‘It’s a PR battle’: inside the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni lawsuits

The director and star of hit summer romance It Ends With Us are facing off with lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and defamation

It Ends With Us should have been a success story. The long-awaited film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, a tale of cyclical domestic violence, premiered in August to decent reviews and wide audience interest; it grossed $350m, against a $25m budget, despite a tide of press and social media speculation over an alleged rift between its director, Justin Baldoni, and its star, Blake Lively. Most of the ire was trained on Lively – for glossing over the subject of domestic violence with florals, for simultaneously promoting her haircare and alcohol lines, for being gruff with reporters in the past, while Baldoni, who played the abuser in the film, championed abuse survivors. But the movie was a hit, demonstrating the viability of female-led, mid-budget melodramas at the box office.

Not that anyone remembers that now. The film has become embroiled in an even more dramatic legal mess exposing a different dark secret: Hollywood public relations. On 21 December, the New York Times published an explosive 4,000-word investigation titled ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Campaign. The report, co-authored by the Harvey Weinstein investigator Megan Twohey, cited documents submitted by Lively in a complaint to the California civil rights commission that accused Baldoni, his co-producer Jamey Heath and their production company, Wayfarer Studios, of orchestrating a smear campaign – including planted stories and artificially boosted social media posts – to destroy Lively’s reputation, in retaliation for speaking up about alleged sexual harassment on set.