The one question we should be asking about the Blake Lively row
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The ongoing drama surrounding the movie ‘It Ends with Us’ underlines a disturbing truth about our attitudes to famous women. Katie Rosseinsky asks why we’re so quick to damn them. Cast your mind back to the summer, and you might recall how one famous woman seemed suddenly to emerge as public enemy No 1. That woman? Actor Blake Lively.
![[Lively is suing her co-star and director Justin Baldoni, left]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/23/05/it-ends-with-us-043024-6-c1a3768b5cc24e79bdeab683bec4d3bb.jpg)
If you spent any time scrolling through social media, you might have seen TikTok stars enumerating every mistake that Lively, 37, had ever made in public. You’ll have spotted Twitter/X threads claiming that her upbeat promotional tactics for her movie It Ends With Us, a film that deals with an abusive relationship, didn’t appropriately chime with the solemnity of its message.
Online sleuths combed the internet for evidence of an alleged feud with her co-star and director Justin Baldoni. Instagram commenters criticised her, too, for launching a haircare brand in the middle of all this. Lively was, it seemed to have somehow been decided, the celeb that it was totally fine to slag off for apparently being “annoying”, “too much” or “tone deaf”.
This weekend, though, brought a new development in this saga, when it emerged that the actor is suing Baldoni for sexual harassment. Lively’s lawsuit alleges that his behaviour on set caused her “severe emotional distress”, and claims that he then embarked on a campaign to “destroy” her reputation (in response, Baldoni’s lawyer described the allegations as “false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt”).
