E862 - Blake Lively’s Complaint Against Justin Baldoni w/ Emily D Baker

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What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the last episode of the year for the vowel files reality recap edition i am your host nick joined by the household what a year it has been just feeling gratitude right now you know it's uh december 31st for all you listening. Crazy year personally for us.
Well, for the show. Crazy year for the show.
Even crazier year next year. But this year was just started off with Gypsy Rose straight out of prison.
Yeah, we kicked it off with a bang. Yeah.
Our team's different. We got, you know.
We have a huge team. The household has really changed.
It's been an incredible year. The show obviously, like Natalie said, we had Gypsy

Rose. It started off with a bang, fresh out of prison.

We had some incredible interviews.

We had the Tom Sandoval interview.

So many incredible guests. Denise Richards

was such a moment for me.

Being a fan of hers for so long,

it was really just a cool year.

I think I'm so excited

and feel so grateful for

the show. Every year the show has existed, we had our best year of all time and it's exciting to once again be able to accomplish that and we wouldn't be able to do it without everyone listening whether you've been with us from the very beginning or the second year or the third year or the fourth year or maybe you tune in maybe you tune out we're so grateful to have you guys tune in with us to choose us to listen to us to be a part of what we're doing uh and to grow with us i mean it's really been just super exciting and uh big things ahead i mean it's really crazy to think just how crazy and great this year has been as a show um and just how incredible we feel like next year is going to be we also mentioned mentioned we have, we're going to kick things off 2025

with a really exciting,

going deeper interview.

We'll, I think, announce that

next reality recap.

The first of the year.

Our first episode of next week.

Is that next Tuesday?

Next Tuesday.

Next Tuesday.

Our second episode of the year.

Well, we have our ass neck on a Monday.

And then on Tuesday,

I think we'll drop that. Also on a personal level, greatest year of my life.
Truly. Yeah.
Had a baby, got married. Just so many other.
It's been really great. Yeah.
I do. I love the life we built together.
We had a great year. We got married.
We had a baby. We've done some really cool things.
i love i love what we built together i love the atmosphere we raised our daughter in you know i'm really proud of us for that me too it's really cool we're doing good yeah we're gonna keep doing better it's honestly been the greatest year of my life it's really it's really been great we've done so many cool things so it's only up and to think how how excited we are for 2025. it's really cool it is crazy to think that like it can get better from the year that we've had you know it's like we've had so many amazing things happen in 2024 and to think that like life is just gonna get better and sweeter and obviously it'll come with ups and downs and challenges like you know any life does but it i it is crazy to think that like yeah i'm trying to get emotional but i just love uh i love doing this with you i love uh i love building this life with you oh i love you well i realized that i married into a um family that uh opens presents all at once and that was hard for me to digest to say, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah.
How was your Hanukkah? Thank you. It's still going on.
Still happening. Eight nights.
Oh my God, fun. Eight crazy nights.
Yeah, we are halfway through. We're in night four.
When people are listening to this, it will be night six. Of course.
If I did that math right, which I think I did. Is every night fun? Every night is great.
Yeah. yeah last night my mom had a Hanukkah party we did a secret Santa type thing we call it secret Maccabee with our whole family um lots of Louis gifts that you know really cute but nowhere to put anything so wait you're talking shit about my family no no my you very much.
Our family. Yeah.
Well, you know, like everyone has their own way of doing holidays. I grew up in a family where Christmas Eve, my mom cooks a big dinner.
We kind of all dress up to sit in the living room type of thing. We have a nice, my mom would, it would be like a seven course dinner and it would be, you know, soup and salad and whatever.
My mom really, she went all out for Christmas Eve. And then Christmas morning, we, everyone would open stockings all at once.
And then it went, every year it switched either youngest to oldest, oldest to youngest. And everyone opened up a gift one at a time.
You were able to like enjoy that one gift. And it wasn't just like chaos.
You could watch the other person. You see what everyone else got.
I go to our family Christmas with your side of the family. We were at the lake house.
And it is like, there is no order. There is no plan.
There's nothing. It's just like, everyone's just opening up stuff.
And I'm like, wait, what did you get? What's what's happening? And it's I prefer that you do. My family does it your way, Natalie.
And I'm like, why is the pressure on me? Now I have to react a certain way to every gift. Let's just wrap it up.
No, you just become a pro. You're like, oh, I've always wanted a meat thermometer.
Thank you, Aunt Suzanne. Like you have to just and that's the fun in it is.
And everyone's like, oh, like Natalie hated that meat thermometer, but Aunt Suzanne is like, yay, I'm so glad you love it. It's like the fun and getting your Oscar winning performance.
But like the lake, I couldn't even, I'm like, what did your dad get from your sister? It was hard. Well, the good news is, babe, because going forward, we're remodeling the lake house.
Okay, that's exciting. Very exciting.
We start in like in a week. What vibe are we going for? are we're we're remodeling the lake house okay that's exciting very exciting we uh we start in like in a week what vibe are we going for is it modern is it just well you'll have to follow along justin okay are you knocking the whole thing down and rebuilding it or you're renovating we are doing a quite the overhaul wow that's really exciting we're investing in our future i posted a little picture of some selects we made and a lot of people thought it was the gold wall that was coming down.
No. And it is not the gold wall.
But it is more exciting. Yeah, we're really going for it.
Like, it's just like, you know, do we need one? So, but like, you know, obviously you guys know the lake house. My grandfather's lake house.
I want it like having river. Yeah, like next christmas it's going to be well that's

what i was going to say to you listen babe we are hosting christmas going forward and next christmas it will be at our lake house youngest one at a time and the elf someone has to pick to be the elf who's it going to be maybe river has to hand the gifts to each person it was you this year you didn't really know what the hell you were doing i got fired so i guess what i'm saying is like good news is you we get to we get to make our own traditions uh next year at the lake which will be we're gonna host everybody not you guys yeah what i was so excited for a second there someday you guys will be able to come yeah i wasn't thinking so until you said that i wanted to remodel the lake to be able to have family up and to host and to be there a lot.

We obviously both come from huge families.

So I think.

Enjoy it.

Yeah, definitely.

Coming from huge families, I think it's nice to have a place where my family, your family can all come together and it can fit everybody.

And it can be that place for us to make all the memories with River and all her cousins and aunts and uncles and stuff. So it will be really fun.
It's going to be an exciting year. I can't even wrap my brain around how just exciting I think next year is going to be for us.
The show, you guys listening. This is our last episode of Vibe vs.
Stats for 2024. Yeah.
We vibes are going out, losing still, but we are coming back strong before the end of the season. I feel it in my toes.
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Maybe that was the most dominating performance in the NFL since we last recorded. Packers were one and one.
They beat the Saints. They lost to the Vikings.
A lot of stuff is going on in the NFL, but I don't even remember what scores we picked before we ended up recording. But I think the big takeaway is Beyonce crushed halftime.
I don't know. Maybe that's...
That was my biggest takeaway. That's the real score.
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Visit wonderfulpistachios.com to learn more. All right, well, now it's time to talk about maybe one of the biggest stories of the year that dropped right before Christmas.
Blake Lively filed the complaint against Justin Baldoni. It is a wild complaint filled with text messages, emails, a lot of accusations about some very weird and quite frankly disgusting behavior of Justin Baldoni.
And then the days that followed, you had Justin Baldoni's former publicist also sue Justin. There's text messages in there.
It's a whole big story about not only Justin's behavior, but the industry in general. You have publicists involved.
You have media itself involved in kind of how complicit they were. In case you aren't aware, Blake ultimately filed a complaint talking about Justin's behavior on set along with some of his other people who run the company.
So for the people who don't know, Justin is, I think, CEO or president of his production company, Wayfarer. And that production company was the production company that produced the movie It Ends With Us.
Sony is the distributor in this case, like ABC, like Disney. It's there as the platform that distribute the movie.
They are, in fact, in charge of the of the marketing for this movie now come to find out. So we'll go over the complaint in great detail.
We have later this episode, Emily Baker coming on this episode. As you guys know, she's the former deputy district attorney of LA County and now the Valfa's unofficial legal expert.
We'll get into the kind of legal aspects of this case. But just to start, in case you aren't aware or you haven't read it, I honestly recommend anyone following this to read the complaint.
Is it a very important read and is full of details? I mean, it's a jaw-dropping complaint of things that you'll be shocked is out there. So ultimately, it seems like this complaint is accusing Justin of sexual harassment, retaliation of the workplace.
There's a lot of legal jargon that we'll break down with Emily later this episode. But it starts by kind of setting the stage about when they started filming this movie.
And as many of you guys know, there was a writer's strike, so they stopped down. So they started filming this movie.
Blake and Justin interacted. Apparently, there were several complaints.
Blake was allegedly made to feel very uncomfortable. And other cast.
And other castmates. They stopped down when the writer's strike happened, it seemed like.
And there was then this big HR meeting that included Ryan Reynolds. I think it's interesting to point out that back in August, when everyone was talking about the story and we kind of knew that at some point Ryan Reynolds got involved, there was a lot of speculation that he took over the project and that Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively inserted their power.
And according to this complaint, it really comes down to Ryan Reynolds was playing the role of a husband who is coming there to support his wife who is being harassed in the workplace. And there was this big meeting between Wayfair, Justin Baldoni's company, the people involved, a lot of people in the cast, Blake, Ryan Reynolds, and then Sony Pictures and the people who were running this picture through Sony.
And these were the

list of things that I think it's important to point out that Justin Baldoni and his business

partner, Jamie Heath, signed off on and agreed to, they basically said, well, we don't see it

the same way. They agreed to stop doing these things that Blake accused them of doing.

Right. And this list of 30 things, they did not say, hey, none of this stuff's happened.

They said, okay, fine, we won't do any more of this stuff.

