I've come

00:16:51.720 to expect from the internet or from people in general. Like generally speaking, people are not

00:16:57.340 sensitive around topics of domestic violence. So it was almost like this wasn't an opinion that

00:17:03.300 people would normally have unless they were seeing it everywhere and just kind of parroting

00:17:08.720 what they were seeing online. Like it did not feel that organic to me because if people really cared

00:17:14.600 so much about sensitivity around domestic violence, you would expect that to be consistent

00:17:20.260 around other topics revolving around domestic violence. And it's not. It's like consistently

00:17:26.800 the opposite. And so I was like, what is it that is really driving all of this hatred toward Blake

00:17:32.600 lively because the TikTok that I know is not a space where people are respectful around narratives

00:17:40.900 and stories and cases involving domestic violence. So I was like, there has to be something else.

00:17:46.400 And maybe it's just the fact that this is so viral that when viral things happen,

00:17:51.900 like virality begets virality. If there's a trending topic, people online are going to

00:17:57.340 talk about it and they're going to parrot what the most popular opinion is. And it becomes a

00:18:02.820 cascade of inescapable repeating the same opinion, the same outrage over and over and over and over

00:18:09.200 again. And that was from the beginning sort of my take on this whole thing was I was like,

00:18:13.780 this is more about just repeating the narrative online than it is about having a real conversation

00:18:20.480 around sensitivity and domestic violence. Well, and you mentioned sort of organic versus

00:18:26.020 inorganic. And organic, as it turns out, this was not. That was a very good segue. The New York

00:18:33.400 Times publishes a lengthy report about how Blake Lively has filed a complaint against Justin

00:18:40.380 Baldoni, the studio that he owns, which produced this movie called Wayfarer Studios, his PR people,

00:18:47.580 basically alleging that not only was there all sorts of sexual misconduct and harassment by

00:18:53.480 Justin and his producer on set, but also that there was a coordinated smear campaign against

00:18:59.940 Blake Lively that Justin and his producer bought and paid for and put into action that resulted

00:19:07.720 in so much of this viral content taking up so much space in even the most unsuspecting internet

00:19:13.300 user's mind. And suddenly I was like, oh, like that's why I saw all this stuff that I didn't

00:19:21.840 care about to be honest yeah also i just feel this way so many times when i see like outrage

00:19:26.900 over a celebrity's like attitude i don't care if blake lively is a mean girl i don't know if

00:19:31.480 blake lively is a mean girl or what a mean girl even entails but if blake lively is not a nice

00:19:36.720 person i don't care i i don't i i don't it's just maybe this is a bad tangent i'm gonna cut this

00:19:44.460 tangent one thing that i think about which i think is super relevant because it gets brought up all

00:19:48.560 the time. Like the internet loves how Robert Pattinson in particular does interviews for

00:19:55.440 press for movies. The internet loves this idea that Robert Pattinson would bash Twilight and

00:20:01.440 that he would make fun of Twilight. And the internet loves that he would like tell these

00:20:05.140 like tall tales to reporters. And then later he came out and said that he made it all up because

00:20:09.740 he felt that the interview questions were so vacuous and he was like disassociating things

00:20:14.400 that like, quite frankly, are rude, but funny. And when a man like Robert Pattinson conducts

00:20:21.480 himself like this in interviews, people love it. They respond so positively to it. But if a woman

00:20:26.720 were to do the same thing, then she's called a mean girl. And that to me gets at the heart of

00:20:32.960 this issue, which is that it is a gender double standard that disproportionately penalizes women

00:20:39.580 for behavior that is rewarded in men. 1.00

00:20:43.180 Yeah, Rachel Zegler comes to mind.

00:20:44.960 Yes. 0.92

00:20:45.460 She criticized the source material of Snow White.

00:20:47.860 And everyone was like, so you're ungrateful?

00:20:49.220 And by the way, you're not even white. 0.99

00:20:50.720 It gets off the rails really fucking quickly. 1.00

00:20:52.660 It happens to female celebrities all the time. 1.00

00:20:55.800 It happened to Anne Hathaway. 1.00

00:20:57.680 Like it happens to Jennifer Lawrence.

00:20:59.760 Over and over and over again, 1.00

00:21:01.700 female celebrities are just held 0.97

00:21:03.140 to a completely different expectation 1.00

00:21:04.960 that is totally outsized

00:21:07.360 from the reality of what's happening,

00:21:09.040 which is that, as you were saying, it doesn't really matter how Blake Lively conducts herself

00:21:14.000 in these press interviews. It's not that important of a subject, but people choose to endlessly

00:21:20.760 scrutinize the way that celebrity women conduct themselves. And it's like, people have said this, 0.91

00:21:26.660 but they're taking, they're cherry picking examples from a really long career. And they're

00:21:32.500 looking at encounters where they're like pulling out examples of the worst behavior they can find. 0.55

00:21:38.040 And I find that that practice in itself tends to disproportionately affect women because in her decade plus long career, of course, there are going to be times when she's not like perfect. 0.63

00:21:49.920 Of course, there are going to be times when she's, you know, responding in a way that people can take issue with. 0.81

00:21:55.800 She's a human being, but she's held to this inhuman standard of respectability.

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00:23:37.700 now let's get back to the episode should we talk about the complaint yeah so the complaint is 80

00:23:45.720 pages long and kat and i both read it we are more inclined to reading things like this than the

00:23:52.020 source material by Colleen Hoover. That's just where our interests lie. Lucky for you, we are

00:23:58.300 both steeped in complaint information. Before we talk about the complaint, I want to introduce to

00:24:04.780 you the cast of characters so that you're familiar with them. Kat, tell me if I have this right.

00:24:09.620 Blake Lively, female lead in this movie. Justin Baldoni, her co-star and male lead in the movie.

00:24:15.100 Jamie Heath, who is the producer of the movie and a close sort of longtime collaborator of

00:24:22.140 Justin Baldoni's. They have a podcast together called Man Enough, where they preach about

00:24:27.320 healthy masculinity, which the irony of these things will soon collapse. Jennifer Abel,

00:24:33.840 who is Justin Baldoni's publicist, and Melissa Nathan and her PR firm, Tagg.

00:24:41.840 Blake, Justin, and Jamie all have like kind of varying degrees of ownership over the movie

00:24:49.180 because Justin Baldoni is the male lead in the movie.

00:24:53.500 He plays the role of the abusive character, but he's also the director of the movie.

00:24:59.140 And he owns his production company, Wayfarer, which bought the rights to the book to make

00:25:04.980 the movie in the first place.

00:25:06.520 So he's kind of the driving force behind this entire production.

00:25:10.600 and he has one of the biggest leadership roles on the set. And he's in this position of power

00:25:17.100 that is outsized compared to Blake Lively. She also, I believe, has a producer credit on the

00:25:24.280 film, but she isn't the director. She isn't the person who has the rights to the book.

00:25:30.380 And I think that a lot of people have sort of put them on like similar playing field when they

00:25:35.520 consider this movie. But Justin Baldoni has all of these different hats that he's wearing

00:25:40.600 throughout this production. Yeah. And some people actually, I would argue, even place Blake on a

00:25:44.800 higher pedestal because she's more famous and more rich. But it's important to note that Justin

00:25:50.020 Baldoni owns the studio that's putting this on and, as far as I'm aware, is accountable to nobody.

00:25:55.860 He also has really wealthy backers. There is this character who will come into play later

00:26:02.920 who has, I believe, like a billion dollars, who is like funding Justin Baldoni. So yes,

00:26:10.060 like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have like a lot of wealth and a lot of power. But when it

00:26:15.460 comes into play, like who has the most power on this set, Blake Lively is arguing that Justin

00:26:21.200 Baldoni is the one who has the power. So the filming process for this movie is it basically

00:26:26.560 happens in two parts, which are pre and post writers and actors strike. The first part of

00:26:31.800 the filming happens in 2023 before the strikes occur and shut down production. And while they

00:26:39.800 are taking a break from filming and while the strikes are going on, Blake and Ryan raise all

00:26:44.300 of these concerns about behavior on set, specifically sexual misconduct by Justin

00:26:50.540 and his producer, Jamie Heath. Blake calls for a meeting when they all reconvene where she makes

00:26:56.020 a list of all of these things that have been happening on set. And it's not just like, you

00:27:00.400 know no sexual harassment it's like she makes a bullet point list of very specific things that

00:27:05.060 have happened that she says cannot happen again and you know basically puts all of these guardrails

00:27:11.380 in place for when they return to filming you know say the second half of the film or however they

00:27:16.680 filmed it this list is in the complaint and it includes things like hold on let me pull it up

00:27:22.460 one no more showing nude images or images of women including producer's wife to blake lively and or

00:27:29.080 her employees. Two, no more mention of Mr. Baldoni's or Mr. Heath's previous, quote,

00:27:35.760 pornography addiction or Blake Lively's lack of pornography consumption to Blake Lively or to

00:27:41.180 other crew members. Three, no more discussions to Blake Lively and or her employees about personal

00:27:47.720 experiences with sex, including as it relates to spouses or others. No more inquiries by Mr.

