Opinion | Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and the Brute Force of Celebrity P.R. Tactics
The actress Blake Lively is not someone I had a real opinion about before a few days ago, when the news broke that she had filed a legal complaint against Justin Baldoni, her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, for sexual harassment and retaliation.But I saw a video a while back in which she appeared to be hostile to a reporter making a seemingly innocuous reference to her pregnancy.
My impression was that she seemed a little rude and needlessly antagonistic.I saw the video thanks to a Daily Mail article suggesting that she was facing a backlash — one that, unbeknown to me, was allegedly the product of a smear campaign by a public relations firm hired by Mr.
Baldoni to damage Ms.Lively’s reputation in order to pre-empt her accusations about his wildly inappropriate behavior on set.Much of what we know about celebrities’ lives is shaped by P.R.
professionals who are paid handsomely to create and spread stories that are flattering to their clients and unflattering to their perceived enemies.Reputation management is big business: The time and resources spent in Hollywood and New York to buff, polish and protect a star’s image can be greater than what’s spent to protect the reputations of some chief executives or senators.
It’s a ruthless business, too.Dishonesty is often tolerated, on the dubious basis that entertainment is a frivolity and the stakes are low, and things like talent and truth can be tarnished with the art of the smear.I saw the brute force of celebrity P.R.
tactics up close early in my career after I co-founded the website Gawker in 2002 — which mostly covered well-known New Yorkers in the spirit of Spy magazine, which had christened Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” — and freelanced for The New York Post’s Page Six gossip column.In the first months of Gawker, in spite of having just around 10,000 readers a day, we got a cease-and-desist letter from Marty Singer, a well-known entertainment lawyer who insisted ...