If TikTok is to be believed, Ryan Reynolds began visiting the set of It Ends With Us every day after he started to suspect his wife, Blake Lively, was having an affair with her co-star (and the film’s director and co-producer) Justin Baldoni.
There’s absolutely no evidence that was the case – TikTok really isn’t to be believed – but with so much rumour, gossip, claim and counterclaim swirling around what has become the highest-profile celebrity feud since Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, it’s impossible to know who or what to trust any more.
And that, it seems, is precisely how the spin doctors on either side want it to be.
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and Ryan Reynolds.Credit: AP
“There are a lot of myths around and general confusion,” says Lucinda Nelson, a PhD candidate in law at Queensland University of Technology, and a keen follower of the case and all it signifies.
“The Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni brouhaha is a fitting symbol of the decline of the American century,” observes marketer Toby Ralph, a regular on the ABC’s The Gruen Report. “A trivial stoush that might have been settled with a slap and a ‘pull-your-head-in’ chat has festered and become headlines, websites, social media scuttlebutt and lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But for all its he-said, she-said pettiness, the case is also genuinely fascinating and significant. It illustrates just how much manipulation of the narrative on mainstream and social media has become part of the celebrity management arsenal. And it suggests that the hard-won gains of #MeToo cannot be taken for granted (or, at the very least, that the pendulum has swung back a little from the #believewomen apex of that moment).
For those playing along at home (and those who have barely registered the whole stoush), a brief recap may be in order.
It Ends With Us is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s loosely autobiographical novel, and was marketed as a romantic drama though it deals with domestic abuse and intergenerational trauma. As the lead, Baldoni portrays a neurosurgeon who is violent to his partner, played by Lively, who rose to fame on Gossip Girl, is married to Deadpool star Reynolds, and is the teetotal boss of a bunch of businesses, with interests in haircare products and alcohol-free cocktails.
Shortly before the film’s release last August, internet chatter surfaced to suggest there was tension between Baldoni and Lively – they did not appear together for any of the film’s promotional events – with the finger of blame at first seeming to point his way. But soon stories surfaced about Lively’s behaviour on set, casting her as difficult and demanding, and suggesting that rewrites done for her by her husband during the Hollywood shutdown may have amounted to strike-busting.
The chatter did nothing to deter interest in the film (and perhaps even fuelled it), which went on to gross $US345 million at the box office before moving to streaming on Prime.
Lively at the premiere of the film in August last year.Credit: Getty Images
“It doesn’t seem to have been adversely affected by this poor publicity where the two main stars seem to be at loggerheads,” says Robert Gill, associate professor of Swinburne’s Media and Communications department.
But any sense of the battle playing out organically was shattered in December, when The New York Times published a story alleging that Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer Studios had engaged PR consultants to wage a deliberate smear campaign against Lively in anticipation of her bad-mouthing the film and/or its director.
Published under the headline “We Can Bury Anyone: Inside A Hollywood Smear Campaign”, the story quoted extensively from a 93-page civil complaint – a precursor to a lawsuit – lodged by Lively that detailed allegations of sexual harassment on the set, and a subsequent effort to destroy her reputation should news of those allegations leak.
Baldoni then filed a counter-claim against Lively and her husband, accusing them of hijacking the movie, civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy, and seeking $400 million in damages. He is also suing The New York Times over its reporting. Lively’s side has also sought a gag order, which has not (yet) been granted.
Justin Baldoni at the launch of the film last year. Credit: WireImage
The whole messy saga is now set to move to court. A pre-trial conference is slated for next week, and unless mediation works, the It Ends With Us mess will end with litigation, with the first hearing set down for March 9, 2026.
Since that December report, almost every day has brought some new twist to the tale. Just this week, we’ve had a rambling voice message left on Lively’s phone by Baldoni at 2am (presumably leaked by her side) in which he apologises for his behaviour on the set (it appears to refer to his angry response to her suggested script changes).
Meanwhile, Baldoni’s lawyers released video footage from the set that they claimed was unedited and clearly demonstrated that he had behaved in an entirely appropriate manner while filming a scene that Lively had presented as an instance of sexual harassment.
But articles soon appeared in which multiple intimacy co-ordinators interpreted the exchange as support for Lively’s argument, rather than Baldoni’s.
What’s missing from all of this, though, is clarity about what had been agreed between the stars before the filming began. If they had agreed that the characters would kiss, then the footage would appear to lend support to Baldoni’s argument that Lively – the bigger star, and half of one of Hollywood’s most powerful couples – was attempting to wrest control from a first-time director. If they hadn’t, then it lent enormous weight to her contention that she was being pressured into something to which she had not consented.
For Nelson, there is something deeply disturbing about the way the narrative has been framed with reference to public perceptions of the antagonists.
“[People argue] ‘she’s so powerful, she’s more famous, she’s got all this money and he was the unknown person’,” she says. “But at the same time, he was the director, he was her co-star, he is a man. A lot of women have those experiences of trying to be polite to men, avoiding those situations, trying to make nice because it’s a work environment.”
Lucinda Nelson of Queensland University of Technology’s School of Law.
The parallels with the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard case are worth noting, too, she says, because that same idea of who is the more “powerful” or famous person in the dynamic did not factor into that one, while it does here.
“People were saying ‘no, that’s not how it works’,” she says. “It’s really inconsistent. The underlying basis for it is misogyny.”
That’s something even Baldoni’s team appears to have acknowledged, in emails contained in her court filings.
At the request of Wayfarer, the consultants developed a strategy to “destroy” Lively by shifting public sentiment. Baldoni “wants to feel like she can be buried”, one strategist wrote. “We can bury anyone,” replied another.
Toby Ralph, marketer and author.
As the campaign began to take effect, Melissa Nathan, Baldoni’s PR manager, appeared to acknowledge the role of misogyny in its success. “It’s actually really sad because it shows you how people are hating on women,” she texted.
Though Lively claimed in her filing that sales of her Blake Brown hair products and her non-alcoholic drinks range had declined since the scandal broke, Nelson says the import of this case is not just about whose popularity or reputation suffers most.
“It sends women the message that no matter how much money you’ve got, how much fame, how much cultural capital, you’re still not going to be believed when you come forward about these things,” she says.
It also sends a message, says Ralph, about the impoverishment of our culture, or at least the version of it inhabited by certain denizens of Hollywood.
“The idea that the way to solve a grievance is to hire aggressive crisis management PR is fundamentally stupid, but wonderfully post-modern,” he says. “The notion that responding in kind may bring settlement is equally bizarre. This is ugly behaviour by beautiful people.”
The fact that it’s so difficult to interpret the truth of any of this has only added to the fascination. On social media, each new drop of information germinates into a field of speculation, hypothesising and freewheeling opinion.
“We’ve got to get people theorising about the case,” said one of Baldoni’s PR team in a message. This is called astroturfing, a strategy adopted from politics in which an idea seems to come from an individual and grow organically, when in fact it has come from one side to deliberately hijack the narrative.
“The PRs do that work of planting seeds and then the public deep dive into it themselves and create their own content about it,” Nelson says.
In the end, what people see in the Baldoni-Lively case – as in the Depp-Heard dispute – is informed as much by how they see the world as it is by the facts, such as they are. And few of us are immune.
“People aren’t aware of their own susceptibility to that stuff, or they are not willing to admit it,” says Nelson. “It’s embarrassing for a lot of us to admit we’ve been manipulated in how we feel about a certain person.”
But, one way or another, we almost certainly have been.
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