00:27:54.440 baldoni to blake lively's trainer without her knowledge or consent to disclose her weight

00:27:59.160 some of them get extremely specific number eight is no more mentions by mr baldoni of him

00:28:05.900 quote-unquote speaking to blake lively's dead father there was one that was basically like

00:28:11.540 no more hours-long meltdowns from justin and blake's trailer which just felt like extremely

00:28:18.000 pointed. So this meeting convenes and they get back to filming. They finish filming the movie

00:28:26.320 in early 2024. The movie comes out in the summer of 2024. And really the second part of this

00:28:33.200 complaint is about how she alleges that Justin Baldoni, Jamie Heath, and their studio hired the

00:28:41.280 same PR firm that Johnny Depp hired when he was in litigation with Amber Heard to create a smear

00:28:47.400 campaign against Blake Lively out of fear that she would make public her allegations against him

00:28:54.040 and the way that he behaved on set. And within this sort of like list of cease this behavior

00:28:59.820 that's included in the complaint, it also includes you won't retaliate against Blake Lively for

00:29:07.220 bringing any of these issues to your attention. And in the complaint, they have a copy of this

00:29:12.680 that has Jamie Heath's signature on it. Now, later down the line, the lawyer representing

00:29:18.800 Baldoni has suggested that this list isn't exactly what they saw during the meeting or

00:29:25.820 that there has been some sort of like different characterization of some of this stuff.

00:29:31.100 But everyone agrees, both parties agree that a meeting did take place, that concerns were raised,

00:29:37.040 and that afterward, Blake has said like things on set cooled down and everything was fine

00:29:41.860 afterwards, indicating that in her view, things weren't fine before this meeting. To me, while I

00:29:47.480 was reading this, you have like the documentation that's attached. And then within the complaint,

00:29:52.820 you have sort of like a narrative retelling of some of the allegations from on set. And some of

00:29:58.460 them really stood out to me as like shocking. For example, Blake alleges that during the filming of

00:30:05.780 a scene where her character is giving birth, she says that initially the character was supposed to

00:30:11.360 be wearing clothes, as one typically does. And that while they're filming, Justin, who is the

00:30:17.680 director, and Jamie, who is one of the producers, are like, actually, we want your character to be

00:30:23.160 naked while she's giving birth. And Blake says that she was uncomfortable with this. So according

00:30:29.440 to the complaint, and this is corroborated by Justin and Jamie, Jamie Heath pulls out a video

00:30:35.880 of his wife giving birth and like shows it to her and is like, no, look, my wife was naked when she

00:30:41.560 gave birth to our child. So it's totally fine. And then Blake compromises by having clothes on

00:30:49.140 like under her chest. She's like nude in this scene. And she alleges in the complaint that 0.55

00:30:55.400 Justin had one of his friends come onto the set and play the OBGYN during this delivery scene.

00:31:02.380 crazy and also she alleges that it wasn't a closed set during the scene so while she just 0.90

00:31:08.620 has like a tiny strip of material covering like her genitalia there are all kinds of people 0.84

00:31:14.640 walking in and out of the background she's like totally visible and that they had live feeds of 0.93

00:31:20.980 what was happening on screen going to crew members ipads so people are able to like there's just so

00:31:27.440 much access to this scene that's kind of been thrust upon her where she wasn't prepared to be

00:31:33.320 basically like partially nude. And also she alleges that this billionaire who backs Justin

00:31:40.680 financially is flown in that day to come watch this scene. So some of the stuff that's being

00:31:47.160 alleged in this complaint, I think it's shocking. And I think that it undergirds this idea of

00:31:54.920 sexual harassment taking place on set. And it's something that is really lost in a lot of the

00:32:02.140 discourse around, well, was Blake Lively being nice to interviewers seven years ago? And then

00:32:08.140 you find out that this is the type of stuff that's being alleged, juxtaposed with what people were

00:32:13.040 taking issue with Blake for, it paints a much darker picture. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another

00:32:19.140 one that I pulled here. This is from the complaint. They were talking about how Justin Baldoni wanted

00:32:25.180 to add sort of gratuitous sex scenes that weren't part of the script. The complaint says,

00:32:30.820 when Miss Lively objected to these additions, Mr. Baldoni insisted he had added them because he was

00:32:36.540 making the film, quote, through the female gaze. Although he agreed to remove the scenes, he made

00:32:41.940 a last ditch attempt to keep one in which the couple orgasmed together on their wedding night,

00:32:46.600 which he said was important to him because he and his partner climaxed simultaneously during

00:32:51.700 intercourse. Mr. Baldoni then intrusively asked Ms. Lively whether she and her husband climaxed

00:32:57.940 simultaneously during intercourse, which Ms. Lively found invasive and refused to discuss.

00:33:03.440 Here's another. Mr. Baldoni also routinely degraded Ms. Lively by finding back-channel

00:33:08.760 ways of criticizing her body and weight. A few weeks before filming began and less than four 0.90

00:33:14.220 months after Miss Lively had given birth to her fourth child, Miss Lively was humiliated to learn

00:33:19.440 that Mr. Baldoni secretly called her fitness trainer without her knowledge or permission 0.99

00:33:23.980 and implied that he wanted her to lose weight in two weeks. Mr. Baldoni told the trainer that he

00:33:29.420 had asked because he was concerned about having to pick Miss Lively up in a scene for the movie,

00:33:34.800 but there was no such scene. We could spend hours just reading the complaint. But one thing that is 0.84

00:33:40.420 notable. Fast forward last night at like three in the morning, I got home from my New Year's party

00:33:46.100 and I was like scrolling Twitter drunk in bed. And I saw that Justin Baldoni has now sued the

00:33:53.440 New York Times for $250 million for publishing this. And I think that what's important to note

00:33:58.980 is that he never refutes anything that the New York Times published. I find that one of the most

00:34:05.060 fascinating aspects of how this is all playing out is in the way that publicists and lawyers

00:34:12.880 sort of frame things. Because initially, when Blake Lively filed this complaint,

00:34:19.020 Justin Baldoni's lawyer issued a broad denial, which is typical. You see this in,

00:34:24.680 I would say, most cases involving celebrity allegations. And then last night, when Justin

00:34:31.000 Baldoni and all the other people in the case who are all represented by this same lawyer,

00:34:35.720 Brian Friedman, when they file their suit against the New York Times, they go into explicit detail

00:34:42.420 about some of the things that are alleged. And they're kind of saying like, oh, well,

00:34:47.480 this conversation happened, but it wasn't really inappropriate. Like they're kind of acknowledging

00:34:52.020 some of this happened, but it's being framed incorrectly. And so there's a lot of really

00:34:57.880 interesting, I think, back and forth in how these legal documents and these statements to the press

00:35:03.320 are serving as a meta-narrative that in itself is like a form of publicity designed to make you

00:35:09.540 think, okay, Justin Baldoni didn't do anything wrong. He denies everything. But if you are like

00:35:14.600 us and you read complaints for fun, then you're like, oh, this is actually different. This is

00:35:19.480 more nuanced. They're sort of acknowledging that some of this happened. They're just trying to

00:35:23.420 sort of reclassify it. So the first half of the complaint really focuses on all of the bad behavior

00:35:30.400 on set. And the second half is about the smear campaign, which ensued. Would you like to take

00:35:36.560 the reins here? Because I feel like this is your bread and butter. This is a really fascinating

00:35:41.220 kind of peek under the hood of what happens in the world of Hollywood PR. And it's stuff that

00:35:47.580 we normally would not be privy to because behind the scenes, separate from the sexual harassment

00:35:54.520 that Blake Lively alleged, you had kind of like a war of the PR worlds happening where Justin

00:36:00.840 Baldoni's initial publicist, who is a woman by the name of Stephanie Jones, who runs her own

00:36:06.180 really successful PR firm called Jones Works, she represented Justin and Wayfair, his studio,

