Blake Lively and Meghan Markle united by a sad fact
As Blake Lively’s legal saga gets even messier, the A-lister finds herself in the same boat as the woman the internet most loves to hate.
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Salem, Massachusetts is a long way from the honeyed climes of Montecito and a world away from the lights lime or otherwise, but I’m not sure much has changed in the last 333 years.
February now, as back then, is just the time to light the pyre, metaphorically speaking – if you ask the internet, anyway.
Is Blake Lively the new Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex?
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With the re-enthronement of Donald Trump and his glued-on, Las Vegas used car dealer quiff and deeply regressive politics, America is turning back the clock to oh, say, about 1938. Just ask Elon and his right arm.
But on the internet, it feels like things have rewound all the way back to Salem circa 1692. And it’s witch hunting time.
This week, the messy drama involving It Begins With Us actress Blake Lively and her co-star and the movie’s director Justin Baldoni got even muckier and murkier and more deeply unpleasant to wade into after he dumped hundreds of pages of legal documents and text messages online.
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Currently, over in the lawless, ungoverned wild west of social media, something creepy has been going on.
For years Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex has held the title as the person the internet most loved to dump hate on. But now Lively is giving her some stiff competition in the most irrationally reviled stakes.
Both women have plenty in common: Finding fame on TV screens during the Obama years, being half of a very famous couple, having unstintingly devoted husbands willing to go to the crease for them and hair that could launch a thousand Pantene commercials.
And then for both came the turning, a point when the wind changed and they were recast as social media’s pre-eminent targets.
For Meghan, we could roughly peg that moment towards the end of 2018 when the first stories started to appear in the British press casting her as, allegedly, “Duchess Difficult”.
Lively is a much easier matter.
In August last year, she trotted off to do the predictable, paint by numbers rounds to hawk It Ends With Us – and the wheels came off nearly immediately.
No one failed to twig that she and co-star and the movie’s director Justin Baldoni were not appearing on red carpets together. Clips of awkward and unflattering interactions she had had over the years with journalists soon resurfaced online.
Lively also faced criticism for the publicity campaign, such as urging moviegoers to wear pink or florals (her character is a florist), the peppy timbre of things painfully jarring with the movie’s theme of domestic violence.
Similarly, her use of the promotional rounds to simultaneously spruik her Betty Booze beverage range was tasteless, given the links between alcohol and DV.
The Blake-lash arrived thick and it arrived fast.
Then, in December, Lively sued Baldoni – who had previously cast himself as a feminist ally in the #MeToo era – for sexual harassment, and alleged that he and his publicists had orchestrated a smear campaign to sink her reputation. Baldoni then countersued with a $US400 million lawsuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and her publicist, alleging defamation and extortion.
The latest chapter in the saga erupted this week when Baldoni and his team launched a website titled “Lawsuit info”, a massive information dump of hundreds of pages detailing his amended legal filing and a “timeline of relevant events”.
In the days since then, oh golly gee whizzikers wow … has social media come for Lively with their pitchforks held hungrily aloft.
The similarities between the cases of the duchess and Lively are eerie.
Both have been accused of being manipulative and what could be boiled down to mean girl behaviour. (Both have vigorously denied it).
Both also stand accused of trying to steer the narrative.
Both women have found themselves being targeted, seemingly overnight, by the baying mob.
Both women trigger an irrationally extreme response in many people and both are the subjects of disproportionate, venomous pile ons that are totally out of kilter with their alleged “crimes”.
Both seem to set people off in a way that says something deeply troubling about gender and power and certain people’s psychological makeup in the new Trump era.
In 2025, Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter lives. What next, the return of the pilgrim hat?
What is horrible to watch is the pleasure that people are taking in Lively’s fall from celebrity darling status. As with Meghan, the unabashed delight in the supposed unmasking of these women is appalling.
Because there is a line somewhere, a line between someone being validly critiqued for their actions, choices and words, and the gleefully malicious pack hunt that is playing out on TikTok, Instagram and X.
Has, say, the duchess, in my opinion, made strategic mistakes at times and miscalculated things and thus far failed to launch a jam empire? Yes, and I’ve written just that over the years – but not a day goes by when I am not genuinely shocked and appalled by the frothing at the mouth, the bared teeth, the foulness directed at her on social media. War criminals don’t come in for such a mauling.
Scrolling through social media today, so many of the same accounts that, day after day, spew scalding hate at the duchess are now having a right old sickeningly jolly time sinking their fangs into Lively.
Who knew going after women, Salem witch hunt-style, would roar back into fashion so fast?
There is a horrible logic, I suppose, to Lively and the duchess’ Salem-style treatment. As this is playing out, and only gathering force and steam, in Washington a man sits behind a big desk jabbing a Diet Coke button while his staffers do their darnedest to drag the world back in time. Way back.
So, you heard it here first – it’s only a matter of time before big buckles are back, baby.
Maybe get yourself a nice kirtle while you’re at it.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as Blake Lively and Meghan Markle united by a sad fact
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