For many, it was obvious what was happening with the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni situation in the summer of 2024. When It Ends With Us was released, a narrative began to swirl around Baldoni and suddenly, it seemed like the internet turned on Lively. Now, we know why.
Documents from Court Listener were shared that are, allegedly, a part of Lively’s motion in the case that show emails from Baldoni’s PR team detailing how they would spin the narrative to be pro-Baldoni. At the time of the film’s release, fans took notice that Baldoni was not completing press with the rest of the cast, despite being one of the film’s stars and the director. He did his solo while Lively was paired with her other co-stars.
Then, at the premiere, it was revealed that many of the cast members had unfollowed Baldoni and he was not featured in any of the cast photos. That alarmed fans to something being wrong and no one had any information on what went down, just that the cast seemingly was not on his side.
Suddenly, the new narrative switched to be anti-Lively with old interviews popping up, TikTok accounts coming out and being pro-Baldoni despite us not knowing what went down, and then it all led to Lively filing a lawsuit against Wayfarer and Baldoni for the smear campaign they allegedly launched against her. And the documents from Court Listener show that is, allegedly, exactly Wayfarer’s plan.
“The team will focus on the social and digital elements – boosting SEO efforts and updating with new content to enforce SEO efforts, monitoring and directly influencing forums that are working against Justin and Wayfarer to adjust the narrative in real time, and collate assets and background to work in conjunction with Jen and her team, as well as TAG PR,” the document reads.
They are really that afraid of Swifties
The document goes on to share that one of the concerns of the social team working to PR manage Baldoni during this time was Lively’s friendship with Swift. In the document, it states that their fee increased to encourage the social team to make sure that they were on top of everything to protect Baldoni and Wayfarer from Swifties.
“The social team are now worried about Blake activating the Taylor Swift fan base, which is a major concern,” it says. “With this in mind and to ensure Justin and the studio are 100% protected moving forward, they have now changed the fee to $30,000 per month due to the uptick in social chatter.”
To me, the most damning part of this entire document is the bullet point that reads “Changing the overall narrative and helping keep it on track.” So you want to change the narrative? Does that mean turning it negatively on Lively and her team? Because that would then, in turn, mean that you were seemingly launching a smear campaign, which is what Lively accused them of.
This entire situation continues to be a mess and this alleged “proof” from Wayfarer just shows that they were seemingly behind the sudden switch in the cultural conversation.
(featured image: Sony Pictures)
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