00:36:11.940 for years. Now, earlier this year, one of the women who worked for her, Jennifer Abel,

00:36:18.580 who is Justin's current publicist, she previously worked for Stephanie Jones, but she left and

00:36:25.660 formed her own sort of PR firm. Stephanie Jones alleged in a separate lawsuit that was filed

00:36:32.460 after Blake's complaint that Jennifer committed contract violations and was stealing clients 0.99

00:36:39.420 out from under her and one of those clients is Justin Baldoni. There's a lot of lawsuits here

00:36:44.820 and I hope you're taking notes because there will be a test. It's really complicated and it's so

00:36:50.740 interesting because I think that normally the assumption is like oh the public wouldn't care

00:36:55.900 about this type of stuff but this case is really showing that people are just as interested in the

00:37:02.080 behind the scenes publicists as they are in some of these like minor celebrity figures. Well because

00:37:07.140 I think that people are realizing, and for me, the moment that I realized this was the Amber Heard

00:37:12.480 trial, how much public opinion, first about celebrities, but also perhaps about bigger

00:37:18.520 things, perhaps about politics, can be shaped by these teams of PR people who are run by people

00:37:25.900 who we don't know. I didn't know who Jennifer Abel was two weeks ago. I didn't know who Melissa 0.97

00:37:31.040 Nathan was two weeks ago. And yet, millions of people online have formed opinions and made viral

00:37:37.480 content based off of these opinions that have been shaped by a group of people who are just

00:37:41.940 in a Slack channel with each other, deciding how they're going to shape a public narrative.

00:37:46.740 And as a journalist who has covered entertainment topics throughout my career, I feel like I'm more

00:37:52.720 privy to sort of the machinations of how Hollywood PR and PR in general works than members of the

00:38:00.220 general public. And I think that there's kind of like an unintended byproduct of all of this,

00:38:05.360 where I think that it's good that people are able to see how some of this stuff works behind the

00:38:10.320 scenes. Because a lot of how it works is you have publicists reaching out to journalists

00:38:15.000 and feeding them information off the record or on background that then informs articles in places

00:38:21.420 like TMZ and the Daily Mail and the New York Times. And then the audience reads that stuff,

00:38:26.420 but they don't really see how the sausage gets made. And through this, we're able to kind of

00:38:31.960 see how it starts with Justin Baldoni's publicist, and then it becomes like an article in page six.

00:38:40.800 Where my dad picks it up.

00:38:43.100 Yes. Yes. Literally. The reason why we have sort of this unprecedented access to this,

00:38:49.940 and a lot of what's been going viral online around this, are these screenshots of text messages.

00:38:56.420 that Justin Baldoni's PR team are sending each other.

00:38:59.400 And the reason we have these text messages,

00:39:01.880 the reason that they're in the complaint 0.97

00:39:03.360 is because Stephanie Jones complied with a subpoena 0.99

00:39:07.300 where she, former boss of Jennifer Abel, 1.00

00:39:10.920 confiscates work phone. 1.00

00:39:12.820 Stephanie, like, you know, Jennifer. 1.00

00:39:18.760 We're talking about like the third subplot lawsuit

00:39:22.140 and Kat's like the most excited

00:39:24.200 she's ever been about anything.

00:39:26.420 so chomping at the bit it's so crazy and i could go so deep into it but i won't because we're

00:39:33.520 limited in the amount of time we have i mean well ish so jennifer abel while she's like leaving

00:39:42.340 stephanie jones's pr firm to start her own competing pr firm her phone basically gets seized

00:39:48.540 and because of a subpoena process that is like a quid pro quo between like blake lively and

00:39:54.240 Stephanie Jones, they get these text messages and they're able to put them in this complaint

00:39:59.080 that's released to the public. I've talked a little bit about this complaint and the ensuing

00:40:05.420 lawsuits on Instagram. And I did get a number of comments from people who I would imagine did not

00:40:11.640 want this all to be true, who were like, well, those text screenshots could have easily been

00:40:16.700 fabricated. I get why people think that. But what you have to understand is this isn't like

00:40:23.320 influencer drama, where people aren't beholden to any sort of ethical standards or standard of

00:40:29.060 proof or accuracy. When you're talking about a legal venue, the lawyers who submitted this

00:40:35.620 complaint on behalf of Blake Lively, if they fabricated text messages, they could lose their

00:40:41.920 legal licenses. It would be really unlikely for a separate lawyer who was hired to do something

00:40:50.820 that would put their entire credential in jeopardy.

00:40:54.280 And we now know, because we have responses,

00:40:57.480 that these aren't fabricated text messages.

00:41:00.000 They are real.

00:41:01.300 Now, Justin's lawyer, who's also representing his publicists,

00:41:05.420 they argue that these are cherry-picked,

00:41:07.740 that they're taken out of context,

00:41:09.260 that they don't include emojis or tap-back reactions

00:41:12.600 or preceding text messages

00:41:14.340 that maybe change the context around them.

00:41:16.880 But we know that these are real text messages

00:41:18.880 and they don't contest all of them like there are a few of them where they're like oh well you for

00:41:24.740 you didn't add this emoji you you cut the emoji out but they don't say that about all of them

00:41:29.500 there's a lot of text messages that they're not contesting that reveal how articles were shaped

00:41:36.640 do you want to explain basically how he hires like first of all like what is tag and how he

00:41:41.360 hires them and like why am i putting too much on you no no no so jennifer abel like i said 0.97

00:41:47.260 She used to work for Stephanie Jones, and over the course of this summer, she forms her own separate PR agency and pulls Justin over as a client. 1.00

00:41:56.580 Now, Jennifer Abel separately is working with another publicist named Melissa Nathan.

00:42:02.220 Melissa Nathan is the owner and the founder of the agency group, which is TAG.

00:42:08.200 And Melissa Nathan is the person who's previously represented Johnny Depp.

00:42:12.780 She's previously represented Drake.

00:42:15.520 She's previously represented a number of people involved in the Trump administration and the

00:42:20.900 Trump family.

00:42:22.040 She previously represented like Tiffany Trump.

00:42:24.780 Can you just explain like on the highest level for someone who's really tapped out of all

00:42:28.900 of this, like what the job of a PR person like Melissa Nathan is?

00:42:32.120 So there are a lot of different types of PR, which is public relations. 1.00

00:42:36.480 Melissa Nathan is a crisis publicist.

00:42:40.020 And so this is interesting because even within the world of crisis communications, there

00:42:44.220 different types of crisis professionals. What does Tiffany Trump need a crisis PR person for?

00:42:51.740 Well, I went to school for journalism and in my journalism school and in a lot of different

00:43:03.600 journalism schools, you can study journalism or you can study PR. Like there are two separate

00:43:08.420 tracks. And they come from like a similar place where it's you're communicating information to

00:43:14.200 the public. That's your job. As a journalist, ideally, you are not beholden to anyone's

00:43:20.160 interests. You don't have conflicts of interests. You're speaking for the greater public and you're

00:43:24.220 speaking for the greater good. As a PR person, you are beholden to a specific interest, which

00:43:30.020 is the person who hired you or the company or the entity. And so anyone who is a public figure and

00:43:35.580 increasingly private figures too, will employ PR people to help shape narratives and convey

00:43:41.960 information to the public and other kinds of stakeholders. And crisis work is sort of based

00:43:48.380 in the idea that if you have a negative public reputation or something happens that puts your

00:43:55.260 business or your reputation or the narrative around you in jeopardy, then you hire someone

00:44:00.960 like this to help you course correct and change how the public or stakeholders view you. And so

00:44:07.720 crisis and PR are not inherently bad. There are tons of cases where people are employed to do

00:44:13.580 things like PR. It's not something that you would think of as nefarious. And similar to journalism,

00:44:18.500 people have, you know, like a growing distrust and growing sort of negative view of this entire

00:44:24.620 industry, which I think a lot of people who work in this industry would say is like really unfair.

00:44:30.000 But when you have stuff like this happen, it paints sort of a broader brush over what crisis PR is. And so over the past week, I've talked to some of the crisis professionals who I've used as sources in previous articles, and they've talked about how like crisis PR itself also isn't inherently nefarious.

