Over the weekend, Blake Lively elevated herself into the pantheon of famous Hollywood women who have taken monumental, #MeToo-inspired stands against sexual predation in the entertainment industry.
The 37-year-old star not only publicly detailed her own painful experience with sexual harassment on the set of her movie, “It Ends With Us,” in a legal complaint and in a viral New York Times story, she also chronicled the way she was allegedly targeted by a sophisticated social media “smear campaign” during the film’s release in August.
The purpose of this campaign, allegedly orchestrated by cunning and craven Hollywood publicists, was to damage her reputation for the sake of advancing the career and the personal brand of her alleged harasser, co-star and director Justin Baldoni.
In a statement to the New York Times, Lively valiantly said, “I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted.”
Nearly seven years ago, Lively also voiced her support for women taking a stand against sexual predators in Hollywood during the rise of the #MeToo movement. But unlike now, Lively’s purported advocacy for women speaking up against sexual misconduct was met with skepticism and even backlash.
That’s because Lively had chosen to publicly support one of the industry’s most famous alleged predators, Woody Allen. Among other things, Lively praised Allen for his “very empowering” direction after she co-starred in his 2016 film “Cafe Society.” During press interviews for the film, she also refused to address the sexual assault allegations made against him by his own daughter, Dylan Farrow.
Indeed, one prominent person speaking out against Lively in late 2017 and early 2018 was Dylan Farrow, who originally accused the filmmaker of molesting her in 1992, when she was 7 years old.
While Dylan Farrow praised women in the industry for “taking a stand” to effect change in Hollywood, she also said that Lively and other celebrity #MeToo advocates who had worked with her father were actually complicit “in the culture they are fighting against.”
“The people who join this movement without taking any kind of personal accountability for the ways in which their own words and decisions have helped to perpetuate the culture they are fighting against, that’s hard for me to reconcile,” Dylan Farrow said in a statement to the media at the time.
When Lively was initially cast in Allen’s “Cafe Society” in 2015, the former TV actor no doubt relished the chance to gain serious acting credibility by working with Allen, then still revered as one of world cinema’s best-loved auteurs.
A year later, after “Cafe Society” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Lively gushed about joining an elite class of actresses who could be considered Allen “muses,” telling Hamptons magazine that it was “really cool to work with a director who’s done so much.”
But it was during the 2016 Cannes Film Festival that public opinion began to turn against Allen, and Lively began to feel some heat. The change was led by Allen’s own son, journalist Ronan Farrow, whose later reporting on the alleged sex crimes of producer Harvey Weinstein helped spur the #MeToo movement.
In a stunning May 2016 op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter, Farrow reminded movie fans — and A-list stars like Lively — that his father had allegedly “groomed” his sister with inappropriate touching as a young girl and sexually assaulted her when she was 7. The allegations against Allen first became public in the 1990s, amid his stormy break-up from longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow, Ronan and Dylan’s mother.
As Allen vehemently denied the molestation allegations involving Dylan, his “PR engine revved into action,” Ronan Farrow explained in his op-ed. Similar to what Lively would say about Baldoni, Allen had savvy and aggressive publicists working on his behalf to spin a narrative to the public that was favorable to him and harmful to his alleged victim, according to Ronan Farrow.
In Allen’s case, this narrative sought to enlist journalists and news outlets in discrediting his own daughter’s account of being molested, Ronan Farrow said. Also similar to Baldoni, Allen’s aim was to salvage his reputation and to continue his career as a filmmaker.
Ronan Farrow described how this narrative held power for more than 20 years, largely because media outlets, fearful of Allen’s power in the industry, didn’t want to consider his sister’s side of the story. The journalist described his sister’s “agony in the wake of powerful voices sweeping aside her allegations” and “the press often willing to be taken along for the ride.” He said that it also hurt his sister to see A-list actors, some of whom were personal heroes, line up to star in his movies.
The day after Ronan Farrow published his op-ed piece, Vulture asked Lively for a comment on being one of the actors who presumably hurt Dylan Farrow by lining up to star in her father’s movies. She demurred, saying she hadn’t read the piece. “I think that’s dangerous,” she said. “I don’t want to speak about something I haven’t read.”
Lively also told the Los Angeles Times that any news coverage of Allen’s personal life didn’t register with her when she was making the movie. “I could (only) know my experience,” she said. “And my experience with Woody is he’s empowering to women.”
Lively came to Allen’s defense in other ways by ripping into a Cannes official who made a joke about Dylan Farrow’s allegations before the “Cafe Society” screening, Variety reported. She said film festivals are meant to be “beautiful” events for the purpose of celebrating movies and artists, and they shouldn’t be tarnished by someone making jokes about “something (like sexual abuse) that wasn’t funny.”
More than a year later, Ronan Farrow, writing for the New Yorker, joined New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor in publishing investigative stories that revealed Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of alleged sexual harassment and assault against scores of women. The Weinstein revelations quickly spurred many other women to come forward about sexual misconduct perpetrated by powerful men in media.
As the #MeToo movement took off, Dylan Farrow gained a new platform to re-litigate her claims against her father in the court of public opinion. She wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, in which she called out Lively, Kate Winslet and Greta Gerwig for choosing to work with her father but then refusing to “answer questions about it.”
Now in 2024, Lively has become a #MeToo-style hero by going public with her allegations against Baldoni. That status was helped by the fact that her claims were detailed by the New York Times report, in a report co-authored by Twohey, one of the reporters who originally broke the Weinstein story.
As with Lively’s bombshell legal complaint filed in California, the Times story also focuses on the alleged efforts by Baldoni and his publicists to damage Lively’s reputation, in order to pre-empt her claims about his sexually inappropriate behavior on set.
But over the years, Lively still has not addressed her support for Allen or her refusal to discuss Dylan Farrow’s allegations. Unlike Greta Gerwig and some other actors, she also has not voiced regret for choosing to work with Allen, even after Ronan Farrow presented evidence of his father’s P.R. efforts to discredit his own daughter.
But given Lively’s recent, allegedly harrowing experience with Baldoni, maybe she’ll finally feel willing to speak up about whether she regrets working for Allen.