Well, I things, they did not say, hey, none of this stuff happened. They said, okay, fine.
We won't do any more of this stuff. Well, I mean, to be clear, they were just like, well, we see it differently.
We agree. You know, it was a very legal response.
But it wasn't, hey, I did not do that. And it was, they signed off on it to continue production.
Because Blake said, I will not continue if this stuff doesn't stop. So there was an acknowledgement.
Let's get into the stuff that Blake has listed in this. Starting with number one, no more showing nude videos or images of women, including producer's wife, to Blake Lively and or her employees.
So we have Justin Baldoni showing, I think, I'm not sure if people are grasping this, but Justin Baldoni is showing Blake Lively and her employees nude images, nude videos of his wife. We come to find out later in the complaint that Jamie Heath, Justin's business partner and I think CEO of the company, was showing birthing videos of his wife kind of being fully exposed, fully nude, without Blake's consent to see this very intimate video of someone who wasn't in the room.
I mean, so it's like they're showing nude videos. No more mention of Mr.
Baldoni or Mr. Heath's previous pornography addiction or Blake Lively's lack of pornography consumption to Blake Lively or to other crew members.
No more discussions to Blake Lively and or her employees about personal experiences with sex, including as it relates to spouses or others. No more mention to Blake Lively and or her employees of personal times that physical consent was not given in sexual acts as either the abuser or the abused.
No more descriptions of their own genitalia to Blake Lively. No more jokes or disparaging comments to be made to Blake Lively and or her employees about HR complaints Wayfair has already received on set or about missing the HR meeting.
No more inquiries about Mr. Baldoni to Blake Lively's trainer without her knowledge or consent to disclose her weight.
No more mention by Mr. Baldoni of him speaking to Blake Lively's dead father.
No more pressing by Mr. Baldoni for Blake Lively to disclose her religious beliefs or unsolicited sharing of his.
If Blake Lively and or her infant is exposed to COVID again, Blake Lively must be provided with immediate notice as soon as Wayfair or any other producers become aware of such exposure without her needing to uncover days later herself. Keep in mind that when Blake Lively was filming this movie, she had a newborn baby that she was being a mother to.
Breastfeeding, taking care of her kid, all while working on set. I think that's important to acknowledge.
An intimacy coordinator must be present at all times when Blake Lively is on set in scenes with Mr. Baldoni, which there has been an interview resurfaced where the interview asks about the lack of intimacy coordinator and Blake Lively says, that's not normal, by the way.
So proof that that did happen. No more personal physical touching of or sexual comments by Mr.
Baldoni or Mr. Heath to be tolerated by Blake Lively and or any of her employees as well as any female cast or crew without their express consent.
No more improvising of kissing. All intimate touch must be choreographed in advance with Blake Lively and an intimacy coordinator.
No biting or sucking of lip without Blake Lively's consent. An all intimate on-camera touch in conversations must be in character, not spoken from Mr.
Baldoni to Blake Lively personally. Blake Lively to have a representative on set at all times with a monitor during scenes involving nudity, sexual activity, or violence with Mr.
Baldoni. All actors participating with Blake Lively in intimate scenes involving her being in any state of nudity or simulated nudity must be classified as an active working actor, not friends of the director or producers, and must be pre-approved by Blake Lively.
So just a little context, the doctor in her giving birth scene in the film was Justin's buddy. Wasn't a working actor, wasn't casted by a casting director, it was his friend.
Later in this complaint, it reads how Justin Baldoni tried to convince Blake Lively that it was uncommon for women to wear clothes during delivery. So here you had Justin Baldoni, a man, trying to explain to Blake Lively, a mom of three, a mom of four at this point, what women do during birth.
And according to Justin Baldoni, they all just strip down and get completely nude. Which is not true.

And he was trying to convince Blake to do that in a scene.

Where his friend would be on set. No more filming of any Blake Lively nudity without a fully executed SAG compliant nudity writer in place.
Any such footage already shot without this writer in place and in direct violation of SAG requirements may not be used without Blake Lively and her legal representative's prior written consent. Any scene by Blake Lively or another performer depicting the character of Lily that involves nudity or simulated sex must be conducted strictly in accordance with the above-referenced nudity writer and must adhere to the Blake Lively-approved script.
An intimacy coordinator must be conducted strictly in accordance with the above referenced nudity writer and must adhere to the Blake Lively approved script. An intimacy coordinator must be on set for all scenes involving nudity and or simulated sex and must have a monitor to ensure compliance.
No monitors to be viewed or accessible on set or remotely during closed set scenes except by Blake Lively approved essential crew and personnel. No more entering, attempting to enter, interrupting, pressuring, or asking Blake Lively to enter her trailer or the makeup trailer by Mr.
Heath or Mr. Baldoni while she is nude for any reason.
No more private multi-hour meetings in Blake Lively's trailer with Mr. Baldoni crying with no outside Blake Lively appointed representative to monitor.
No more private multi-hour meetings in Blake Lively's trailer with Mr. Baldoni crying, with no outside Blake Lively appointed representative to monitor.
No more pressing by Mr. Baldoni to sage any of Blake Lively's employees.
Producer Alec Sachs to be given standard rights, inclusion, and authority per her job description and as represented to Blake Lively when signing on. Sony must have an active daily role in overseeing physical production for the remainder of the film to monitor safety for cast and crew, schedule, logistics, problem-solving, and creative.
Engagement of an experienced producer to supervise the safety of the cast and crew, schedule, logistics, problem-solving, creative for the remainder of the shoot. Engagement of Blakeake lively approved a-list stunt double to perform lily in scenes with mr baldoni involving and or violence blake lively to perform only close-up work or work from a blake lively pre-approved shot list in scenes with mr baldoni involving sexual violence no more adding of sex scenes, oral sex, or on-camera climaxing by Blake Lively outside the scope of the script Blake Lively approved when signing on to the project.
There are three more to this list, as shocking as that may sound. No more asking or pressuring Blake Lively to cross physical picket lines.
No more retaliatory or abusive behavior to Blake Lively for raising concerns or requesting safeguards, and an in-person meeting before production resumes with Mr. Baldoni, Mr.
Heath, Mrs. Sachs, the Sony representative, the new producer, Blake Lively, and Blake Lively's spouse, Ryan Reynolds, to confirm and approve a plan for implementation of the above that will be adhered to for the physical and emotional safety of Blake Lively, her employees, and all the cast and crew moving forward.
So they signed off on all that and they said, okay, agree, agree, agree. We'll stop doing all that.
Let's resume filming. Yeah.
And so obviously Justin and his partner, Jamie Heath, were aware of Blake's frustrations.

And so they continued to film.

And then as the movie came out, Justin clearly wanted to get ahead of this to protect his own image.

And looks like he hired these mercenary publicists that are professionals at creating these narratives.

It's also important to point out that when they had this complaint, part of the agreement was that Justin and his team would not retaliate against Blake for voicing these concerns. We now come to find out, according to this complaint, that Justin and his team did quite the opposite, that he did, in fact, hire these publicists, these kind of crisis PR people.
It turns out what they really are good at doing is crafting narratives, putting out hit pieces, things like that, changing public sentiment. They know how to create discourse and trolls.
They're dealing with Reddit. And then we have all these text messages from these publicists giving the proof that this is in fact what Justin Baldoni intended to do.
Before we get into those, I think it is important to note that I know another critique I had, which obviously fell for the Justin Baldoni tactic, was the way she was marketing this film. I know we talked about it a little bit more with Emily.
So the marketing plan that Sony gave to everyone involved was to focus on Lily's strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence and to avoid talking about this film that makes it feel sad or heavy. It's a story of hope.
So that was what they were all told. Hey, this is how you need to market this film.
It's also important to point out because I know a lot of people have this perception of like, well, Blake Lively, she's this big, famous, powerful Hollywood person. And there's no denying that she is super famous and obviously has power.
But again, just like ABC, when they're the distributors of The Bachelor, for example, they're the ones who come up with the marketing campaign. It's not The Bachelor.
It's not even the producers on the show. There may be some input and things like that.
But ultimately, Sony is a huge company. You guys have probably heard of it.
It's a massive entity. Whether you agree or disagree with their marketing strategy, they're not going to Blake Lively, who in this case is an actor and a producer in this movie.
She's an employee of this movie, right? And so we all just assumed. And then that was one of the big narratives that was out there back in August when everyone was just taking Justin's side.
Everyone was just criticizing one person for the marketing strategy, and that was Blake Lively. They didn't even think to consider to criticize Sony or anyone else as part of the cast.
Everyone just pointed the blame to Blake. We now come to find out that Justin was aware of this strategy and didn't voice any complaints.
They did that to explain why they were not doing any press with him. They weren't photographed with him.
What the public did not know was that Mr. Baldoni and his team did so in an effort to explain why many of the film's cast and crew had unfollowed Mr.
Baldoni on social media and were not appearing with him in public. To that end, he and his team used domestic violence survivor content to protect his public image as described in further detail below.
So it was all a ploy by Justin and his team to ruin, in quotes, ruin Blake. Another big narrative that was going out there back when, again, was speaking to the power that Blake and Ryan allegedly have, and that the only reason that the entire cast was siding with Blake is because they wanted to side with the alleged most more powerful.
Stories literally came out. When everyone else was focusing on Blake giving interviews and how she handled herself being pregnant and whether she was rude 10 years ago in a particular interview here or there.

While everyone was focused on that, they were just dismissing any type of information that came out that suggested Justin might have behaving inappropriately. And it was always like, oh, well, Blake and Ryan are just too powerful.
We come to find out Justin's business partner, multi-billionaire, who is the major financer of Justin's company.

He's also his friend and also is part of the same church group. So they're very close.
In here, alleged that at the premiere, Wayfair's co-founder and chairman and leading financer is multi-billionaire. His name's Steve, who divulged at the film's New York premiere on August 6th, 2024, that he was prepared to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Mrs.
Lively and her family. Imagine that.
I don't even know what Ryan and Blake are worth, but I don't think it's billions of dollars. And if you had a person worth billions of dollars make a threat like that, they were willing to spend a hundred million dollars to destroy you and your family's lives.
How scary is that? What does that even mean? I think it's also, I remember people saying like, oh, Ryan's on set because he's trying to take over this film. And it's like, can you imagine being on set with someone who makes you feel so uncomfortable who's doing all of these things to you the one person i would want by my side is my husband is the person who i feel the most safe with the person who i feel protects me the most that's who i want with me every single day while i have to interact with this fucking creep and he showed up and the entire internet was like no he's not being a husband he's just abusing his power.
And it's like everyone wanted to think of it as a power play. The internet wanted to find every reason and excuse not to believe Blake Lylee for whatever reason.
I think we need to get honestly into some of the screenshots that were subpoenaed by his publicist and this crisis PR manager's phones, Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan.

Justin Baldoni also has a couple of texts mixed in with these. But these are, I think, very telling.
I mean, I think, honestly, one of the ones that to me was the most shocking was when Justin Baldoni texted Jennifer Abel a screenshot of a tweet, and it has pictures of Hayley Bieber, and the caption

of it is Hailey Bieber's history of bullying many women, not just Selena Gomez, throughout the year's thread. And he sends that screenshot to his publicist and says, this is what we would need.
So he wants to put out any history of, in quotes, Blake Lively bullying other women. His publicist responds with, yes, I literally just spoke to Melissa about this on the break, about what we discussed last night for social and digital.
Focus on Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. So here they are.
They're just apparently like the playbook is to, you know, put out this information, have these blogs, these threads, start start creating the conversation through these bots. You put it out there and you try to have people organically try to like latch on to this.
And it like it completely seemed to work. They retained a subtractor, including a Texas based contractor named Jed Wallace, who weaponized a digital army around the country from New York to Los Angeles to create,

seed, and promote content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet

chat forums. The Baldoni Wayfair team would then feed pieces of this manufactured content to

unwitting reporters, making content go viral in order to influence public opinion. I didn't even know this was possible, but they have hired this person to put a shit ton of likes on something, a shit ton of views, to put it on your For You page to make it seem like it is the most viral piece of information that has ever gone out there, when in reality, it's just like some guy in his basement clicking away on his computer.
It's all false. None of it is genuine.
But Justin Baldoni's team sent out a large wide email text saying, Hi team, so far, extremely limited pickup on Daily Mail or Page Six. We'll continue to keep an eye out and send pieces as needed.
But so far, it's been steady coverage on pure speculation. We've also started to see a shift on social due largely to Jed and his team's efforts to shift the narrative towards shining a spotlight on Blake and Ryan.
Again, we'll continue to send links and screenshots, but wanted to send an update in the meantime. The same day, Melissa Nathan, who is this crisis pr team working for justin text jennifer abel his publicist the majority of socials are so pro justin and i don't even agree with half of them lol like his own people are like acknowledging that like again they're again they're just they're just hired guns they're mercenaries they're just here to do a job they don don't even care what they actually think.
They're just collecting a paycheck. Oh, but just wait, because it does get worse.
Melissa then says, he doesn't realize how lucky he is right now. We need to press on him just how fucking lucky.
The whispering in the ear, the sexual connotations, like Jesus fucking Christ. Other members feeling uncomfortable watching it.
I mean, there's just so much. So there they are, his own team, acknowledging what they've heard and what they know to have happened on set.
Bullet point 32 speaks to that. On one occasion, Mr.
Baldoni and Miss Lively were filming a slow dance scene for a montage in which no sound was recorded. Mr.
Baldoni chose to let the camera roll and have them perform the scene, but did not act in character as Ryle. Instead, he spoke to Miss Lively out of character as himself.
At one point, he leaned forward and slowly dragged his lips from her ear and down her neck as he said, it smells so good. None of this was remotely in character or based on any dialogue in the script.
And nothing needed to be said because, again, there was no sound. Mr.
Baldoni was caressing Miss Lively with his mouth in a way that had nothing to do with their roles. When Miss Lively later objected to this behavior, Mr.
Baldoni's response was, I'm not even attracted to you. Who? That's not even in the script.
You're just, like,bing cameras aren't even rolling like this isn't part of the fucking film and you're like touching all over this married woman who has four children so obviously we saw a lot of these headlines come out a lot of them obviously people believed one of them being is blake lively set to be canceled string-to-watch videos that have surfaced following, in quotes, tone-deaf Q&A to promote It Ends With Us could tarnish 36-year-old star's golden Hollywood image for good. Melissa Nathan sends this article to Jennifer Abel, and Jennifer Abel says, wow, you really outdid yourself with this piece.
Melissa says, that's why you hired me, right?