00:44:49.980 a lot of times if you own like a major company or if you're a politician or if you're a relative

00:44:55.340 of a politician, you might hire a crisis publicist before anything bad happens. Like you might hire

00:45:02.020 a crisis strategist to help you plan for if someone goes online and spreads some nasty made

00:45:09.680 up rumor about you, how are you going to respond to that? That's what a crisis PR person would

00:45:14.020 help you with. Crisis publicity in Hollywood is kind of a different beast because Hollywood,

00:45:20.580 which also now encapsulates things like influencers, the narrative oftentimes is the

00:45:26.240 product. If you're an influencer, your whole job is how the world perceives you. And increasingly,

00:45:32.660 as any type of celebrity, your whole product is yourself and how the world around you,

00:45:38.580 people on social media perceive you. And so crisis publicity is something that is commonly referred

00:45:44.820 to a lot of times as spin, which is like, if there's stories out there, how do we change those

00:45:50.340 stories? Or how do we put stories out there in a way that makes our client look good? Or in this

00:45:56.580 case, how do we put stories out there that makes someone our client had an altercation with look

00:46:02.220 bad so justin hires this pr team led by melissa nathan and long story short not that short i know

00:46:10.820 we've been recording for an hour already but it's incredibly successful they see the backlash that

00:46:18.500 blake lively is getting for promoting the movie in this light-hearted way right telling people

00:46:23.180 to go wear florals meanwhile the public is not made aware until recently that promoting this

00:46:30.060 movie in a lighthearted way was in the marketing materials provided by the distributor of the

00:46:35.900 movie. So Blake Lively was contractually obligated to maintain that tone in her promotional interviews,

00:46:42.320 but nevermind that. Justin Baldoni and his PR team are like, well, if the public is responding

00:46:47.600 so badly to that, we are going to focus our social media content, Justin's social media

00:46:53.600 and content entirely on the seriousness of domestic violence. So much so that there's a

00:46:59.000 text in here that justin sends to his pr team he he proposes the idea and i thought this was 0.58

00:47:05.940 fucking crazy he proposes the idea of collecting dms that his followers can send to him survivors 0.72

00:47:12.700 of domestic violence that he can then publish to promote the movie even his own team are like 0.98

00:47:20.160 justin you're doing way too much this is this is not a good idea so they didn't follow through

00:47:24.280 with that one but they seed all of these articles in different publications like the new york post

00:47:31.660 where melissa nathan the head of this pr firm has a sister who is an editor there which was also

00:47:37.680 crazy yeah there are price negotiations between justin baljoni's camp and tag and i think it it

00:47:46.800 looks like they paid somewhere between 75 and 175 000 for this treatment which to be honest given

00:47:53.920 how huge this got doesn't sound like a lot of money to me like i would have thought it was like

00:47:58.460 millions so tag and justin baldoni and jamie heath and jennifer abel they're all extremely

00:48:04.260 successful in this effort and there are these texts between justin and between the pr people

00:48:09.680 that are published in blake lively's complaint one where melissa nathan says he doesn't realize

00:48:15.120 how lucky he is right now we need to press on him just how fucking lucky he is and here i believe

00:48:21.380 she's referring to the allegations blake made against him the whispering in the ear the sexual 0.97

00:48:26.580 connotations like jesus fucking christ other members of the crew and cast feeling uncomfortable 0.96

00:48:32.100 watching it i mean there is just so much in other texts she writes and the socials are really really 0.95

00:48:38.800 ramping up it's actually sad because it just shows you how people really want to hate on women

00:48:44.620 and I thought that was sad yeah this is Justin's PR person a woman weaponizing people against

00:48:52.740 another woman because it's her job and communicating to other women that she's doing this with

00:48:59.540 about how sad it is that they're so successful in this effort I don't know there's so much here

00:49:04.920 and again this episode could be three million hours and at the rate we're going it might be

00:49:09.000 i really was wondering with that text where melissa nathan says it just goes to show you how

00:49:14.920 willing people are to hate women i was like what is it like to to put your head on the

00:49:20.800 pillow every night and know that this is your job yeah so i think it's really interesting that in

00:49:26.020 the response from the lawyer who represents melissa nathan and justin baldoni and jennifer

00:49:31.840 abel they are really harping on the fact they're like oh well they didn't actually do all of this

00:49:36.800 bad stuff to shift the narrative. The narrative just organically developed because of misogyny.

00:49:41.960 They say that like, oh, well, Blake brought all of this on herself. It was all organically

00:49:46.220 responding to things that Blake did. It's all Blake's fault, yada, yada, yada, yada.

00:49:50.800 But I do think that there is something to be said about the fact that over and over and over again

00:49:57.240 on social media, people willingly do engage in these sort of misogynistic slants. Like,

00:50:05.200 Justin's lawyer argues that the stories they discuss in these text messages weren't actually

00:50:12.060 always a result of their efforts. We do know that they're being paid sums of money to have

00:50:18.240 conversations with journalists who work for outlets like the Daily Mail, who work for outlets

00:50:23.560 like TMZ. And if you read these outlets or if you know about these outlets, they traffic in negative,

00:50:30.940 salacious stories about celebrity women. But the online social media response is so much bigger

00:50:38.660 than that. And I think a lot of it is authentically fueled by people's underlying double standards and

00:50:45.640 expectations for women. Yeah, it's like this inorganic calculated strategy to dogpile on a

00:50:52.340 woman plays well into the hands of organic misogyny that is already taking place online,

00:50:58.600 especially fueled by page six in the Daily Mail, but also TikTok comments. 1.00

00:51:03.400 Yes. I was revisiting some of the TikToks about this, and it's like a lot of TikTokers have 0.97

00:51:09.940 responded to this, and a lot of content creators have responded to all of this by saying,

00:51:14.960 I didn't make negative content about Blake Lively, nor did I hold a negative opinion of her because

00:51:20.140 anyone told me to or anyone paid me to. I just felt that way about her. And I think multiple

00:51:26.640 things can be true at once. For example, I was watching this one TikTok from over the summer.

00:51:31.640 I don't know if I can say this, so stop me if I can't say this. This woman called Blake Lively

00:51:36.340 a cuntasaurus. And I'm like, well, yeah. I think you can say it. It's not a real word.

00:51:44.960 Right. I'm like, well, yeah, no one told you to say that. But the fact that you would use that

00:51:50.620 word as a descriptor at all is indicative that we have this invented language. Like we're

00:51:57.040 constantly inventing new ways to negatively characterize women. I was like, what? And it's

00:52:05.220 funny because I saw separately someone referred to Justin Baldoni. I can't remember what word

00:52:12.460 they used, but they used like a negative word to describe him in a Reddit comment. And someone

00:52:17.020 responded and was like, do you really think it's fair to like characterize him in this negative way

00:52:22.100 when we don't know all the facts? No one in the comments of that TikTok was like, is it really

00:52:28.280 fair to use this language about Blake Lively? People were eating it up. There's this culture

00:52:33.440 of mass participation in dogpiling of women specifically, where the very criticism of Blake

00:52:40.860 Lively as being like a mean girl or a negative person is so reflected in the way that people

00:52:47.100 are actually responding to her. Like the language and the excitement and everyone piling onto her

00:52:53.660 is the exact behavior that they're purporting to criticize in her, but it's actually the behavior

00:52:59.720 of the mob. And just to be clear, all of this is happening, this whole coordinated campaign.

00:53:05.620 This is not because they were like, we should pay $100,000 to make people hate Blake Lively a little bit for fun. It is because they are afraid that she will make public her allegations against him and the way that he behaved on set. And their goal in all of this is discrediting her in the public eye and making her so unlikable to the point where it would be useless for her to try to come forward.

00:53:30.920 There's this phenomenon when we look at gender violence where when someone is victimized, before they even come forward, before they even express to anyone that they feel as though they were victimized in a situation, perpetrators will seek to undermine their character publicly to discredit them before an allegation even comes out.

00:53:53.680 We see this in cases ranging from campus sexual assault to cases involving massive cultural moments.

00:54:01.860 It's a tried and true tactic that perpetrators use to discredit preemptively so that nobody believes the allegations by the time they finally reach the public, if they ever do.

00:54:13.620 When I read this New York Times article and then the complaint in full, I had basically the same thought, which was like he and his people spent $100,000 to do what is so commonly done for free and on a much smaller community-based level by abusive people to discredit, right?

00:54:34.380 Spreading rumors, making someone out to be an uncredible person so that you can get off the hook.

00:54:40.320 And that's, that's one of the many reasons why I was like, no, this is not just a celebrity story. Because when we buy into the smear campaign, which I again, I think this can happen on a college campus, you don't need page six, you don't need Melissa Nathan. And when we participate in these smear campaigns, and we don't think critically about what we're consuming, it's a disservice to anyone's ability to ever come forward.

