Blake Lively’s December 2024 lawsuit against Justin Baldoni produced something that stunned the entertainment industry. Not the allegations of sexual harassment against Baldoni, whose performative feminist persona had long been catalogued and critiqued, but actual documented evidence of a coordinated commercial machine that, for the right price, helped powerful men destroy the reputation of the women accusing them.
As part of a new series, The Baldoni Playbook, I’ll be exploring the mechanics of Justin Baldoni’s smear campaign, the methods and tactics used as well as the numerous complaints and issues on the set of It Ends With Us. I’ll also be digging into the history of the team Justin Baldoni hired: Bryan Freedman, Melissa Nathan and Jed Wallace. Examining the decade long history of influence campaigns they executed on behalf of almost two dozen clients.
In this first piece, I wanted to talk about why this particular story has so resonated with me and why over a year later, I’m still dedicating my voice to covering this topic.
When the sexual harassment allegations against Justin Baldoni first became public, they were disappointing but not surprising. Baldoni had made a career of trying to outrun controversy. No sooner than Baldoni landed his first major recurring role on Everwood, he was sued by his management company for failing to pay his bills. In 2012 Baldoni launched My Last Days, a web docuseries following the lives of those living with terminal illness. Reviews called it manipulative and exploitative, both the crew and the families featured on the show agreed. It was revealed that even facing crippling medical bills, the families were never compensated for their appearance even after the show was bought by major broadcasting network The CW.
The show led to Five Feet Apart, the first feature film directed by Baldoni. The film was widely criticized for a tone deaf marketing campaign that trivialized a sensitive topic. The film also led to another lawsuit for Baldoni, this time for copyright infringement. Travis Flores who had featured on My Last Days alleged the movie’s script had been heavily inspired and directly copied from a screenplay he had been writing about his own life experiences living with Cystic Fibrosis. Flores’ family say his lawyer convinced him to drop the lawsuit as Baldoni had the resources to financially and physically ruin him. The lawyer who represented Flores was Bryan Freedman. Clearly impressed with Baldoni’s financial resources, Freedman would later represent Baldoni against Blake Lively.
Baldoni insisted that Five Feet Apart had been inspired by a different individual with Cystic Fibrosis, Claire Wineland. Wineland herself had grave concerns about Baldoni exploiting the terminally ill for profit and to benefit his own career. While Wineland was not involved in writing the script, Baldoni had hired her to review the script and as a consultant on set in exchange for promised donations to her charitable foundation. Despite the film making over $90 million Wineland’s family say those promises never materialized. Wineland passed in 2018 and Flores in 2024, leaving both grieving families with many questions for Baldoni that remain unanswered.
In 2017 Baldoni gave a TEDWomen talk, Why I’m done trying to be “man enough”, in which he called on men to build emotional depth and accountability posing the question:
Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life? To hear their ideas and their solutions? To hold their anguish and actually believe them, even if what they’re saying is against you
Baldoni’s own answer to this question, when it came, would promptly burn his platform to ash. It was a career that never went long without incident. Baldoni turned his talk into a series of table discussions where he invited, among others, Scooter Braun, a man famous for attempting, but failing, to financially exploit one of the world’s most successful female artists, to discuss the merits of MeToo.
In 2018 Baldoni was paid $50,000 to speak to students at WashU on masculinity, to mixed reviews with one student expressing “it was extremely frustrating to see someone talk about…how masculinity affects women and also continually interrupt women as they’re speaking”. A student would also allege that Baldoni attempted to invite her back to his hotel room and when she declined told her to look him up if she was ever in LA.
Baldoni was sued yet again in 2021, along with Wayfarer Entertainment, the studio Baldoni co-founded with billionaire Steve Sarrowitz, for discrimination and retaliation by a former employee.
As Man Enough expanded into a podcast co-hosted with Jamey Heath, Wayfarer’s CEO, and Canadian Journalist Liz Plank, comments on early episodes called out “the amount of times Justin cut Liz off” and “I noticed that you cut off Liz quite a few times”. Despite Baldoni’s talk telling men to listen to women reaching almost 9 million viewers, it was still something Baldoni himself struggled to put into action.