I'm the best.

So here they are saying like, yep, we're planting this shit.

We're putting this shit out there.

We're trying to make our client look good and Blake Lively look fucking bad.

None of this is genuine.

None of this is real.

I think that's what's so crazy to grasp is that like, you know, people have said for

years, like, don't believe everything you see on the Internet.

And it's couldn't be more true now is like how many of these have happened? And this Melissa Nathan, her sister, being a writer, reporter for all of these publications have written so many terrible articles about so many people. And we just believe them because, oh, it's a headline.
It's in the media. It must be real.
No, these people are just paying them to do this. Another detail.
On the day of shooting the scene in which Miss Lively's character gives birth, Mr. Baldoni and Mr.
Heath suddenly pressed Miss Lively to simulate full nudity. Despite no mention of nudity for the scene in the script, her contract, or in previous creative discussions, Mr.
Baldoni

insisted to Miss Lively that women give birth naked and that his wife had ripped her clothes off during labor. He claimed it was not normal for women to remain in their hospital gowns while giving birth.
Miss Lively, not normal. Here is a man telling a woman what is normal for women to do in childbirth.

Huh?

It's ridiculous.

When the birth scene was filmed,

that scene was chaotic, crowded, and utterly lacking in standard industry protections for filming nude scenes. While filming the scene, Mr.
Heath and Mr. Baldoni also failed to close the set while allowing non-essential crew to pass through while Miss Lively was mostly nude, with her legs spread wide in stirrups and only a small piece of fabric covering her genitalia.
Among the non-essential persons present that day was Wayfair co-founder, Mr. Sorowitz.
This is the billionaire business partner of Mr. Baldoni, who flew in for one of his few set visits.
Miss Lively was not provided with anything to cover herself up between takes until after she had made multiple requests. Like, I'm sorry.
You can hate Blake Lively all you want. You can think she's a mean girl.
You can think she's annoying. You can think she's this and that.
But you cannot tell me that Justin Baldoni is a warrior for women and a feminist and cares about women when these are the environments he's putting women in like it's just it's it's black and white it's not gray it's not confusing it's not well what about it's it's that's it's clear as fucking day he doesn't give a fuck about women if he's making her do these things he's adding in like after after blake signed onto the movie based on a draft of the script, Mr. Baldoni, without Miss Lively's knowledge or consent, personally added graphic content, including a scene in which Miss Lively was to orgasm on camera.
Like, what the fuck? And then he added them because he was making the film, in quotes, through with the female gaze. Again, he is explaining to Blake Lively and justifying him being a creep because he understands the female gaze, the arrogance of this person.
Like, again, the utter gaslight of this whole man to just make you feel like, huh, what is going? Like, you know what I'm saying? Imagine going to this place of business, this work where the director slash actor. And I also saw this tweet out there that someone pointed out.
The self-identified feminist ally towards women is head of a company that bought the right to a movie about DV. Then he's directing this movie and casted himself as the lead male slash abuser in this movie, which I don't know, I guess, but that's a weird thing to be like, you know what? I should, I know that I, huh? Like why are you so compelled to play this character? I don't know.
Maybe that's nothing, but now that this information just comes out, doesn't it's, I don't know. Even that is a bit weird.
This is incredibly disturbing during a car ride with Ms. Lively, her assistant and driver.
So we have two witnesses to this allegation. Mr.
Baldoni claimed to Miss Lively that he had been sexually abused by a former girlfriend, which has since been shared publicly. At the end of the story, Mr.
Baldoni shared that it had caused him to re-examine his past. He then said, did I always ask for consent? No.
Justin said, did I always listen when they said no. He replies, no.
What? Huh? There's so much more in this complaint that Justin and Mr. Heath and all of these people involved with Justin have done.
And there's proof and there's other people to corroborate that it wasn't just Blake Lively. It was her employees.
It was other cast and crew. It was so many people that these two men, Justin Baldoni and Jamie Heath made feel so uncomfortable that there's just no hole to poke.
Unfortunately, there is no hole to poke. And we're going to link this in our bio.
You can click it. You can read it for yourself.
There's also the complaint of Justin's former publicist who's also suing Justin. And in that complaint, there are also text messages of the hired, the other two publicists.
Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan. Thank you.
And even in that complaint, there are text messages between those two women verifying that they, those two women even thought that Justin was creepy and weird and they didn't respect who he was. They were literally just hired guns.

I mean, it is crazy how well known it was behind closed doors, just how much of a creep Justin was and his own hired guns that worked for him and their messages between each other are verifying this in a conversation. Again, it's in a complaint that we will add to the description of the episode.
You should check it out. Obviously, a lot of people have reached out to me to remind me that unlike most people on the internet, I got it right way back when.
To me, it's less about that I was right or I pointed things out. It was more just how quickly people were to not want to believe Blake over what we over nothing.
You know what I'm saying? Stories were kind of coming out, and questions were being raised about why is the cast separating themselves from Justin? And the internet wanted nothing to do with it. It was completely, everyone dismissed anything negative about Justin as Blake trying to control the narrative.
We were dissecting these interviews of when she was pregnant over nothing. We were so quick to dismiss that.
And again, it wasn't like I was out there saying back in August when I was saying, hey, I'm not sure if we should just side with Justin. I wasn't out there being like, Blake Lylee till I die, that I was just like team Blake no matter what.
I wasn't even saying, I wasn't even necessarily agreeing with her. I was literally just saying, hey, maybe we should just ask different questions.
Maybe we should consider the possibility that despite whatever you might think of Blake or however she handled herself in old interviews, maybe we should consider the possibility that there's another reason why the entire cast has separated themselves from Justin, and you all were like, shut the fuck up. We want nothing to do with it.
And again, it's really eye-opening on the industry itself. Media, outlets, it's like, why is it even...
I think there's also an acknowledgement that hit pieces exist. There's been mention of hit pieces.
There's been mentions of narratives, but it's always this thing that, oh, that doesn't really happen. They're not hit pieces.
It's the truth. We're just getting the story out.
And now you can't read these complaints without a clear acknowledgement that spin is a real thing. These writers are willing and able to write what you need to write them for the right amount of compensation,

or if your interests are aligned. It's a crazy story that I really think it's just the beginning.

I hope it's a valuable lesson that we all learn.