00:55:05.880 This is something that we've talked about before on this podcast that I think is a really useful framework for understanding a wide variety of sort of rhetoric that we encounter, and it's called DARVO.

00:55:16.960 So DARVO stands for Deny Attack Reverse Victim Offender, and it's a pattern that was coined

00:55:26.300 by a woman who studied domestic violence to explain some of the behaviors that perpetrators

00:55:32.540 of violence use to discredit and further harm their victims.

00:55:37.040 And once I learned about DARVO, I kind of started to see this pattern everywhere, not

00:55:42.880 just in interpersonal relationships, but also more widely in sort of cultural responses

00:55:48.980 to people who are disproportionately victimized.

00:55:53.480 So frequently when we have celebrity men and women, I see these like Darvo patterns emerge

00:55:59.300 somewhat organically because it becomes a cultural script that people fall into and

00:56:05.640 follow without even consciously realizing it.

00:56:08.480 And so the denial stage is sort of this idea that even if we don't know that someone has been victimized, that a woman has been victimized, we're sort of immediately discrediting the idea that something bad could have happened to her.

00:56:24.680 We're sort of not even considering it as a possibility in our mind.

00:56:28.020 We're immediately moving to the next phase, which is to attack.

00:56:31.740 And the attacks come in a wide variety of ways.

00:56:34.800 But with Blake Lively, we see constantly this gendered rhetoric in terms of how her character

00:56:41.060 is being painted. And it's a way that women in particular, and especially women who follow along

00:56:46.380 different categories of marginalization, are attacked by the public, even if it's for things 0.94

00:56:51.580 that aren't actually bad, like being too ambitious or taking too much ownership over a product or

00:56:58.360 being viewed as bossy or being viewed as too much. With the reverse victim and offender,

00:57:03.500 you see this too where it's like even before these allegations were made public the way that

00:57:10.320 Justin Baldoni was being framed by the public at large was he was being framed as this sort of

00:57:16.500 victim before we even really had any idea of what was going on on the set. I remember this whole

00:57:23.860 idea of body shaming. Blake Lively kind of reached the public over the summer and I remember seeing

00:57:30.040 a lot of women feeling bad for Justin Baldoni online saying that like oh my gosh he had a bad

00:57:36.040 back and so it was really important that he know how much Blake Lively weighed because 0.66

00:57:41.640 he's like the victim in this situation where a woman possesses gravity

00:57:46.840 and it's like you see this inclination over and over again to sort of view people who have

00:57:54.760 structural power as victims and to view people who lack forms of structural power as aggressors

00:58:01.740 and as perpetrators, even if logically it doesn't make any sense. And we talked about this at the

00:58:07.140 beginning, but it's like, because Blake Lively is viewed as more famous and wealthier than Justin

00:58:13.080 Baldoni, people imagine her as having all the power in the situation. But when you actually

00:58:18.900 examine the circumstances more closely, it's like, well, Justin Baldoni was the director. He was her

00:58:25.480 boss in this setting. Also, structurally, no matter how wealthy or famous a woman is, 0.66

00:58:32.820 she's still a woman. So she still experiences the consequences of structural misogyny, 0.85

00:58:38.880 regardless of how much money she has, or regardless of how beautiful and wealthy and

00:58:43.220 famous she is i do think sometimes that's missing in like the left's understanding of these cases

00:58:49.600 especially as it pertains to rich and famous women because i think sometimes people on the left you

00:58:53.920 know especially men on the left will think that a wealthy woman can escape the bounds of misogyny

00:59:00.200 and gender-based violence through her wealth and that's not true i would like to take a quick break

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01:00:57.160 Now, let's get back to the episode.

01:01:00.960 speaking of how people are being portrayed and received by the public throughout this entire

01:01:08.500 story, Justin Baldoni is not just another guy. He's not just another, you know, movie actor,

01:01:16.860 A-list, B-list, whatever you want to call him. Justin Baldoni has spent years crafting an image

01:01:24.060 of himself as a sort of professional male feminist. And I alluded to that at the beginning of this

01:01:32.380 podcast when I mentioned that he has a podcast of his own called Man Enough, where he and Jamie

01:01:38.780 Heath, the producer who's named in this complaint and who showed Blake Lively a video of his naked

01:01:45.260 wife giving birth while they were on set together, they have this podcast called Man Enough where

01:01:49.800 they preach about healthy masculinity men holding men accountable justin baldoni has done a lot

01:01:57.800 a lot of personal branding i would say especially in the wake of me too of like how can i be a model

01:02:05.740 for other men which on its face i don't think is a bad thing i actually think especially for like

01:02:12.300 a hot rich straight guy is potentially a very good thing so he has this very popular podcast

01:02:17.480 he gave a ted talk called why i'm done trying to be man enough he wrote not one but two books

01:02:24.400 the 2021 book man enough redefining my masculinity which randomly i was looking at these books and

01:02:31.300 the reviews this is such a random cameo man enough by justin baldoni has an endorsement from sean

01:02:39.980 mendez who wrote man enough filled my heart with courage to do and be better oozing truth and love

01:02:47.020 this book was absolutely necessary for me to read. If you're like me and searching for a push in the

01:02:52.040 right direction, you've found it. So Shawn Mendes loved the book and the 2023 book geared to teenage

01:02:58.860 boys called Boys Will Be Human, a get real gut check guide to becoming the strongest, kindest,

01:03:05.740 bravest person you can be. And on the Amazon description of this book, particularly poorly

01:03:12.140 aged the book is advertised as warning this might be the most honest book you've ever read

01:03:18.640 which is just kind of rough now i read reviews from people of all genders frankly on his podcast

01:03:26.320 and his different videos and stuff and his books from people who like sean mendez felt like it

01:03:31.700 helped them and i don't want to have a black and white conversation about men who make work like

01:03:36.600 this or justin's work in and of itself and i also don't want to fall into the trap of becoming so

01:03:42.120 cynical that you start to believe that anyone who loudly professes their belief in something

01:03:46.840 is, you know, doing so inauthentically. I've met people who have adopted that worldview.

01:03:53.180 And I think oftentimes it's a worldview that leads to just total apathy poisoning. And for what it's

01:03:59.420 worth, like Kat and I are both people who loudly profess what we believe in all the time. And yet

01:04:05.200 when Blake's complaint broke, there were many, many women familiar with Justin's work over the

01:04:11.700 years who had a really similar reaction, which is that I never trust men like this. And this is why

01:04:17.500 we can't trust men who are really preachy about how good of men they are. And I feel like this is

01:04:23.420 part of the story. I think this was really well encapsulated by this one Reddit post where someone

01:04:29.260 wrote, a guy whose entire brand was dedicated to being a progressive male feminist turns out to be 0.84

01:04:34.420 a creep. Surprise, surprise. I'm really glad that you brought this up because it's definitely a 0.92

01:04:40.160 sentiment that I've seen expressed by a lot of people, including I think a male guardian columnist

01:04:46.360 wrote this whole thing where he was like, I almost puked when I saw how big of a male feminist

01:04:51.340 Justin Baldoni was. And although I understand that kind of knee-jerk reaction, I also think

01:04:58.840 that it's flawed, particularly because over the past several years, as I've written and studied

01:05:05.340 abuse dynamics. I've encountered a lot of men, not a lot, but I've encountered several men who have

01:05:12.440 much, much, much smaller platforms than Justin Baldoni who do actually dedicate themselves to

01:05:19.860 doing this kind of work, both in understanding abuse and researching and spreading awareness

01:05:25.460 about abuse. And also I've encountered men who aim to educate other men as a way of preventing

01:05:33.820 these types of situations from happening in the first place. And I think that it would be doing

01:05:38.420 a disservice to this field to paint all of these men as inauthentic and all of these men as having

01:05:46.840 like, you know, a covert reason why they're doing this that isn't actually in line with practicing

01:05:52.400 what they preach. I think that when it comes to stuff like this, what really matters is looking

01:05:58.460 at the substance of what people are saying and doing rather than just having like a surface

01:06:04.340 level reaction to any man who talks about or is interested in feminism.