That struggle was the basis of Blake Lively’s lawsuit against him, which revealed that the production of It Ends With Us had been littered with complaints from cast and crew about an unsafe work environment. Producer Alex Saks who’d been hired to run production, felt she had been sidelined and removed from any decision making authority and that Baldoni had been verbally abusive towards her. Two months before filming even started, in an email addressed to Saks and Sony, Baldoni apologized for his behavior towards Saks, “I have failed at being a safe place for others” he writes adding “I try very hard not to interrupt the women in my life, and unfortunately I’ve been failing in that on quite a few occasions”. During a disagreement three weeks into filming, Baldoni yelled at Saks and slammed his hands into his chair. Saks said she felt “physically intimidated” and threatened to leave the production.
Throughout production Baldoni showed an alarming lack of respect for the boundaries of a professional work environment. He wanted to invite department heads to visit Russian Baths with him and Sony execs had to step in to explain why this was inappropriate. In a car ride Baldoni shared that he had both been sexually assaulted and had sexually assaulted women. During press interviews to promote the movie, Sony were horrified to learn that Baldoni was “basically alluding to ‘raping’ Atlas out of Lily”. Adding: “we cut the tape but he is a moron” and suggesting Baldoni “shouldn’t do any more press”.
Blake Lively’s experience of sexual harassment was less the result of intentionally targeting a specific individual and more the collateral damage of handing control of production over to a thoughtless Director struggling to manage his anger, his addiction to pornography and still learning how to let women finish a sentence uninterrupted. None of which raised any red flags even as the complaints continued to mount.
It’s a pattern we’re seeing play out in the current media cycle with Maine’s Democratic candidate for Senate, Graham Platner. It isn’t just that he had a problematic tattoo and a history of problematic reddit posts. It is that his campaign were happy to continue on, even as they were aware he’d been sexting multiple women while married for almost a year. Only now that multiple former girlfriends have gone public as part of a New York Times exposé have party leaders withdrew their support causing Platner to drop out of the race.
When the New York Times published its exposé on Justin Baldoni, I covered the story entirely because Baldoni was one of the most prominent male voices in the space I operate in. A man who had built a substantial following and a publishing career on the premise that men need to do better, be more accountable, show up differently. A core part of the message of unpacking masculinity, one Baldoni himself repeated regularly, is that men need to hold other men accountable. It seemed a straightforward conclusion that men in this space should be a large part of the conversation about Baldoni and educating on why his behavior is problematic and unsafe.
Yet my peers, almost without exception, do not appear to share this sentiment and have said nothing.
Even in the spaces where men are actively doing the work of deconstructing masculinity and gender roles, there appears to be a quiet consensus that conversations about celebrities are gossip, and gossip is beneath the serious, rational work that men do. The irony of men who advocate for emotional intelligence dismissing a conversation about power, coercion and accountability as too trivial to engage with should not be lost on us.
The conversation about Justin Baldoni is not gossip. It is an important case study in what safety, integrity and male allyship actually requires. Whether the men who claim to advocate for women are willing to do so when it is inconvenient, when instead of applause, it actually costs them something. It is a conversation about whether allyship ever moves beyond performance and into praxis. For Justin Baldoni, the evidence suggests it has not.
Over the years there have been many clues, but the most obvious is a Romper article from 2018 for Father’s Day written by Baldoni about raising both his son and daughter to embrace feminist values. In the article, Baldoni describes reading the speeches of abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth to his children at bedtime and that he didn’t know much about the definition of feminism until a few years ago but has greatly expanded his knowledge:
I’ve found that one of my favorite definitions of feminism comes from Cheris Kramarae, a women’s studies scholar, who says: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” I think of this definition every time I’m asked if I consider myself to be a feminist father. In other words, do I consider my daughter to be a human being? The resounding answer is, and will always be, YES.
On the surface this looks like exactly what we ask of male allies. A man who can not only name feminist activists and scholars, he reads them and can quote them too.
Except he hasn’t read Kramarae. If he had, he’d know those are not her words. Kramarae’s definition of feminism, in her co-authored work “A Feminist Dictionary,” runs to nearly three pages, double columned. It is expansive, nuanced, and does not reduce to a single punchy bumper sticker. The quote Baldoni attributed to her was written by writer and activist Marie Shear. Shear wrote a review of “A feminist Dictionary” and in doing so offered her own deliberately tongue-in-cheek additions, such as:
Lesbian: any uppity woman regardless of sexual preference. If they don’t call you a lesbian, you’re probably not accomplishing anything.
Men: people who think toilet paper grows on the roll.
Shear’s definition of feminism as “the radical notion that women are human beings” was both a nod to feminism’s modest and trivial central premise and poking fun at opponents who treated it as a dangerous political movement threatening family, state and the public’s very souls. It’s a joke about how little it takes for a feminist to be considered “radical”, but also how low the bar is set.