Obviously, that's a lot. I think Emily Baker can really break down the legality of all of this, so we should get to her.
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v-i-a-l-l emily welcome back to the show thank you for having me i'm glad to be back it's so good to be with you first off happy holidays uh happy new year all that fun stuff i know it's been a good holiday as i tried to take a break and then lawyers are filing lawsuits on christmas eve christmas to everyone but them yeah uh obviously very wild as you know like like you said this complaint broke i think a couple days before christmas kind of you know shocked the world as we we just talked about but as always it's always great to have you on to kind of break this down in layman's term to kind of understand this complaint as a whole. And then we have the complaint from Justin's former publicist also suing Justin.
It really paints this kind of crazy story. I know you've gone through it in full detail.
I guess I just want to hand it over to you and kind of get your thoughts on the complaint as a whole. And then we'll ask some questions in terms of how does this come together and things like that.
I mean, it's quite a lot between the Lively complaint and then the Stephanie Johnson complaint. You've got a lot of receipts in these complaints, which the lawyers clearly took their time to go through celebrate extractions.
The text messages are formatted like they came from a cell phone extraction, which we later learned that they did. But with the Blake Lively complaint, that is not a lawsuit yet.
I've seen a lot of confusion about that. It is a complaint filed in California with their civil rights division, which is a necessary step before you can bring a complaint for workplace harassment.
So this is a necessary first step. People, I've seen a lot of chatter in my comments, in my DMs, people saying, well, if this had all the receipts, why not just file it as a lawsuit? Well, you can't until it goes through that process because it is a workplace lawsuit.
And I think that's really the best place to start is the misunderstanding of, well, if it had all these receipts, why not just go ahead and file it? Well, because you can't for the type of litigation that it is, and that is a workplace harassment. So whether they want to file in federal court or in Los Angeles Superior Court, they have to go through this first and either go through an investigation with the California Department of Civil Rights, or they have to go and get a right to sue letter, which means the California Department's not going to investigate, and then they get a letter saying, go ahead and sue, and then they can go ahead and sue.
Gotcha. So is this public information for everyone to look up if they want to? Because that was my understanding that lawsuits are public information, but are complaints always public? And if not, how did we become aware of this complaint? It was like the New York Times, I think, initially released something.
How does that all kind of come to be? It's such a great question. Once things are filed in the court system, then they're accessible.
And you'll see this in New York where sometimes you'll see a complaint that has a bunch of red text on it saying that it hasn't even been approved by the clerk yet. The public can still search those.
This complaint was filed with the Civil Rights Board. That's an administrative action.
Those aren't public and searchable. We have it as a public because the New York Times chose to link the entire lawsuit.
So the New York Times had it and they chose to link it. But you can't go to a court website right now and find this because it hasn't been filed in court yet.
So no, it's not public. It was given to the New York Times.
I was struggling. Obviously, you have to pay for the New York Times, which I am now subscribed to.
But when this complaint first came out, someone had sent me the link because I hadn't paid for New York Times. I hadn't read the complaint.
And I was like, oh, I'll just put this on my story. And it ended up having like 14,000 people click on it to read the complaint from my story because it was like so hard to find just on Google.
Yes, it was. It was incredibly hard to find.
And that's because the New York Times had it. And this is not uncommon.
We saw this in the Britney Spears conservatorship all the time where TMZ had things before they hit the court website and before opposing counsel even had them. So is this anything new? No, not at all.
This happens all the time that somebody has it ahead of it hitting the public docket. I've seen a lot of like, why now? You know, like if it happened so long ago, why do it now? Why has it? I mean, I'm sure there's a process.
I feel like all legal stuff takes forever to happen. What is that process and why did it happen three days before Christmas? This is actually pretty fast because a lot of what's being complained of is the PR campaign as the movie was launching in August.
We're not really that far away from what happened during the PR push for this movie. And if you look at all of the text messages, not only does that take time to extract a phone, but it also takes time to dig through sometimes tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of text messages.
And from the subsequent complaint with Jones Works, the PR company, we learned that that cell phone extraction was from a work phone from a active working publicist. So if that's a work phone, you can only imagine how many text messages we're talking about that they were digging through to make sure that A, they understood everything and B, they had all the information.
So in the scheme of litigation, this is pretty fast. And with Blake Lively's complaint, there was an entire HR process that happened before this movie even released to the public.
So that HR process was going on before the movie resumed filming after the writer's strike and the SAG strike. So there was that entire PR or HR process.
And then they finished filming and then the movie got released and then there were further problems. And then this started getting investigated.
So it was complained about in proper channels and in proper course, but not publicly. It seems that the reason that the lawsuit came about is because the internet was like, Hey, it's kind of weird that y'all aren't in pictures together.
And then that caused all of this to spiral out, or at least that's what it seems like to me. Yeah.
I think it's been floating out there in terms of how they came to accumulate all these text messages. But I don't know what's accurate out there or what's just misinformation.
How does someone get these text messages, especially now as you're explaining it, it's not even at the lawsuit level. So yeah, how does that come to be where they can pull these messages from whoever? There's a couple options.
But since we have the Jones Works lawsuit that was filed Christmas Eve in New York, we know that they said they were subpoenaed and then gave them over. However, if you are employed and you have a work phone, your employer, depending on what your employment contract says, can extract your phone and give those to people.
Whether or not there's a subpoena, depending on what your employment agreement says and depending on where you live, of course. But that's not your property.
That's your employer's property. If your employer wants to go through and read all your emails, they can go through and read all your emails.
But there are a lot of processes in different courts, and California is one of them, where before there's even a public lawsuit, you can still get legal subpoenas. And we saw the lawyer for Baldoni and others say, well, my clients weren't subpoenaed.
Well, right, because the employer is the one who turned over the text messages and is now also suing, which they can do like your, your work stuff isn't private. Interesting.
Huh? And so in Jones works is the employer of Justin's former publicist. Who's also suing Justin.
Did I get that right? Yes. So Jones work and Stephanie Jones employed employed Jennifer Abel, and then Jennifer Abel brought in that other PR crisis manager.
And so we've got what seems to be Jennifer Abel's phone and probably emails as well, because in the complaint with Blake Lively, it looked like there were some emails pulled as well. So her employer would have gone through all of that and pulled all of her emails, all of her delete history, all the rest of it.
Because Jones Works seems to be a company of enough size that they have an IT department or an IT person that's doing all of that for them. That's kind of crazy for all the Machiavellian maneuvering that Abel and Nathan were doing.
Abel sounds like she was simultaneously kind of stabbing her employer in the back while also still communicating via her work, emails and phones. It's just like they were so smart but incredibly stupid at the same time.
It's kind of fascinating. It happens quite often.
I covered the Alec Murdoch case out of South Carolina quite a lot. And when news agencies did a Freedom of Information Act request for the court clerk who was in the middle of all kinds of mess for what she was doing, all of the stuff she was up to was in her publicly available emails because she's a government employee.
So all the stuff she's emailing back and forth and Drew's cell phone numbers and Nancy Grace's cell phone number and all of this other stuff, she's emailing back and forth from an email that can be FOIA requested. It's wild.
People don't think that their employers will actually get their emails. They will.
And they probably also have AI programs that are tracking keywords too. So yeah, your work emails aren't private ever.
What are some of the things that you have noticed the press and their coverage of this complaint? You know, what have they missed or what have you noticed that people aren't picking up on or, you know, things that are really standing out to you? One of the biggest things is people still think that it's a lawsuit. Not all the press is accurate in that and talking about the process, but also not a lot of the press, especially the non-legal coverage of it, doesn't talk about the fact that this is a necessary step before you can sue.
This isn't a, oh, it'd be nice if. This is a, you must do this.
Or if you bring a lawsuit, it'll just get thrown out if you haven't obtained that right to sue letter. And I haven't seen a lot of people talking about what a really a interesting employment law lawsuit this is, which I realized saying it out loud is a deeply nerdy thing to say, but employment litigation is incredibly interesting in California.
It's very employee friendly in this situation. Blake Lively is the employee and really she's suing for workplace retaliation.
They cover the allegations of sexual harassment a lot, but this is really at the heart, a retaliation lawsuit where Blake Lively went to HR, had HR meetings and said, Hey, it's not okay with me if people just walk into my trailer while I'm nursing. And Hey, it's not okay with me if people are all on set for scenes that are sex scenes or where there's nudity, which is incredibly common that those are closed sets.
Hey, it's not okay with me that people want to be in here while I'm having body makeup put on or removed. You know, really reasonable boundaries that happen on movie sets all the time.
But the PR campaign after that is being alleged as workplace retaliation for going to HR. And when you say retaliation, to be clear, this is not like when you say retaliation suit, it's not Blake retaliating.
It is you're saying Justin and Wayfarer, his company or whatever, they retaliated towards Blake for voicing her concerns about

onset behavior and things like that.

Just want to make sure that we're not saying Blake's retaliating.

Absolutely.

We're using retaliation in the very legal sense of the term because this is retaliation

is actually the cause of action in California.

If you go to HR and say, hey, this is happening in the workplace and then you turn around and get fired, that's kind of your classic case of workplace retaliation. You complained against something and then you were the one punished for it.
So Blake Lively is alleging she brought up issues in the workplace and then she was the one punished for it, but in a very Hollywood blacklisty kind of a way with a PR smear campaign. It's not a, we're going to fire you from this movie, but we're going to damage your reputation.
And it seems to me from the lawsuit, this is my opinion, twofold. We're going to damage you so you're untouchable.
So you can't host Saturday Night Live. So you can't go meet with Target about your brands.
And we're going to damage your reputation enough that if you voice these complaints about the work environment on set, no one will believe you, which is really the most nefarious part of all of this. It's not discussed quite a lot is damage her reputation enough that if these allegations ever came forward, she wouldn't be believed because people would be like, yeah, but we hate Blake Lively, which is wild and also seems to have worked.
Yeah. I mean, like we discussed earlier, I mean, when this was all coming out and we were here on this show kind of saying, hey, just like, let's just maybe hold off and consider other narratives.
I mean, there were stories finally getting out there about the possibility of Justin's behavior on set. And the entire internet was like, we don't care.
Nah, we're not interested. You know, it's like on any other day with any other allegation, it would have been major news.
But yet, like at that point, Justin's team seemingly got ahead of it so quickly and created such a, I guess, compelling narrative online with all these kind of trolls and all these maneuvering that they were doing. I don't even know how they did it, but they were so successful that even in the mention in the complaint, how even the people working for Justin were almost shocked how successful they were, how dismissive the entire internet was of Blake and the possibility that Justin might not be, you know, behaving as he should on set.
And it was just a complete dismissal. Yeah, no, and not just the internet, but also traditional media outlets that would normally cover allegations of something going on on set.
Social media raised the red flags like, hey, isn't it weird that the author of the book who sold the rights to the book to Jason Baldoni and Wayfarer isn't with him on any of the press? What happened? Hey, Blake Lively and the rest of the cast aren't with the producer of the film. And then they really spun that narrative that, oh, well, he doesn't agree with the way they're promoting it, which wasn't their plan, was Sony's plan because Sony was the distributor.
Did that plan go well? No. Is that Sony's plan that they were contractually obligated to fulfill? Yes.
And that's in the lawsuit too. So I think the lawsuit from Blake Lively or the complaint, I'm going to use the words interchangeably because my brain is so lawsuit oriented, but the complaint from Blake Lively lays out that this was Sony's marketing plan, which I think was kind of affirmative PR on Lively's side showing, hey, the narrative was Justin Baldoni didn't agree with the way that they were marketing the movie.
But that's not even factual because this was the Sony marketing plan. This wasn't rogue or unheard of or unknown to him.
This was the marketing plan from the distributor of the film from the get-go. He spun the narrative that, oh, I just, I don't want to be associated.
They're treating it too lightheartedly, which I do think was a fail on Sony's part, but that's not necessarily the issue of the cast. I mean, I remember I fell for that when all of this was going on.
And I remember being like, as someone who's been through domestic violence, like, yeah, I don't love the way that Blake is talking about this. You know, it's not.
And then come to find out, like that's, she was doing her job and Justin was maliciously, like breaking contract to make her look worse. That's what's crazy about it too.
And like to Nally's point, I guess even I fell for it. I mean, I certainly had my opinions about Justin, but I wasn't as familiar with the contents of the book.
But I have a basic understanding of how Hollywood works, the difference between a distributor and a production company versus an employee. but like there's just this perception of oh if you're a big celebrity you have this immense control and power and everything you say you get your way and that was just kind of the narrative

that was spun in the sense that like yeah here you have sony massive company legacy company but everyone around the world has heard the name sony we've heard we knew that sony was the distributor and yet we just all just assumed that if blake was talking and promoting the book this way it must be blake's choice and it can you know and we just all the internet we when I say we blame Blake for it and then to Natalie's point which makes it even more sinister is that there's no documentation out there or suggesting that like Justin went to Sony and said hey guys I disagree with this like everything we've read or understand is that Justin also signed off or at least agreed or at least, or at a minimum, didn't voice a complaint about him disagreeing with how Sony was planning on marketing this movie. He just behind everyone's back made a decision on his own, knowing that it would, how it would come across and make Blake look the way he successfully made Blake look, which is so sinister, especially when you consider the platform that Justin has made his entire career about and the fact that like he went behind her back knowing the optics of, you know, it's like he was so self-aware about how people respond to these types of conversations regarding DV and domestic violence for him to set up the woman in this situation to make her look the way he made her look is so, it's sinister.
It's like really dark. It's really, yeah, it's hard to be like, oh, he's such a warrior for women and oh, he's such a feminist.
And then to be like, but you did this to a woman. Like, how can you say that's who you are? He weaponized the whole movement around her just because he's been so involved in the movement and kind of understanding how people respond to certain messaging i mean the whole thing there was this clip that you went around viral and it was just like justin on the on the on the red carpet and he was just like and you saw it was in a couple interviews because clearly this was something that he had crafted you know and that was my whole issue with Justin.
When I interviewed him, it was like, this guy just, you know, my perception that he talked in talking points, you know, and so when he's saying, you know, we have to stop asking why do women stay and start asking why do men hurt? That's a great question, you know, but it's, again, it's just a line. It's a, it's a, it's a punchy line.
It sounds really great in soundbites. And then we heard it in soundbites and everyone on the internet is hurting.
Oh, yes, that's a great question, Justin, of course. And it's just like, he just, he so carefully crafted this narrative, at least that's how it comes across, in a way that it's just so like, when you really, when you take a step back and you look at all the details, it really paints a very icky picture about like how this all came to be and just how dark it was considering the platform he built his entire reputation on.
Well, the lawsuit is written to leave a picture. And again, the lawsuit, I always say lawsuits are allegations and shade.
And again, complaint interchangeably. I think this will be a lawsuit soon.
I think once we are out of the holidays, the California Civil Rights Division is going to be like, you go sue. We want nothing to do with this.
Enjoy that. And I think we'll see this get filed in the new year in the courts in California.
But government agencies are on that weird, we don't know what day it is and we're quasi working right now. So that's not going to happen until the new year.
But it's written to really say they went after destroying her reputation so she wouldn't be believed about sexual harassment in the workplace. Like it really is a, oh, well, we think the Internet doesn't want to believe women in the first place.
And let's let's let's double down on that. That's our PR strategy.
Let's say that she weaponizes feminism and that she and her husband are incredibly powerful. But when we talk about that campaign with Sony, it seems to me, and you guys would probably know better than I would, that he would be in the best position to have input in the marketing plan as the person who owns the rights to the story in the first place and is producing it and is directing it.
It seems that he was in the position to change the direction of marketing vis-a-vis Blake Lively, who, though probably more powerful in Hollywood, I don't know if her input would have been as well taken on that with Sony as his would. So it seemed that he could have had that off at the beginning.
What do you feel like was the most shocking to you when you first read the complaint? That everything was in text messages. Right.
No. That everything was in text messages.
And I don't, look, people are going to say the text messages are altered. If they are, it will come out in the wash because all of this is going to get heavily litigated.
We're going to see lawyers in the media throwing mud at one another. And we've seen a number of PR professionals and crisis PR professionals thrown into the middle of this.
None of their clients can be happy that their names are in the news. Nobody who works with PR, I would imagine, wants their PR to be the story.
I imagine PR doesn't want them to be the story. I mean, it's interesting enough, PR and just media in general is the story.
And like in a very, not even that indirect way, these various publications and how they

covered this story, I think are very much kind of in the spotlight, you know, like how

did, you know, again, page six, E!