01:06:09.100 Because something that I noticed when I was reading some of the things that Justin Baldoni

01:06:13.200 has written and listening to some of the things that he said is that it seemed to me a lot

01:06:18.980 of it was really surface level compared to the men who I've seen who have much smaller

01:06:23.300 platforms doing this type of work, it's much more research-based, analytical, looking at statistics,

01:06:29.960 looking at data, looking at theory and psychology and law and politics. And I think that it really

01:06:37.320 matters what the actual substance of what they're saying and doing is. Because I think that we have

01:06:42.740 to actually critically interrogate things instead of just look at them at face value and like draw

01:06:48.880 emotional-based responses from things. You tell me what you think, but I feel like part of the

01:06:54.120 reason why so many, especially women, had this response to the news about him, I feel like part

01:06:59.460 of it is that when you are, to some degree, steeped in the language of feminism and of

01:07:05.160 progressive causes, like Justin Baldoni has been for years, you know how to talk about it in the

01:07:12.300 right way, and you know how to sort of skirt around your own creepy behavior by cloaking it

01:07:17.980 in this sort of progressive lingo. You know how to talk the talk.

01:07:21.500 Yes. I think that this is absolutely 100% a real phenomenon where people weaponize language,

01:07:29.680 specifically the language around social justice that has been popularized on the internet and

01:07:34.540 in the media over roughly the past decade or so. We've repeatedly seen people do this,

01:07:40.840 where they learn the language of a community and of a specific progressive stance,

01:07:45.440 and they use this language while simultaneously privately exhibiting behavior that is the very

01:07:51.860 same thing that they're preaching against. So it's not to say that this isn't like a well-explored

01:07:57.700 phenomenon at this point, but rather just to say that I think people need to be critical.

01:08:04.560 We were talking about this earlier. There's like a really funny tweet that went viral recently,

01:08:08.580 and I'm not going to say it verbatim. Oh, no, wait, no, I'm pulling up the tweet.

01:08:12.280 Yeah. It's like one of those internet parables.

01:08:15.280 People be saying things so definitively, like, man, I think it depends.

01:08:19.740 And that's it. Yeah. Yeah.

01:08:22.120 Anyone can say, like, I'm a feminist and then talk about how much they love their wife.

01:08:26.820 But you have to actually look at the words that they're saying and evaluate, like,

01:08:30.440 is this substantive? Is this meaningful? Is this actually aligned with feminist thought?

01:08:36.480 Are you specifically referencing the 2015 open letter that Justin Baljoni wrote to his wife,

01:08:41.360 where he thanks her for giving him a child

01:08:44.280 and then encourages other men to like love their wives more.

01:08:46.960 Yes.

01:08:50.240 Not the deep cut.

01:08:52.400 I mean, it's just what I have to say about that letter.

01:08:54.900 Not only is it not unusual for men to feel this way about their wives

01:09:00.620 after they are pregnant and give birth to their children,

01:09:04.180 but it's also not like an inherently feminist position to hold. 1.00

01:09:08.420 you could actually argue that like glorifying pregnancy and giving birth to children is like 1.00

01:09:15.620 not in line with feminist thought. Feminism is also like extremely complicated and people within 1.00

01:09:22.600 feminism have really differing views on like what is feminist and what is not. So it's really easy

01:09:28.840 to just be like, I'm a feminist and therefore everything that I say is feminist. People don't 0.75

01:09:33.640 even agree on what being feminist necessarily means i think i think among the most jarring

01:09:38.920 texts that were revealed in the complaint sent by justin baldoni and there were a number

01:09:43.260 up there was justin baldoni saying in preparation for blake coming forward with her allegations he

01:09:50.320 planned to deploy the neurodivergent angle where he was like actually i was just misreading cues

01:09:58.280 and everything that i did to her was a result of my neurodivergence that was up there

01:10:03.320 But the real one that is like just so jarring to me when considering all of his quote unquote feminist work was right when he hired the PR team, he sent a screenshot to them in a group chat with his publicists of a viral thread from Twitter where it was all the times Haley Bieber has exposed herself as a mean girl.

01:10:24.860 And he said in this group chat with his publicist, this is what we need. This is what we need to do to Blake Lively. We need viral pop crave threads about all the times Blake Lively has been a piece of shit to her coworkers or whatever.

01:10:38.820 You were mentioning there are different definitions of feminism, but there is no world where sending a screenshot of a viral hate thread about a woman and suggesting that you need to recreate that about another woman fits into any of these visions of feminism. 0.98

01:10:54.940 them. Yeah, I thought that was really telling. And it's super fascinating to me going through

01:11:00.280 these complaints and looking at the various examples from like Stan Twitter and influencer

01:11:06.820 culture and TikTok that are being pulled out. One thing I think that's like really stood out

01:11:12.900 to me about this is like these celebrities are actively consuming the same viral content on the

01:11:20.240 same internet that we're all on and they're picking up what like stan twitter is doing and

01:11:26.080 the effect that it has it showed me something that i already knew which was how consequential

01:11:31.880 what all of us choose to do on the internet is especially in an age of social media where

01:11:38.700 everyone has the potential to go viral regardless of your credentials and regardless of like the

01:11:44.140 substantive quality of what you're doing and saying justin baldoni is seeing the way that all

01:11:49.180 of us react and respond to like pop crave tweets about a celebrity mishap and like the PR group

01:11:56.800 chats are ready to deploy those yes as it suits their own narratives like I was reading different

01:12:02.980 takes about this whole Justin Baldoni feminism conundrum and I found one that I'm going to read

01:12:09.240 an excerpt of by a writer called Shea Orent for Impact Boston she wrote I am also reminded of the

01:12:15.100 man I met in my first few weeks of college who made a performance of stopping to check on a

01:12:19.580 drunk girl who was making out with someone as I left the party with him, and whose sign on his

01:12:23.980 dorm room door said consent is sexy. He tried to close that door. I got a bad feeling and led him

01:12:30.680 back outside, where he promptly ditched me. He would later become known on campus as someone

01:12:36.160 who coerced and assaulted many of my peers. What I find most disheartening is this. I want men to

01:12:42.240 be allies. And of course, there are men who genuinely are. But it seems the louder their

01:12:47.600 allyship is, the less we can trust it. Which sucks, but there are a lot of very loud male 0.99

01:12:52.700 voices on social media sending messages to young men and boys that recruit them to be part of the 0.98

01:12:58.280 problem, to cut themselves off from their capacity to grow and empathize, to lean into anger and

01:13:03.540 entitlement, and to hate women. Whereas there are a few adult male role models who are having

01:13:08.540 public conversations about healthy masculinity, Baldoni makes it less possible for real men to do

01:13:14.240 that work. Men like him do have a tell, though. It's how they treat women. Take their words and

01:13:20.620 their politics with a grain of salt. Set a boundary with them and see what happens. Because ultimately,

01:13:26.260 this is how we know whose feminism is genuine and whose isn't, by listening to women. Men can give 0.98

01:13:32.020 all the speeches they want, but the women in their home and their social circle and their workplace

01:13:36.920 know who they are. And when those women tell the rest of us, they are doing us a huge favor,

01:13:41.620 often at a great risk to themselves. Men like Baldoni have made it impossible for men who say

01:13:47.100 the right thing in public to be trusted. In the end, the only thing he said that was worth our

01:13:52.000 time was this, listen to women. I think that's a really well-written way of phrasing what I think

01:13:58.420 is one of my big takeaways from this, which is that if we actually want to combat abuse and

01:14:04.500 misogyny, it requires a group effort from everybody, not just women, also men. But we also

01:14:12.260 have to be aware of the fact that people can weaponize the idea that they are a part of the

01:14:16.740 solution to hide that they are actually perpetuating the problem. So we have to be aware of that, but

01:14:22.260 we also can't lose sight of the fact that there is no moving forward unless people actually believe

01:14:28.480 in these things. And I think another thing that really struck me about this case, which is so

01:14:33.000 similar with other hate campaigns against celebrity women is that one of the big driving

01:14:38.120 forces was other women online. When you look at the controversy around Blake Lively, when you go

01:14:44.640 on social media, when you look at who's making content about this, when you look at who's in 0.89

01:14:47.960 the comments, it's a ton of women, which speaks to the fact that for women who are relying on 0.99

01:14:54.560 internalized misogyny, you can also claim to be a feminist while not practicing what you preach. 0.94

01:15:00.440 as we sort of zoom out here a little bit into the bigger picture and fit this into other things that

01:15:07.260 you and I have talked about when I posted about the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni case on Instagram

01:15:12.740 I put it in direct comparison to that of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp and yes the most surface

01:15:20.060 level way to do that is to highlight the fact that Justin Baldoni and Johnny Depp hired the

01:15:24.880 same PR people to smear women. But I think it's similar in a lot of ways. I wrote about that.