Baldoni, having read neither Kramarae nor Shear’s work missed this important context, repeated it as a profound personal insight, and in doing so became the precise thing Shear was satirising. A man who has done the reading would have caught that. A man who searches “famous feminist quotes” and pastes the first result into a Father’s Day article would not. A key distinction between a man who has engaged with feminist thought and a man who has learned to perform it fluently.
A second example is Baldoni’s reading list on BookAuthority which provides curated reading lists by experts and thinkers. He recommends “For the love of men” by Liz Plank, his co-host on the Man Enough podcast. Second, “Becoming a Dangerous Woman” by Pat Mitchell, who co-founded TEDWoman, the platform that gave Baldoni his biggest career moment. Finally, “Financial Feminist” by Tori Dunlap, Dunlap and Baldoni have each appeared on the other’s podcasts. A man who has genuinely engaged with feminist literature has presumably encountered a feminist writer he didn’t already have a business relationship with. Baldoni, apparently, has not. Even “Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth doesn’t make the list. An ally whose support of feminist women begins and ends only at a reciprocal endorsement of the women who uplift and support him is not expanding his circle of feminist thought... he’s keeping score.
It was this score-keeping that caught my attention.
When the first rumors surfaced of Baldoni clashing with both Blake Lively and the book’s author Colleen Hoover, both women faced an intense backlash and harassment from those defending Baldoni, resulting in one of movie’s stars issuing a statement. Brandon Sklenar, a man with no feminist platform, no TED talk, no podcast about redefining masculinity, put out a public statement defending the women involved. Baldoni remained silent.
Baldoni’s silence only became more damning after his own countersuit dropped. While Lively had refrained from naming the other women Baldoni had made uncomfortable on set, Baldoni and his team had no issue directly naming Isabela Ferrer and painting a target on her back. The Hollywood Reporter leaked that Jenny Slate had also made complaints in a report sourced from “multiple friends and former colleagues of Baldoni”. Sklenar, Hoover, Slate, Ferrer, and anyone publicly associated with Lively who spoke out in support of her became an instant target for a wave of harassment. Many shut off their comments, Hoover shut down her entire account. Through it all Baldoni, the man who had built a career on the idea that men needed to step up, stepped back and quietly allowed himself to benefit from the sudden appearance of a digital army devoted to defending him.
Those of us who made content on the topic also took notice. Approach the conversation with anything less than a full throated defense of Baldoni’s innocence and comment sections would be flooded with a wave of newly created accounts with zero followers, zero posts and AI profile pictures hurling insults and derision while also praising Baldoni and gushing about how wonderful he is. Even the content creators who have now spent the better part of a year, firmly establishing their “Team Baldoni” credentials by defending Baldoni’s every movie, have found themselves attacked and insulted by their own audience the moment they offer a more nuanced or neutral perspective.
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What caught my attention was not who they were defending, but rather how they were going about it. Scattered among the comments about how Baldoni brought receipts and I was clearly a paid plant were more familiar lines. “You just blindly believe all women”, “False allegations destroy men’s lives”, “Women lie”, “Simp”. I had heard every single one of these lines before. In fact I’d heard them many times as a content creator, but never from feminists. Never from male allies or their audience. These were the talking points of the manosphere imported wholesale from the discords, forums and comment sections I’d been documenting for years. Deployed by accounts defending Baldoni, while trashing everything he stood for. They weren’t there to defend a man they admired, they were there to trash the women who accused him.
This sudden outpouring of support for Justin Baldoni from an online army delighting in enacting the misogynistic violence he had spent the last seven years educating on towards his accusers might at first, seem confusing. However court documents revealed Baldoni’s team were working with Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, who managed to fit coverage of Baldoni’s story around their respective rehabilitation campaigns for Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Russell Brand. Baldoni’s team also actively worked with content creators including Sage Steele, currently giving interviews in which she repeatedly misgenders Elliot Page, and others who have spent years campaigning against the #MeToo movement. It makes no sense for a genuine male ally to be actively courting such support to rush to his aid. It does, however, make complete sense for a man who cares less about the movement and more about evening the score against the women accusing him.