News, Us Weekly, People Magazine, how did they choose or not choose to cover this story?

And I just think it's really, you know, fascinating, scary.

I don't know but again this shines an entire spotlight on the industry as a whole and it's like as someone who's worked in this space a little bit I have friends in press and things like that and every once in a while there would be an article that would come out about me and then I would see like a picture and i'd be like why did they choose like this picture and i look so stupid and i would talk to my friends who like worked at e-news or whatever i'm like why do you guys do this and they always would like play dumb it's like what are you talking oh no like um they're just like random it's everything's random you know and i'm like no it's not like and it's just like they wouldn't even admit it you know you, it's like an acknowledgement that nothing in this space is random. It's an acknowledgement that like hired guns and publicity is, is a, is a thing, you know, that like you can craft narratives pro

positively and negatively. It's just like, it's like a negative story about Blake.
They're choosing

a photo where she's like, not quite smiling yet because she looks a little bitchy. Yeah.
Right.

And it's all very carefully. It's the yeah thumbnail photo it's the shady thumbnail photo the media crafted at first youtubers just stole it yeah it's it my hope is that it's a a wake-up call to all of us as consumers of fans of entertainment that we can no longer and in a way i feel like the headline business is under review so to speak the fact that we we get our news in headlines the whole short clips on the internet that's where we get a lot of our information how we craft our narratives and I hope that this you know what eventually we assume will be a lawsuit will shed a light on just in how as as viewers we consume information again the entire internet, essentially, just was so quick to dismiss the woman in this situation off of nothing, off of a handful of interviews that were suggesting that maybe she's kind of rude, you know, and that's all it took for us to completely dismiss the victim in this scenario and believe someone who said some nice things every once in a while.

And we got that information from headlines and a couple like clips on the Internet.

And it wasn't by reading all the information or really asking the sound questions or paying attention to what was happening.

We were just rushing to assumptions and just getting our information secondhand. And I hope it's a wake-up call for how we digest this information.
Two things can be true. If Blake Lively was rude in interviews or if people interpreted it as rude in interviews and press junket days and had not great interviews, it doesn't mean she wasn't harassed in the workplace.
And you can't harass somebody in the workplace because they've ever been rude. I'm sure everybody in the world has been rude at some point in their life, whether that's been on camera or not is different.
But we all have less than great days, but that doesn't excuse or forgive what happened. But the internet went that direction with, yeah, but maybe don't be rude.
And the text messages in the lawsuit, it was, yeah, I kind of hate how much the internet just wants to shit on women. And then the last one was, yeah, but maybe don't be a see you next Tuesday, though.
And so even the PR company or the PR agents that are being sued were like, yeah, but it's fine with us because, like, you know, she deserved it was basically what those text messages were saying. And that's pretty awful.
And when we saw the second lawsuit, you saw that even more because the second lawsuit took every opportunity because lawyers are shady AF and we love gossip. Like lawyers love nothing more than gossip.
And the second lawsuit from Jones Work PR has all the tea, but put in all of those text messages of how much the PR agents that are being sued in both lawsuits dislike Justin Baldoni. It's all in there.
They don't like him at all and they don't really care. They're like, this is our client.
This is our job. What's crazy about the whole point of like, all she did was be rude.
It's like, you don't have to be perfect to be a victim. You know, like you can be a terrible person and you can still, bad things can happen to you and you can still be victimized.
And it's like, the fact that people are like, oh my God, she was mean, she was rude. Like, there's no way that like he would do this to her is the craziest thing to me.
It's hard because the way our court system works is that when you're the one suing or in a criminal case, when you're the one making the complaint or when something happened to you, you are the one it feels like on trial. And we've seen this in any high profile trial you watch, you will see that people are picked apart.
Everything they've ever said, every text message, it is part of how our court system works. And I think the broader society has kind of taken that on in questioning some people and not questioning others.
And I think there's a difference between questioning circumstances and discounting what somebody is saying happened. But the court system is so adversarial, it makes it really difficult for people to sort out the two and that two things can be true at once, especially in civil litigation.
And that's because in most civil litigation, you have apportioned liability. So if you're looking at a car accident and somebody's going through yellow and somebody else makes a turn, lawyers are going to be like, this is a terrible analogy, but you can apportion fault.
Like who's 51% more at fault? So our civil litigation system is very much set up to be like, okay, what did you do? What did you do? And how did we get here? But that doesn't always work cleanly in employment litigation when you're dealing with allegations of sexual harassment. It's not, what did you do? What did you do? How did we get here? It's, what happened? Did you go through the proper forms to complain? And then where are we? So it's difficult because when people come forward, they aren't ever going to be perfect because no one is perfect.
How they express themselves in court is going to be what matters the most. But at the DA's office in LA, we often talked about with juries, look, if you have a crime that happens in hell, your witnesses aren't angels.
That was kind of the core principle. If you have these horrible things happening in these horrible situations, the people who are also there have their own stuff going on.
It doesn't mean they didn't see what they saw. To that point, Emily, you kind of referenced it a few times, just so the audience kind of understands how this all works.
When Blake and her team are considering even filing this complaint that inevitably we assume is going to lead to a lawsuit, what are the things that they have to consider? Because what I'm hearing from you is that even if you're the person suing, once it goes to the lawsuit, everyone involved is exposed, so to speak, right? So if Blake is suing Justin, I'm assuming they really have to have their ducks in a row, so to speak, because if that's, you know, for anyone out there questioning Blake or saying, oh, we don't believe her or, you know, trying to poke holes in this complaint. what would happen if let's say they weren't telling the truth i guess what i'm saying is

they what do they have to consider uh and how detailed do they have to be

and how would they be exposing themselves if for some reason this was all just a made-up thing and Justin was still the innocent angel that he wants everyone to think he is? Undertaking civil litigation is not easy for anyone and often the winners are the lawyers because they walk away with the most money. So if like at the most basic question I've seen around the internet is what if these text messages are fake? Well, if lawyers put forth fake text messages in a complaint to the court, they can face substantial action against them because you have a duty of candor to the court under your license.
Now with all the Tom Girardi stuff, we've seen how seriously California may or may not take some of that, but they tell all the peon lawyers that you will be disbarred. So you can't put fake information into a complaint into court.
This complaint is going to the California Department of Civil Rights, but you still can't lie to them. So sometimes you will see lawyers say on information and belief, meaning this is what my client has told me and we're waiting to verify it.
So you will see that language in lawsuits, but you have to have, and anyone who's seen Legally Blonde more than once, and haven't we all, it has to have a reasonable belief that there's evidentiary support for the complaint. So you're putting it forward saying, I believe these things to be true.
If at the end of the day, this gets filed as a lawsuit, which I think it will, then there will be motions to dismiss, and then the judge will start to evaluate it. And then there will be motions for summary judgment, and those have a lot more information behind them after discovery.
But what Blake

Lively is opening herself up to by filing this is mutual discovery. So not just what was going

on for Justin Baldoni and potentially with his phone records and emails between all of the

co-defendants, the PR company, Wayfarer Studios, but her as well. The discovery goes both ways.

She'll be sitting for a deposition. Ryan Reynolds probably will too, because he was at that HR

Thank you. company, Wayfarer Studios, but her as well.
The discovery goes both ways. She'll be sitting for a deposition.
Ryan Reynolds probably will too, because he was at that HR meeting and everyone else at that meeting. And we saw the 30 point request from that HR meeting.
Everyone else at that meeting is going to be dragged into depositions as well. So now Blake Lively and her lawyers would have sat down and said, okay, these are all the people that are going to be deposed.
The head of Sony Studios, if they were involved in the HR, everyone from Wayfair, everyone on set that was part of this HR meeting and more. And the potential cast, all the people who kind of separated themselves along with Blake from Justin.
Yes. So if you're not going to have support in the workplace, this lawsuit will make it worse.
If you have a lot of support, people are going to say, no, we absolutely support you. Depose me.
Let's go. I'm happy to tell them my side.
So it really depends on the positioning. And since this lawsuit dropped, so many have come forward in support of Blake Lively.
I've not seen, and if I'm missing it, it's been the holidays,

so please let me know. I've not seen a ton of people coming forward in support of Baldoni.
I've seen his podcast co-host leave. I've seen his agency drop him.
I've not seen a lot of people say,

I don't believe this about him, which when stuff comes up, you will often see people supporting

both sides. And we're at a very much an imbalance here of where the support is leaning from those that were on set and from those that know Blake Lively as well.
I just want to just clarify one thing, and you can say yes or no. But just to reiterate everything, it is safe to assume that Blake and her team, and specifically her lawyers, they must have Blake and her lawyers considered and you know, and got the green light from all the people and like checked, you know, dotted their eyes and crossed their T's before they would file something like this.
They considered all those things that you just reviewed with us to make sure that they had a strong case moving forward. Like we can assume that.
Absolutely. And they would have had not only extensive conversations with her about how invasive this process will be.
I don't follow, I follow celebrities once they end up in lawsuits, but I don't follow broader celebrity culture as much because the lawsuits have been so busy over the last four years. but Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds strike me as fairly private Hollywood

personalities.

They don't seem to put a ton of their life on display.

It seems that they allow glimpses when they're doing stuff,

but kind of keep their kids offline. They're not constantly being photographed by paparazzi.
They seem to be protective of their privacy. This is the opposite of that to the extreme.
So this is a very invasive process that she has the opportunity to choose, go forward and sue or don't. She might've felt like she didn't have a choice because otherwise the narrative would just keep running and she wouldn't be able to promote her brands and work, but she can choose to sue or not.
And it's going to get incredibly invasive for all the parties involved. What I will say is because this is an employment lawsuit, we saw or will be in this complaint, we saw the breakdown of that HR meeting.
There were a ton of people involved. So that HR meeting that happened before they resumed filming would have been well-documented and well-attended.
And I imagine there are probably emails surrounding what it looks like to resume filming with tons of people. And the lawyers would have reviewed all that saying, yes, you had been raising these red flags.
Yes, these other people had been raising these red flags. They would have pulled all of that from Blake Lively and anyone who would choose to disclose that.
If other members of the cast had made HR complaints, they probably have all that before they even brought this lawsuit. And those things in companies that are very large working on sets are going to be really well documented.