01:15:31.080 And it was the single thing that drew the most comments on my Instagram post about this. People

01:15:37.740 said repeatedly, you're undermining your own argument in favor of Blake Lively by including

01:15:44.460 Amber Heard in this. It's interesting because public support for Blake Lively has been relatively

01:15:50.600 high. And there's this pervasive idea that this was nothing like the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial.

01:15:59.420 And I don't think that's true. And I don't think you do either, but I want you to make the case

01:16:03.520 because you could better than I can. Not only do I think that there are a lot of parallels between

01:16:08.860 what happened to Amber Heard and what happened to Blake Lively, but they're essentially the exact

01:16:13.920 same story. And I think if people fail to recognize that, then they're not really comprehending

01:16:19.180 what happened to Blake Lively, because so much of it follows the exact same pattern.

01:16:25.960 Both Blake Lively and Amber Heard alleged abuse at the hands of a man in Hollywood.

01:16:31.720 And what happened to both of them after that followed the exact same pattern.

01:16:36.700 First of all, what I think people tend to forget about Amber Heard and what they tend

01:16:40.760 to remake into a sort of revisionist history about Amber Heard is this idea that she had

01:16:47.260 a majority of public support from the very beginning that only flipped after the 2022

01:16:52.680 defamation trial. And we both know that that's not at all the case. From the very second that

01:16:59.140 Amber Heard's allegations against Johnny Depp became public, people already started hurling

01:17:05.200 abuse at her and questioning and undermining the validity of her allegations. There's literally

01:17:10.600 video of her walking out of where she got the restraining order, where people are screaming 0.90

01:17:15.660 at her that she's a liar. But even before that, Amber Heard was a target because she was in a

01:17:22.200 relationship with Johnny Depp. There was already online attacks aimed at her that had a misogynistic

01:17:28.440 viewpoint that belittled her and attacked her just for daring to be in a relationship with a

01:17:35.720 man of the stature in Hollywood as Johnny Depp. Similarly, in the Blake Lively case, there were

01:17:42.440 reasons that people didn't like Blake Lively well before it ends with us. Before these lawsuits

01:17:48.700 became public, we were all there, we all saw it. The social media misogyny storm was fomented in

01:17:55.360 the months before these allegations came out. So in both cases, you have this DARVO process

01:18:01.520 already kicking into gear before the public is aware of the specifics of the abuse allegations

01:18:07.960 that are the true heart of both cases. In addition to these cases following the same patterns in

01:18:13.700 terms of what actually happened, yes, it is crucial that both Johnny Depp and Justin Baldoni

01:18:19.960 employed the same PR person because we saw the same tactics that are detailed in these text

01:18:26.340 messages and in their own defense outlined in both cases. We know that it's Melissa Nathan's job

01:18:32.960 to interface with journalists at publications that covered both of these women in very similar

01:18:39.020 ways. In both cases, mainstream media coverage inspired and influenced these massive online 0.88

01:18:46.000 reactions. Very similarly, both of these took place in sort of a visual format on social media

01:18:52.300 platforms like TikTok and YouTube. And on these social media platforms, misogyny is monetized.

01:18:59.240 it is profitable and popular to tear down female celebrities exponentially more so than it is to 0.64

01:19:06.440 uplift them or defend them. And so you have a lot of different factors coming into play

01:19:11.100 with both Blake Lively and Amber Heard, but they're the exact same factors.

01:19:15.980 I feel like it's really important for people to understand. And I was actually talking about this

01:19:21.260 with my dad of all people, my dad, who is exceptionally reasonable and willing to take

01:19:27.440 in new information and adjust his opinion based on that which I love him for shout out dad but

01:19:32.720 Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have a lot more money than Amber Heard has and influence and

01:19:41.040 connections inversely Johnny Depp has a lot more money and influence than Justin Baldoni does

01:19:46.980 and I feel like it's important for people to understand again I just come back to this like

01:19:52.800 the way we think about these cases and the people in them is not organic. Public opinion can

01:19:59.660 absolutely be bought and paid for. And some people can afford it and some people can't. And some

01:20:05.380 people can fight it and some people can't. And I do feel like part of why Blake Lively has had

01:20:12.880 more success here is because she can afford to produce a fight like this. Exactly. The crucial 0.75

01:20:20.280 difference between Blake Lively and Amber Heard's case is the very thing that caused public opinion

01:20:26.460 to switch up on Blake Lively, which was the New York Times article written by one of the most

01:20:32.920 well-known Pulitzer Prize winning journalists today who wrote the story that both took down

01:20:38.520 Harvey Weinstein and launched the Me Too movement, which came out in conjunction with this complaint

01:20:44.920 that was carefully assembled by Blake Lively's team that outlined all the tactics that were used

01:20:51.220 to attack her. Amber Heard didn't have any of that. There was no giant New York Times expose

01:20:58.520 that exposed disinformation used against Amber Heard at the time that all of this was happening.

01:21:04.640 There was no one with the platform of the New York Times that came forward to say, actually,

01:21:11.060 you guys are being fed a smear campaign about amber heard during the time of the 2022 trial

01:21:17.180 there was such little information in support of amber heard online for several reasons one of the

01:21:23.820 reasons is because people who did speak up in support of amber heard were attacked and silenced

01:21:30.120 like you you won't you won't say cat will never claim persecution but you were put through the 0.99

01:21:37.860 fucking ringer. It's true. I mean, I saw it firsthand. The very first thing that I ever 1.00

01:21:42.600 said online about Amber Heard is I pointed out that she had witnesses corroborating the abuse

01:21:50.160 that she testified to during the trial. Just making an objective observation about any information

01:21:56.760 that supported Amber Heard's case was enough to face relentless online attacks. And it was not

01:22:04.560 rooted in reality. It was all rooted in emotionally charged sentiment that was fueled

01:22:10.760 by misogyny. And it was also fueled by disinformation. And I think what we saw with

01:22:16.180 Amber Heard involved a lot more of the disinformation element than what we saw with

01:22:21.520 Blake Lively. With Amber Heard to this day, people still believe in all of these false

01:22:26.800 made-up narratives that had even more virality online than the Blake Lively stuff did.

01:22:32.480 When I was outlining for this episode, you know, I know that the second we bring up Amber Heard, the comments just become, you know, what about that she did this? And what about that she did? We are not going through the entire Amber Heard trial because we already did that in another episode. And it was the second episode that was ever came out of this podcast. And if you want to walk through that with Kat and I, then I don't know, you can go listen to that one.

01:22:54.740 But I also just feel like people who are stuck on this like, well, yeah, Blake Lively, it makes sense to support her.

01:23:02.960 But Amber Heard, that's a totally different thing.

01:23:06.000 I feel like if you're stuck in that trap.

01:23:08.600 Then the police are coming for you.

01:23:11.720 Can you guys hear the ambulances?

01:23:17.180 I feel like if that's the conclusion that you've arrived at, then we're not seeing the bigger picture.

01:23:22.760 and that whether or not you will support, you know, someone who comes forward in the future,

01:23:28.100 whether it's a big celebrity or not, is still dependent on how much you like them

01:23:33.380 and how successful the smear campaign was.

01:23:37.440 I think that if you're unable to pick up on the parallels between Amber Heard and Blake Lively,

01:23:42.880 then you're not going to be able to distinguish when this is happening again to another celebrity

01:23:48.440 woman or another woman in the public eye, because this is going to keep happening to women. And we 0.99

01:23:53.540 know that it will because it's happened to so many celebrity women repeatedly, even within just the

01:23:59.220 past couple of years. Yeah, I've been thinking, I think about you a lot. I think about you a lot

01:24:04.920 in general. But I think about you because you're someone who reports on a lot of these cases. And

01:24:12.340 just since Depp v. Heard. You have Brad and Angelina. You have Megan Thee Stallion and

01:24:18.220 Tory Lanez. You have this. And it's a really like once you've identified what's going on

01:24:24.960 as far as the PR of it all. Yeah. And people's willingness to take the bait every time there

01:24:31.220 has yet to be a sort of raising of public consciousness around the cycle. Yes. And a

01:24:37.980 public willingness at scale to zoom out, look at all of this, and not participate in it next time.

01:24:46.100 And I think that in all of these cases, there's two things going on that complement each other.