When Baldoni filed his countersuit airing his own claims against Lively it similarly seemed to contradict his carefully crafted public persona. None of the events in Lively’s filing, the complaints, the hostile work environment, the behavior on set, were substantially disputed. Baldoni’s counter-narrative wasn’t that these things didn’t happen, they were misinterpreted. For a man who had devoted hours of content to telling men accountability begins with separating intent from impact, he had shown a complete and total regression. He hadn’t intended any harm, so why were these women overreacting? His minimizing behavior wasn’t just in his lawsuit, it was also captured on camera. In one exchange Baldoni says that Lively looks “hot” and “sexy” and fails to see the exchange makes Lively uncomfortable. Jenny Slate steps in to explain to Baldoni that comments on women’s bodies are not appropriate, to which Baldoni responds “Sorry, I missed the sexual harassment training”, then looks directly at the camera and rolls his eyes.
According to Baldoni’s filing, these repeated complaints were an unimportant distraction from the fact that while all of this was happening, Blake Lively had seized creative control of the production. The script, the casting, the costume design, the direction, even editing and marketing. There was not a part of the movie that had not been commandeered by a clueless actress who had no business doing any of it. The disastrous result of her hostile takeover was Wayfarer’s biggest commercial success, grossing over $350 million, to the praise and thanks of Sony for all her hard work “in every frame”.
Yet despite making Baldoni considerably richer, he argued that the movie based on a book by a woman, with a screenplay written by a woman, edited and marketed by a woman, had unfairly removed his “A film by Justin Baldoni” credit. It was this failure to fully recognize his vital and important contribution, that had damaged not just his ego but also his career and most certainly not the fact he had been caught on camera being a performative fraud. The cherry on top of this narrative is that Baldoni repeatedly gave interviews about how important it was the story be told through “the female gaze” which meant him stepping back and letting women’s voices speak over his. Wanting the praise for the performance of an allyship he was unwilling to put into practice.
Which is exactly why it matters to continue to hold Justin Baldoni as an important case study. Survivors of abuse and sexual harassment are dismissed every day, by a thousand small acts of minimization. By those who hear the heartfelt discomfort of the women they harm and respond by saying she’s difficult, holding a grudge, doing it for the attention, and rolling their eyes. It works entirely because we have collectively decided that a survivor’s credibility is always in doubt. That the burden of proof for the accused will never rise to the level of we reserve for those making the accusations. Nor will perpetrators ever face the same relentless scrutiny, suspicion and harassment survivors face any time they use their voice.
Baldoni did not create this environment, he was just happy to weaponize it to his advantage. A man who builds a platform on giving women’s voices the room to speak, while silently organizing and benefiting from a sustained smear campaign against the women accusing him has shown us clearly what his true values are. He has revealed a man who has not removed himself from patriarchal violence but one who is calculated enough to outsource it. To keep his own hands clean, while others do the work for him.
It is often said that this lawsuit is complicated and that one must “read all the documents” to fully understand the convoluted and subtle power dynamics at play. Truthfully, it is the simplest possible test of whether a man who claims to value accountability, actually does.
The women who set boundaries, who told him no, who raised complaints and asked simply to be treated as professionals in their own workplace, experienced the kind of fragile, wounded pride that Baldoni spent years encouraging men to move beyond, telling us that he had figured out how to be man enough.
As it turns out, Justin Baldoni is merely the kind of man we’ve had enough of.
Excellent! Very well written, easy to understand, read and absorb. You may be a bit of a lone male voice in a space where we need more men, able to articulate and communicate that which I sometimes, as a woman even find difficult to do so. The good thing is having written this well thought out and researched piece, it will stand the test of time. Because we still have to hope that one day we won’t be living defensively or in opposition to the (a) patriarchy. Because again we cant lose the hope, institutions that support it are dismantled, gone for good. That we can still hold hope that it is not ALL men or indeed, even some women. And that your voice will be a beacon of light for more men to follow.
Great essay. I think it’s interesting that feminist men have a need to find other feminist men to look to for answers, rather than just listen to women themselves. I certainly have made this mistake in the past.
Other people have made this point, but I think men (white in particular), are so used to seeing themselves in the protagonist role of all media, that they struggle to relate to anyone who doesn’t look exactly like them, while the rest of the world has adapted to a lack of representation, and are able to see themselves in people that don’t look like them. Representation is important, not just for unrepresented people to have, but also for the overly-represented white men to let go of. I try to relate to people that don’t look like me. It builds respect and humanizes people, because you see them as a person before a societally-constructed label.
It reminds me of the Alan Watts joke that the first astronaut returned from space, and when asked if they met God, said “Yes, and she’s Black”.