It almost seems like Justin's lawyer's response and his response initially was this is all about Blake trying to build up her reputation that was damaged back when, you know, back in August. But everything we just discussed almost suggests the opposite.
Like you said, to do this isn't just like Blake talking, giving an interview and making some flippant accusations to say, oh, it's not me. It's actually Justin.
This really opens up the door for a lot of emotional distress, a lot of anguish, a lot of exposure. You don't do this unless you're very serious, unless you have a lot of evidence backing it up.
You don't do this for the accusations of which Justin's lawyer seems to be suggesting. This is not something you undertake lightly.
And Justin's attorney, who is also a pit bull in his own right, definitely leaned into the narrative that's already existing about Blake Lively and just continued to lean into that PR playbook. But Brian Friedman works regularly with Mark Garagus.
You've seen his name come up in the Bravo Reality Reckoning. He's involved in a lot of those lawsuits with Rachel Levis in that lawsuit against Tom and Ariana.
So he is well-versed with Hollywood, and he is definitely a lawyer that is going to fight in your corner. But that's not to say Blake Lively's lawyers aren't.
And when we look at Stephanie Jones and the Jones Work lawsuit, she brought in Quinn Emanuel, who as a law firm has absolutely no chill at all. They are currently representing Jay-Z in New York and other things.
So we're talking about very powerful law firms that are just going to go all out with each other. So thinking that this is going to be easy is not accurate.
It's not easy. It's not fun.
A lot of people choose not to bring civil lawsuits because of how invasive it is. And even if they have conversations with lawyers, they often decide not to pursue it because it's more worth it to just let it go.
It's the same, unfortunately, with criminal prosecutions. A lot of people will sit down with police or prosecutors and talk about what the process is like and say, you know what, at the end of the day, I'd rather just try to move on.
And so this is going to be a very invasive process for everybody. And I don't think that any side is going to settle because too much is on the table now.
There's way too much out there for Baldoni to turn around and want to settle. And I don't know if Blake Lively would want to and has the money to choose not to.
We keep talking about this HR meeting that happened January 2024, right before filming resumed. There were seven or so people there.
And at the beginning of this complaint, it talks about this HR meeting. And it says, you know, before the list of 30 things, it says the January 4th meeting occurred only after Wayfair had rebuffed Ms.
Lively's efforts repeatedly. What does that mean? It means that she had tried to resolve this short of having an all-hands HR meeting to me, and they had said, no, it's fine.
No, it's fine. No, we're not going to do that.
So it seems like she didn't immediately escalate this to a all-hands, I'm not going to resume filming until we have an HR meeting. It seems that she tried to say, hey, and this is, again, my interpretation of what they mean by rebuffed.
Hey, I don't have a breastfeeding space at work, which also you can't do in California, but I don't have a breastfeeding space at work. That's going to be in my trailer.
So when the door is closed to my trailer, nobody can come in. Like setting up those basic boundaries.
And it seemed that Wayfarer was like, well, you know, we're not doing that. That is my interpretation based on what that says that she tried to handle it before escalating it, which for all of us that have had jobs, you try to handle things before you escalate it.
Nobody wants to escalate it to a full blown HR meeting. I imagine no one in Hollywood wants to have to have the distribution company, Sony, coming in to mitigate a workplace that has become untenable because for everyone involved, it's just embarrassing.
You don't want to have to sit there and be like, hey, we can't talk about your porn addiction in the workplace. Why do we even have to say these things out loud? And, you know, again, California tends to lead the nation in employee-friendly regulations.
And that includes things like safe spaces to nurse that aren't a bathroom. But a lot of employers still don't do that.
You would think a private trailer should be private when you are four months postpartum, but I'm particularly flustered by that because it's something that I've dealt with personally, as I'm sure many have. It's just, come on, give people the space that they need when they are going back to work as working parents.
Make it easier for everybody. But again, we're talking about a man who, again,

has made his whole brand out of signaling this virtue about being an ally. And again, he comes across for me as the type of guy who talks about how he understands the plight of women so much that it's like one big gaslight.
It's just like, hey, I'm on your side, I'm on your side. So honestly, it's like Justin will walk into a room of a woman breastfeeding and be like, it's okay, I'm not uncomfortable, you know? Right, right.
And then imply that the woman breastfeeding shouldn't be uncomfortable because me, the ally that I am, this is all normal, you know? Hey, everyone breastfeeds, it's okay, you know? okay. And he acts as if he says stuff like that.
The complaint is filled with accusations of Justin saying and doing inappropriate things to these people. And when they voice their frustration, it was a lot of dismissive reactions from Justin being like, oh, it's okay.
I can say that. I think there was one moment where he's like it's okay my wife's on set i can say that today as if like oh he he called there's a accusation and part of the complaint that he uh talked to another woman on set and said he thought her pants were sexy you know things like that it's just like he's like no no don't be uncomfortable my wife's here it's like um please don't comment work.
That's weird. And he's like, no, you're making it weird.
It's not weird. You're making it weird.
It is very dismissive and gaslighting. And I think one of the things I took issue with as well in the complaint, and this is just me being me taking issue because I am very ADHD.
and it's something I've dealt with with learning disabilities since I was in school is the, um, the plan to blame things on his very recent diagnosis of ADHD. And it's like, look, if we need to get on to like Dr.
Amen's podcast, so I can talk about the fact that if these things come out, I have an excuse and I'm like, what? No, it's crazy. And like, I'm ADHD.
I'm dyslexic. I have all these things.
I can be aloof. How have we not talked about this? I mean, because we don't lead with our issues that we have.
We overcome them, Emily. Exactly.
You know, and it's just so frustrating. And yes, I have, being who I am, have said awkward things in social settings.
I've had to learn the hard way sometimes. I've been accused of being rude.
I don't walk around and be like, it's okay, I'm ADHD. What? It's, huh? No, it's something I have to work on.
Just like if Blake may have to work on things the public eye, you know, whether you're Blake Lively or Ryan Reynolds and you're you're that level of celebrity or you're a former reality TV star. If you get noticed in public, you have to learn how to interact with people.
You know, when they walk up to you at dinner and say, hey, I'm sorry for interrupting. Can I take a picture? You know, when people are when when Natalie and I travel, we're on a plane.
You it's a weird thing for people to get uncomfortable and nervous and fan out.

And you have to learn how to respond and you don't always get it right. You know, I've gotten it wrong.
I've had bad reactions from, you know, people I've met in public, not because I was intending to be rude, but like, I just, I didn't meet their expectations. That's often how it is how it is when fans meet a celebrity and it's that the celebrity doesn't meet their expectations of how they thought the celebrity should act around them.
Sometimes they have the right to feel the way they do and sometimes it's just their own interpretation of the situation. I also think him blaming it on his ADHD is like, we've seen him interact with fans.
We've seen him in a crowd of people and he's suave. He's like, you know, he has the whole room in his hand.
And then like always says the right thing. He always says the right thing.
And then for like him to say, well, you know, if some of this stuff gets out, we'll just blame it on that. It's like, oh, I didn't realize ADHD made you say like, oh, yeah, like I want to talk about my dick to strangers.
Thank you. Yeah.
You know, that's sorry. That's a weird cop out.
I've been ADHD and I've been aloof, but I know right and wrong. I know boundaries.
I know what's inappropriate. I know what not to say.
I've, you know, like that's not it's not it's it's, it's such a bullshit excuse. Like you don't, I don't know where all of a sudden like not understanding quote unquote social cues is an excuse for being dismissive or making women feel uncomfortable or saying inappropriate things or acting inappropriately.
Where does ADHD come in when you are allowing investors or people who should not be on set in a closed set scene? How does that explain that? It doesn't explain that. It's interesting to me, and both of you mentioned this, is the searching for an excuse.
Not searching for a way to say this didn't happen on set and these complaints never came up and this HR meeting never came up. It was a way to explain the things that were being complained about.
Like, this is the explanation. And if that explanation doesn't work, but also Blake Lively is a mean girl, like we're going to get the women on our side by calling her a mean girl because most women have dealt with mean girls.
But we're not in junior high. You can't sexually harass someone in the workplace.
And then you can't try to ruin their career, which is what's being alleged here, if they bring it up in the workplace. I don't know if this would have become public if he hadn't gone on the offensive when the Internet started asking what I thought were reasonable questions of, hey, y'all aren't being pictured together.
That seems strange. Yeah, it's like everyone wants to say, oh, Blake Lively's lying or, oh, let's not believe Blake Lively.
But it's like Justin isn't even defending himself. He's just saying, oh, let's make sure we have a plan and excuses ready for when this comes out, because I know I did all this, but we need a reason as to why I did all this.
Also, to your point, Emily, there's a good chance that Blake Lively never even brought this complaint to where it is now had Justin not do the whole revenge part. Like if it was just if it just stopped at his behavior on set, I'm guessing there's a good chance it never got to this point, you know, but because he went on the offensive because he tried to destroy her credibility.
There's a part in this complaint that talks about. And I think it's a really important, you know, section.
The whole narrative early on was, oh, Blake and Ryan Reynolds are so rich and powerful, yada, yada.

And the whole argument was like, oh, well, the only reason why her castmates are siding with Blake is because she's rich and powerful. Well, as it turns out that Justin Baldoni's business partner, friend, and church buddy, which, you know, when you go to the same church, there's a level of, you know, loyalty there that I think maybe goes beyond just normal colleagues, and he's worth a couple bill, you know? So he is, you know, and in the complaint, there is an allegation that at the premiere, this billionaire friend of Justin, financier of the company was overheard saying that he was willing to spend up to $100 million to destroy Blake.
Huh? I'm so interested where that quote came from and how that all came out. There are a few questions that I am left with, and all lawsuits are going to leave me with questions because lawyer, but how they know that and where that came from, who heard it, who related to them.
I have so many questions. It's such a specific thing to say, but they're going to end up spending quite a bit in legal fees because Wayfarer and Baldoni are being sued or are likely to be sued in two jurisdictions.
Because we have the Stephanie Jones-Jones work going forward in New York, and then we have the LA potential lawsuit when the right to sue letter comes through. And I do think this will get filed.
I don't imagine that we will see this resolve before it gets filed. And if it does, I imagine there would be a statement explaining that.
But you've got people fighting in two different jurisdictions on separate sides of the country. So for the defendants, including Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, it's going to get expensive to mount these lawsuits, and it's going to get expensive quickly.
I mean, for this type of suit, I imagine most attorneys are starting with a $50,000 retainer at a minimum, and that is a generously low minimum, if not a $100,000 retainer. So it's going to be expensive fast.
But that accusation about that $100 million, we can assume if it does go to court, we'll find out why they felt so comfortable including that in the complaint. Because like you said, it's not a text message.
It is something that someone overheard overheard but i assume there's a witness there that might be called or something right they wouldn't just write that in as hearsay you know there's plenty there that they don't need to include you know the fluff like this what's that and that's what's so interesting and you know before we let you go emily it really felt like this complaint was very really just laid out the facts it. It was just very detailed.
It didn't have a lot of fluff.

It didn't have a lot of storytelling.

It was just like point by point, all the random, creepy, and odd things that Justin said and

did with his colleagues towards Blake and the rest of the cast.

It had some.

I think that it was written in a way that it could be read and understood by not just media, but by individuals. And it definitely had a fair few of details.
I think including the Sony marketing campaign was necessary, but also had multiple purposes. It was kind of a plus plus on, hey, he's slamming her for this media campaign.