01:24:51.700 One of them is the coordinated efforts from perpetrators or people who are accused,

01:24:57.860 which involves publicity and it also involves social media and influencers and content creation

01:25:03.840 and looking at how the accused party in each of these scenarios and their representatives,

01:25:09.460 looking at their public relations strategy, looking at how they're choosing to communicate

01:25:14.220 information to the public, the people who they choose to communicate that information,

01:25:18.840 the information that they're feeding them, their own statements, how social media is like sending

01:25:24.620 this information out to everybody absorbing it. That's one half of it. And with each of these

01:25:29.160 cases, you see the exact same tactics and the exact same playbook. But the other side of this

01:25:34.540 that is also crucial, which is the power that allows all of these campaigns to be successful,

01:25:40.300 is people's preconceived biases around women and around victims. If people didn't already have 0.76

01:25:48.000 biases against women and against victims, then none of these campaigns would be successful

01:25:53.400 because it requires people to agree with them and to connect with them. And crucially,

01:25:59.920 it empowers them to take these like breadcrumbs of what they're hearing and reading and create

01:26:05.720 their own discourse around it that perpetuates the same narrative. And that's what I think a

01:26:11.000 lot of these content creators who have responded defensively to the New York Times article and to

01:26:16.800 the complaint when people are saying like, oh, well, no one told me to do that. I did it on my

01:26:21.560 own. That's the crux of the issue. When people make content online that is designed to reach a

01:26:28.040 wider audience, it requires that it fits into the narratives and the mindsets and the biases

01:26:34.680 that everybody already has. The whole point of this is that if there wasn't already a receptive

01:26:41.260 audience to this type of misogyny, it wouldn't go anywhere. And I think that's something that

01:26:46.680 we see reflected in the fact that the text messages from Melissa Nathan expressing that

01:26:52.580 people really just hate women this much, that's the heart of this story. And that's the heart at

01:26:58.660 all of these stories. Because even though the facts differ and the allegations differ and the

01:27:04.240 evidence differs, none of this would be possible if people didn't already have an anti-woman bias

01:27:10.420 that they were willing to filter and respond to this information with.

01:27:14.340 That was really good.

01:27:15.900 Thank you.

01:27:16.680 And also bleak.

01:27:17.780 Yeah.

01:27:19.060 I mean, I guess I kind of want to wrap this up by doing what I often do at the end of

01:27:24.340 these podcast episodes, which is giving, you know, someone who's listening to this,

01:27:28.520 maybe their parents who feel that, you know, they exist in a world outside of the consequences

01:27:32.740 of these sorts of celebrity scandals, like something to do, something that they can take

01:27:37.140 away from this.

01:27:37.760 I think that there's kind of two parts to what people should take away from this.

01:27:41.800 And the first part is understanding what's going on and the broader implications that

01:27:47.100 it has because this is about misogyny and it also, even more broadly speaking, is about

01:27:53.360 our information ecosystem and how easy it is for narratives to be perpetuated to the

01:27:58.980 point where something inorganic is believed organically by huge amounts of people in the

01:28:04.380 mainstream.

01:28:05.340 And most frequently, like the patterns that we're examining have to do with anti-women

01:28:10.360 driven campaigns against celebrities, but this can also apply way beyond that. This can apply

01:28:16.240 to everyday women and everyday people. It can also apply to topics that on surface level,

01:28:21.580 it might not seem connected to things like news and politics and areas that similarly are often

01:28:28.060 governed by the information we consume on the internet and how it makes us feel. And so we

01:28:32.980 should all be more cognizant of how these processes are playing out. The second part of this is the

01:28:39.000 decision of what to do as an internet bystander. Because really, like we discussed, the comments

01:28:45.340 that we leave, the content that we engage with, what we choose to upvote on Reddit, what we choose

01:28:50.380 to like, what we choose to share, that plays a massive impact. What we choose to quote tweet.

01:28:57.000 We all play a role in this when we choose to engage with it. So I think at the very least,

01:29:02.660 we can choose to disengage from it. You don't have to go out there and try to be a champion

01:29:07.920 of who's right and who's wrong in every single one of these cases, especially if you don't feel

01:29:12.720 like you have a sophisticated enough understanding of these dynamics, which are complex. But the very

01:29:18.740 least that you can do, and what I think we would all benefit from doing, is disengaging from these

01:29:24.120 types of campaigns. You don't have to pile on. You don't have to endorse this type of content.

01:29:30.700 Frequently what I see happen with these types of things is once the opposing party comes out with

01:29:36.040 their own narrative, like once Blake Lively filed this complaint, people started to say,

01:29:41.140 this is complicated. I don't know how I feel about this anymore because new information is

01:29:46.380 coming to light. But the correct thing to do is to draw that conclusion before we get to this point.

01:29:52.960 If you think it's too complicated now, then why were you weighing in before? I think oftentimes

01:29:58.420 there's a response to a woman bringing forward allegations where people say, we need to wait 1.00

01:30:03.560 for the other side. But did you wait for the other side the first time you weighed in? Did you wait 0.96

01:30:08.980 for Blake Lively's side when all of this was happening over the summer? Or did you just rush

01:30:13.820 ahead and take part in this without really knowing what was going on? I think if people really want

01:30:19.020 to have all of the information before they take a stance, then they need to consistently do that,

01:30:24.660 regardless of whether the person being attacked is someone who they feel is right or someone who

01:30:29.680 they feel is wrong. The other thing I think about is like social media platforms incentivize us to

01:30:35.760 just kind of mindlessly participate in whatever the discourse of the day is. When you're scrolling

01:30:40.900 TikTok or any other social media platform, the design of that platform is intended for you to

01:30:46.400 not stop and think about what you're consuming and what you're engaging with. And so we actually

01:30:51.440 have to do something that's kind of difficult, which is like develop literacy around these

01:30:56.380 platforms that we're using. And that applies to all of us. We're not exempt from that. I know I'm

01:31:01.560 not exempt from that. There were so many people online who expressed sentiments after Blake

01:31:06.640 Lively's complaint of how did I let myself fall for this? Even people who recognized what was

01:31:12.240 happening with Amber Heard were saying, I can't believe that I saw it in that case, but I didn't

01:31:17.380 see it in this one. And I think the fact of the matter is it's really, really easy to get caught

01:31:22.980 up in online discourse and online campaigns. And that's a lesson for everybody. Because regardless

01:31:28.540 of whether you're invested in celebrity news or not, if you're on social media, then this applies

01:31:32.880 to you. Absolutely. And the next time this happens, and it will, it will be just as sophisticated as

01:31:40.660 all of the ones that have come before with the added sophistication of knowing how people have

01:31:46.740 come around to understanding what happened in these cases. So it's like, I just feel like we

01:31:50.920 have to constantly be wary especially of things that are posted in places like the new york post

01:31:57.300 and then fed into like pop crave or whatever which sources the new york post in the same way

01:32:02.080 that when johnny depp was texting his team and the text that got released from depp be heard

01:32:07.800 johnny depp was not on twitter sending tweets to his manager being like we need this type of

01:32:13.240 smear campaign we need a hailey bieber hate campaign but justin valdoni was the people

01:32:20.180 who are involved in manufacturing these narratives are becoming more and more sophisticated with

01:32:25.680 every new cycle, which means that if we want to be responsible consumers, we also have to become

01:32:31.560 more sophisticated with every new cycle. It's like developing new antibiotics to an ever-evolving

01:32:37.760 chlamydia. That's a beautiful metaphor. Did I land the plane there?

01:32:44.900 uh cat thank you for returning to the couch thank you for having me it is always such a pleasure

01:32:54.880 i honestly can't imagine spending my new year's day any other way me either it's a beautiful new

01:33:01.180 year and the next time this happens we're coming back you're gonna have to hear more vocal fries

01:33:08.480 where can people find you support your work so i'm on most social media platforms right now i'm

01:33:21.940 on blue sky at cat 10 barge which is the place where i'm investing most of my time i don't know

01:33:28.900 how long the final cut of this episode will be but based on the raw recording it's a long one so if

01:33:34.300 you've made it this far extraordinarily grateful hopefully we can put some new ideas into practice

01:33:41.100 y'all because i don't know how many more smear campaign episodes i have in me happy new year

01:33:46.780 you know this podcast is like a year and a half in and sitting down and recording again

01:33:52.080 with kat on a very cyclical topic just made me reflect about how far we've come in this little

01:33:59.380 show and I'm just so grateful that you've been here for the journey and we'll see what this

01:34:04.940 year brings. So until next time, I love you and stay fruity.

A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - January 10, 2025

Blake Lively and the Amber Heard Effect

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