And hey, we know that this is contrived because here's the marketing plan, but it also signals to the public, hey, also here's this marketing plan. So there was a lot in this lawsuit that served multiple purposes, but complaints are written to also tell the story.
They are written when people are like, oh, they cherry picked the text messages. Of course they did.
It's their complaint. Their complaint is advocacy for their client from their perspective.
It is their story. It is not there to tell both sides.
A filing from a plaintiff is there to paint the plaintiff's side in the light most favorable to them. A filing by a defendant is there to paint the story in the light most favorable to them and the light most negative to the plaintiff.
So lawsuits are very much an adversarial proceeding. And people forget that, too.
They're like, this is very one-sided. Yes, at this point, it is very one-sided.
But it's why I like to cover court so much, because when this gets filed, it will be responded to. And we've already seen Baldoni's lawyer respond in the media saying this is all Blake trying to salvage her reputation and this is a salacious lawsuit.
Show me a lawsuit about celebrities lately that doesn't have salaciousness in it. I mean, all of them do.
It is part of the playbook of litigation at this point. Well, Justin's lawyer also stated that they plan on also counter-suing.
What might that look like? And is that just something that everyone in the type of lawyer that Justin has, is that just kind of standard operating procedure? Does that potentially open up Justin as well? I'm sure they'll have their own narrative like you just suggested. It'll be from the POV of Justin.
But how strong do you feel like this complaint is? And if you were to speculate on how Justin's lawyer might fight this, assuming everything that Blake laid out is true and that Justin's lawyer's argument is like, we just have the wrong perspective, that seems to be their argument. It's just like, well, we're not denying it happened.
It's just why it happened and how it came to be. And the framing of the story is completely misrepresented.
How do you think they will do that without exposing themselves and look like they're lying? They are already in it. So they're already likely to be sued.
They're already being sued in New York. They can't file a countersuit yet because generally a countersuit, if we're going to be hyper specific and legal is if Blake Lively had filed this in court already, you can countersue within that same lawsuit.
So it's within the same body of that lawsuit. This isn't filed in court yet.
They don't have a right to sue letter yet. So he can't countersue within this lawsuit.
They can respond to the California Department of Civil Rights. If that department does an investigation, they can respond there.
But I think by countersue, he means that he might proactively sue because he said he was going to do that this week, which there's no lawsuit docketed yet for Blake Lively. So it would have to be their own lawsuit.
But Justin Baldoni is already being sued in New York. This complaint is likely to move forward.
He's already open to discovery. They already have these text messages.
So for them, it's going to be telling their side of the story. And I imagine we will see, oh gosh, I don't even know what causes of action they'll bring because I don't know what they have or what they know.
But it'll be a counter narrative to this, that this is not really an employment dispute. And this isn't really intentional infliction of emotional distress.
And the things Blake Lively said in the interviews are why the internet did this. And this has nothing to do with his PR campaign.
It'll be interesting to see what causes of action he chooses to bring and whether it involves invasion of privacy. But that lawsuit might be between Justin Baldoni and Stephanie Jones, the PR firm that released all these text messages.
That seems like a cleaner path then to also bring Blake Lively into it.

But for Baldoni to go after Jones in New York and then drag or attempt to drag Blake Lively

into the New York lawsuit,

that seems to be the clearer path

if they're really going to bring a countersuit

is bringing it in New York

and talking about invasion of privacy

and the text messages and what have you.

It really seems like the publicists in both these complaints are like the linchpin almost. Yes.
Just because they're the hired guns who don't even clearly have loyalty to Justin. They're just there to be hired.
And now they're exposed and their careers and credibility are on the line. And it'll be interesting to see how these two women, how they go about defending themselves or how they handle these complaints.
I do have one question for all of you before I go, though. Yes.
Are you looking forward to seeing kind of the veil pulled back on Hollywood PR campaigns? Because that's one thing I'm really interested in this lawsuit is to see how much of the curtain gets pulled back for the public to look at what being blacklisted in Hollywood truly looks like. What does it really look like to you? I mean, I really am.
And I've thought about this over the weekend. I really hope this is a wake up call for the industry itself, for consumers of pop culture and media in general.
you know as someone who works in the long-form space in podcasting, to me, this is, again, I think it puts a spotlight on short-form content. I put it on content.
I put a spotlight on headlines. We've become such a lazy society in terms of how we get our information.
We read a headline. We don't click on and actually read the article.
We watch, you know, 15 seconds of a clip, you know, we form an opinion. And I think now you really have to be willing to listen to a whole episode or read a whole article.
Or when you hear a narrative, you have to be willing to ask yourself the question, I don't know, is this accurate? Or do I need to like Google for 15 seconds and fact check what's out there? I wish we lived in a world where we could trust information that's out there. But I think time and time again, this year, we're reminded that like we have to be more discerning as consumers in terms of what we believe and not believe.
And I do hope that, yes, I hope it becomes a spotlight on the industry because, again, it's an acknowledgement that hit pieces exist, that it's a thing, that these freelance writers are hired guns of crafting various narratives. And you don't have to disclose it.
If you do a sponsorship, you have to disclose it. If you're promoting something, you and I both have to disclose it.
But if a story is placed, that doesn't have to be disclosed. If there's a relationship there, like the author is sisters with the PR agent, that doesn't have to be disclosed at all.
So it really brings up this level of who benefits, these are my questions when I read things. But also just the industry in general, how many articles have we listened to, or how many articles more importantly have been printed based off of an anonymous source? You know, like these, all these publications need no real information or evidence.
There's no journalism period whatsoever going on here. It's just an anonymous source.
Sometimes the anonymous source is the person themselves who doesn't want to be quoted. Sometimes an anonymous source is the colleague who friend to friend, like it's based off of nothing.
You know what I'm saying? And all these rumors that get out and it's just so easy again to have all you need is someone willing to say, I heard this. I saw this.
I know a person. That's all you need.
It also makes you think, I mean, like Melissa Nathan, who is this crisis PR, who's on Justin Baldoni's team, her sister, Sarah Nathan, who is this quote unquote journalist for all of these publications, who's written some terrible articles about a lot of women, some Meghan Markle. It makes you think like, oh, Meghan Markle.
Like, she's had such, so many people have hated on Meghan Markle. And like, is this another one of these like hit pieces? It just makes you think of how many women have Hollywood tried to tear down that like we just believed because we read a headline.
And I always wonder, as I said, when I look at things, who benefits and then where is the money? And what you brought up, Nick, USA Today actually had a huge reckoning within USA Today because one of their journalists was just making up anonymous sources and they had to retract a ton of articles based on that. I talked to a number of independent media who had worked in legacy media, including Mandy Matney, who did the Murda Murders podcast and covered that.
And she was talking about the immense pressure and understaffing to get the clicks that media companies are tracking, how far down a page your eye goes, how much of a story a reader is reading. And it is driving towards more clicks, more subscriptions, more articles that convert to subscriptions.

How many subscriptions did New York Times convert based on publishing that lawsuit with people hitting a paywall and going, oh, I'll give you the $1 free trial. And then I'm going to forget about it until some app tells me six months later, I'm still paying for the New York Times, and then I cancel it.
But the pressure of getting people to read further down the page and to grab those really clicks and views with headlines is driving some of this. And then how understaffed media is, which is why I think new media in the long form, like your podcast, is thriving.
Because I think a lot of people are tired of their attention being grabbed in manipulative ways because most of those headlines are emotionally manipulative. They make you feel something first.
And that feeling is generally anger or disgust. It's a negative or a more negative emotion because those are faster and stronger responses.
You're like, ew, what? Instead of, oh my God, that's so uplifting. How many headlines have we read that blank slams blank for blank? And you're just like, huh? And then you read it and you're just like, someone had like a, well, I don't know.
You know, like I wouldn't have worn that sweater that, you know, Aaron wore or something. And it turns out like, John blast Aaron for wearing sweater or something.
But you hear blast. Insert name.
Insert name exposed. You know, they expose, eviscerates them.
It's like, huh? Did a murder happen?

Like what happened? And it was like someone said something on a podcast that didn't even come across as actual criticism if you actually listened to the podcast. But the publication uses words like slams, eviscerates, trashes, things like that.
And again, like to your point, all of these platforms are just incentivized by clicks and traffic and in no way incentivized for truth and exposure. And then once a story gets out, like the Justin story that came out, and when you saw the wave of people siding with Justin, right? And it was clear just by seeing the stories that came out, it was clear that these platforms were paying attention to where the narrative was heading.
They were paying attention to what side people were siding on, and they were basing their stories and coverage around that. They weren't interested in getting it right.
They were interested in riding the wave of public sentiment. And that seems to be the driving force now with these publications is just figuring out where sentiment going and make sure we ride that wave so that we can get the clicks and we can compete with all the other people out there riding the wave as well.
Well, if people are reading further down the page on an article that is why Blake Lively is rude, then the publication immediately knows that says, hey, this article is getting more reads than that articles. What we need are more articles like this one.
And then people are reading those articles or reading more of them on Instagram or watching reels about them or TikToks about them. And then the algorithm's like, oh, you watch this entire TikTok.
You'd like one on this same subject. And then it kind of rabbit holes you down the same subject line because the platforms want you to stay on the platform longer.

The New York Times wants you to stay on the New York Times longer.

I mean, you and I do long form content.

We always want you to hang out longer for the full conversation.

So it really does start to drive that.

What I love about independent media is you can just be true to your opinion and your audience and say, Hey, these are our sponsors. They're not here based on the topic.
They're here based on the show. And we're going to talk about what we want.
It's why people listen, because they want to hear what you have to say about it. And you were well ahead of the curve on this one.
And I think the only one talking about this back before any of these lawsuits happened. And that's why people are tuning into your show more than they're tuning into the New York Times.
One thing about Nick is he is a good read of character. And he, when something doesn't smell right, he is the first one to say it.
And he definitely said it back then. And a lot of people had a very strong reaction to what Nick said.
But Emily, we know you have to go.

This has been so insightful.

We really appreciate you being able to break this down.

Yeah.

You guys are the best.

Thank you.

When the next lawsuit drops, you know where to find me.

Because this one is not going away anytime soon.

We anticipate our audience hopefully hearing a lot from you on this show

as we continue to cover the story.

As always, Emily, can you please let our audience know where they can find you, pay attention to all the great things you're doing when you're not on The Vile Files? Absolutely. I cover legal cases over on YouTube at The Emily D.
Baker. I live stream three days a week starting in 2025.
So all of the upcoming trials in 2025 from Karen Reed's retrial to Brian Kober to Corey Richens, which is like the Mormon mom poisoning of her husband. It's wild.
That's going to be starting in April. So if you want to stay in the loop with all of that, the Law Nerd app free on iOS and Android will tell you everything I'm doing and where I am, including this episode when it goes up, because that's going to go out into the app to over 100,000 long words.
So come join the community. Let's talk law.
Thank you guys for having me. It's great to be here.
I love how you break it down. Thank you all.
We love you as well. Thanks so much.
Bye. Happy New Year.
It's true that some things change as we get older, but if you're a woman over 40 and you're dealing with insomnia, brain fog, moodiness, and weight gain, you don't have to accept it as just another part of aging. And with MidiHealth, you can get help and stop pushing through it alone.
The experts at Midi understand that all these symptoms can be connected to the hormonal changes that happen around menopause, and Midi can help you feel more like yourself again. Many healthcare providers aren't trained to treat or even recognize menopause symptoms.
MIDI clinicians are menopause experts. They're dedicated to providing safe, effective, FDA-approved solutions for dozens of hormonal symptoms, not just hot flashes.
Most importantly, they're covered by insurance. 91% of MIDI patients get relief from symptoms within just two months.

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Visit myfico.com slash free today to get your FICO score for free. My FICO makes it easy to understand your credit with FICO scores, credit reports, and alerts.
Visit myfico.com slash free or download the My FICO app and discover the score lenders use most. Beautiful Anonymous changes each week.
It defies genres and expectations. For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a murder attempt by her own son.
But just the week before that, we just talked the whole time about Star Trek. We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery.
It's unpredictable. It's real.
It's honest. It's raw.
Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts. I do have a question for you, Nick, though, because I feel like way back in August, you were one of the only people who kind of took not even blake's side but you you encouraged everybody to just take a beat and open their eyes to the fuller picture and i'm curious like how you got that idea and like what well well i'll get into that in a second but i think what's really important what you just pointed out is that i wasn't even taking blake's slide i i was.
I was literally just suggesting that we ask different questions and we shouldn't just rush to condemning Blake because of old interviews. And we should consider why the entire cast was separating themselves from Justin.
And we shouldn't just assume that Justin's the good guy in this narrative just because he says the right things publicly. That's all I was saying.
entire internet internet was like shut the fuck up but you got a lot of heat like in the comments even on the tiktok that we posted of your take like people were all over you just like this is a whack take this is wild like how could you say that i don't agree some people would disagree i just i don't i really am pretty good at being offline so i didn't realize it was like a hundred percent was telling me to shut the fuck up like it's it's funny so every once in a while like my publicist will like well you know we'll have a meeting whatever and it's just like i don't i do a good job of not reading comments and sometimes like i'll realize that like i might be catching more heat because i just remember when this came out she's like well maybe we should like move on from like the you know like the justin and blake story i'm like why why do you say that well i come to find out that like every single person online disagreed

with me it was wild some of the comments that were out there it was wild um it feels certainly

good to have been validated i was right why did i think what i thought about justin i mentioned i

did a tiktok a couple days ago and gave some context why i had the opinion that i had

Thank you. It feels certainly good to have been validated that I was right.
Why did I think what I had thought about Justin? I did a TikTok a couple days ago and gave some context why I had the opinion that I had. We interviewed Justin a few years back.
A lot of you guys weren't here. He was promoting his book, Man Enough.
He gave me a weird... Honestly, he gave me just a really bad vibe.
I mentioned in that TikTok when he came in, it was a pouring rain. He meditated in front of us.
I'm a huge fan of meditation. I'm not criticizing meditation, but for me, meditation is something you do for yourself.
He came in, he could have meditated in his car. He could have meditated at home.
I don't know. He came in and we all sat there and waited for him to finish meditating.
It was like, this guy was clear. He gave off the vibe that he was performing.
And that was just the vibe I got. I never talked about it, never spoke on it.
A lot people since then have been like asking me who i went after i posted that tiktok about giving my opinion what it was like to interview justin's like well who i was so and so it's just like justin's the only person we've interviewed how many people last year alone 130 i don't know how many people i've interviewed over the years of doing this show justin baldoni is the only person who gave me the vibe that he gave me about how disingenuous he came across. It's really cool.
We get to meet a lot of cool people doing this show. Sometimes we do become friends with them.
It was so cool to meet Denise Richards, someone who growing up, I was like, she is an icon. I honestly didn't know what to expect.
Denise Richards, the Bond girl, then the former housewife. I was kind of nervous.
What is she going to be like? She was so cool and down to earth. And yeah, I've built a rapport with Denise Richards since then.
A lot of times we interview people, they're a little nervous. It's an interview.
It's professional. Everyone's lovely.
Some people are more willing to open up than others. Some people aren't, whatever.
He was the only person who gave me this vibe. but again, I didn't really speak on it.
I'm not trying to like, I don't have people on to talk about what they were like behind their back or anything like that, but it was just a vibe I got. So when the story came out, I just knew, I'll never forget when the story broke, we were at the lake house with our friends, Erica and Scott.
And I was like, I just, I know there's something going on with this guy. Like I don't buy this guy.
I think he's a false prophet. I think he's a guy cosplaying as Jesus.
That was just the vibe I got. And I, and I was just out there being like, I'm not so sure we should just rush to judgment about Blake.
So that's why I thought what I thought, but yeah, I think, I just hope that if you're out there and you were listening to this and you were someone, like this is not about like pointing the finger but just ask yourself like what were you believing back then you know and why did you believe what you believed and if you're you know again this is this is a movie about dv this is a movie that a lot of people identified as as past victims who saw a connection to this movie and its characters and And many of those people were quick to blame Blake, the women in this scenario and defend Justin over what? Over nothing. I think this is so much more than a like believe women stance right now.
It's like there's cast and crew that have men involved who want nothing to do with Justin, who they overheard and they saw and things made them uncomfortable. Like this isn't just Blake Lively against Justin Baldoni.
This is so many cast, so many crew, so many people involved who are like, hey, I don't like this guy. He's saying shit.
He's doing weird shit. Like, I don to be around him.
And I think that's what people need to pay attention to. It wasn't just Blake Lively who was like, hey, I don't want to promote this movie with him.
I don't want to stand beside him on a red carpet. It's the writer of this film who sold these rights to Justin is so uncomfortable.
She doesn't want to be around him. Brandon Sklenar, who plays Atlas in the film,

he wants nothing to do with Justin.

The actors who play young Lily and young Atlas,

man and woman want nothing to do.

This is just so like,

people are in my DMs being like,

you're going to eat your words,

like this believe women thing. It's like, it's not about that anymore.

Like, it's not about believe women because no one fucking believes women ever. So like, we're past that.
This man has clearly made several people, people uncomfortable and done shit where he hasn't asked for consent. He's added in scenes.
I mean, this is a bad guy. And for people to sit here and be like, team Justin, it's not fucking teams.
It's black and white. This is a bad guy.
This is a bad person who's done some bad things to a lot of people. And I think we just need to wake up and realize that.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's just so important, I think, to acknowledge that no one on Justin's team, Justin himself, this Jamie guy, no one is saying that this stuff didn't happen. And I think that is the most telling part.
His publicists are also in cahoots of like, this guy's fucking weird. This guy's cringy.
This guy thinks he's all that. His own publicists, his own team are saying that about him.
So this isn't like, oh, this isn't true or that's not true. It's like Justin isn't even saying, guys, I didn't do this.
And I think that's what people need to pay attention to. Also, again, there's still conversations about people trying to decide what they think about Blake.
I think we need to give Blake a lot of credit for what she did to come forward with all this. Blake's willingness to file this complaint and to fight this battle is still going to come with a lot of criticism.
It's going to cause a lot of stress on her family's life. Again, they were threatened by a billionaire that was going to spend a hundred million dollars to destroy their family.
Like, huh? That's an insane accusation. And how would you feel if that were you and your family? And people are so quick to find ways to dismiss that.
Blake has really shined a light on the industry as a whole, how we look at victims, how we want to discredit victims, that we have a society where we don't want to believe right and wrong. We want to believe people we agree with.
We want to believe people that we think we could be friends with. And then we are so quickly to discredit people if other people are able to convince us that we wouldn't be friends with them.
It's like, huh? That's not how we get to the truth. We have to be willing to ask questions.
We have to be critical thinkers. We actually have to consider that the person that we think reminded us of someone we went to high school with, they could still be right.
And we should have pause before we rush to judgment and just condemn people because of who we think they are in public. People have had experiences like this and feel almost embarrassed to speak about it.
It's a very scary thing to come forward with. I would imagine Blake would just want this to go away and not have this continue to be a thing that she has to deal with.
And she has had to make, I'm assuming, the very difficult choice to fight this. And because it's going to get in the legal system, it's going to be very public.
It's going to be out there. It's going to be emotionally distressing.
So again, a lot of disturbing stuff in this complaint. We highly recommend you guys read it, review it.
We'll add the links to the show descriptions. I think the big takeaway too is, I think there's a lot of, with this whole, the Luigi assassin, not to get into that, but there's this kind of like eat the rich mentality or mindset going around.
And I think part of that, we were so quick to dismiss Ryan and Blake in this story because of the perception of their power and influence. You always hear the phrase, there's always a bigger fish, you know? And in the story, we come to find out that there was in fact a bigger fish, this billionaire financer who was making threats and willing to invest hundreds, like a hundred million million to destroy a life.
I think the big takeaway is we should be careful not to jump to picking a side right off the bat. It's more about just asking some questions and to be allowing the information to get out.
And I think maybe that's the big takeaway. And for all the people, think back to August when the story came out if you were someone who was quick to just side with Justin or want to discredit Blake because again she reminded you of someone you went to high school with, just take a beat and ask yourselves why you came to that conclusion.
We have to stop doing stuff like this, otherwise this stuff is just going to keep happening. I think it's very brave of Blake to really shed a light on the industry as a whole.
And hopefully a lot of good will come from it. But this is obviously just getting started.
Justin's team seems to be fighting back very aggressively. Even Justin's lawyer is someone who, if you do some research, Justin seems to surround himself with people, let's just say, are the opposite of allies.
He surrounds himself with people who have their own checkered past. And again, someone who talks the talk like Justin talked would never surround himself with the people that he surrounds himself with.
Yeah, I think with Justin, you just got to start asking yourself, read the complaint, just look at the behavior. Just look at the behavior of a guy, again, who casted himself.
Is this the behavior of a person who actually is an ally? Is this the behavior of a person who actually wants to platform and protect women? Is this the behavior of a man who really listens to women and really wants to understand them? Or is he using allyship and this need and desire for us to protect women as a way to abuse his power, to gaslight his entire audience into thinking he's a good guy, and to get away with making people feel incredibly uncomfortable? Again, we were so quick to say that Ryan and Blake were abusing their power. All it was was a guy being a husband to his wife and wanting to protect his wife put yourself and again their shoes what it would be like to show up to work and have this person do these things that he's being accused of how would that make you feel and having to go to work and then think of all the people in this project people like oh why didn't she leave the set or why didn't she do this they are people in incredible positions that other people really rely on them.
And like, it's not that easy just to walk off set. I mean, if she would have walked, that would be, that would have been in itself a big story.
But she also made a huge decision in saying, I'm not going to continue to film this if these 30 things don't get fixed. Yeah.
She tried to handle it. I think that's telling in itself.
Well, that is going to do it for this episode. We obviously didn't get to Salt Lake City or Southern Charm or all the other headlines.
We'll pick all that up in the new year. There was so much, obviously, to cover this episode.
We just wanted to focus on the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni complaint. So we will see you in the new year.
Thank you again for such an incredible year. This has really, truly been our best year we've ever had as a show.
I truly believe that this is going to be an even bigger year for us, for you guys as well. We can't thank you enough for supporting us for our show.
We're going to kick things off in a big, big way starting next week. Can't wait for you guys to hear all the exciting things we have coming up in 2025.

It's going to be a great year.

Until then, be safe tonight.

If you are celebrating this New Year's Eve, make sure you do it safely.

We love you all.

We'll see you in 2025.

Bye.

it's true that some things change as we get older, but if you're a woman over 40 and you're dealing with insomnia, brain fog, moodiness, and weight gain, you don't have to accept it as just another part of aging. And with MidiHealth, you can get help and stop pushing through it alone.
The experts at Midi understand that all these symptoms can be connected to the hormonal changes that happen around menopause, and Midi can help you feel more like yourself again.

Many healthcare providers aren't trained to treat or even recognize menopause symptoms.

Midi clinicians are menopause experts.

They're dedicated to providing safe, effective, FDA-approved solutions for dozens of hormonal symptoms, not just hot flashes. Most importantly, they're covered by insurance.
91% of MIDI patients get relief from symptoms within just two months. You deserve to feel great.
Book your virtual visit today at joinmidi.com. That's joinmidi.com.
Looking for a mortgage, credit card, or auto loan? Then you should know your FICO score. Did you know 90% of top lenders use FICO scores? Visit myfico.com slash free today to get your FICO score for free.
My FICO makes it easy to understand your credit with FICO scores, credit reports, and alerts. Visit myfico.com slash free.
That's myfico.com slash free. Or download the My FICO app and discover the score lenders use most.
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