The 'It Ends With Us' Legal Drama Is Proof That There's No Such Thing As A Perfect Victim
The world wants to believe that women are villainous, and the world wants to believe that women are cold. The world wants to believe that women are strange and flawed, that we're difficult and complicated. The world, it seems, wants to believe everything detrimental about women, but what it doesn't want to do is actually believe women when they speak in their own words.
Consult the mob mentality of the internet, and, in the legal war that's erupted in the weeks following It Ends With Us's premiere, either Justin Baldoni or Blake Lively will be victorious. On December 31, Lively filed a lawsuit against Baldoni, producer Jamey Heath and publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan, alleging that the group orchestrated a smear campaign to 'bury' her reputation. Just one day later, Baldoni responded with a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, accusing the paper of working with Lively’s team and 'cherry-picking' text messages out of context to defame him in a story published on December 31, titled 'We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Campaign.' Baldoni's lawyer, Bryan Freedman, promised more lawsuits would follow and yesterday, the actor came good on his assertion by suing Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for defamation.
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This is the second lawsuit filed by Baldoni in relation to Lively and the production of their film and in the 179-page filing, Baldoni accuses Lively and Reynolds of wielding their combined celebrity clout to hijack the filming and production of It Ends With Us. Within hours, Lively's team responded to the filing, saying: 'This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim Offender.'
Consult the internet and the consensus seems to be that Lively, she of Gossip Girl fame, is the villain. Over the past 30 days, since Lively first filed a lawsuit against Baldoni and his team, searches for the pair and their ongoing lawsuits have spiked by 500%, according to Google Trends. On TikTok, videos made by both men and women have gone viral, dissecting Lively's behaviour in previous interviews. Analysing her every word, Lively has been painted as a villain. The same dissections of Baldoni have yet to really appear. The reasons are complicated, the explanations diverse, but the takeaway is that these legal complaints are a classic case of he said, she said. There is very rarely only one winner, and it's very rarely women.
The argument seems to be that something is 'off' about Lively. That she is clearly lying or manipulating her version of events. In the aftermath of It Ends With Us, when videos started resurfacing of Lively's previous interviews in which the actor was slammed as being 'rude' and a 'mean girl', a brutal reality emerged for women everywhere — unless we fit the cookie cutter shape of what the world understands a victim to be, we must be lying. There isn't room for our mistakes within the pantheon of victimhood. When we are not a perfect victim, we are not a victim at all. Not really, not how the world understands us to be. Legal disputes aside, commentators on the internet have said that they find Lively 'jarring', that she seems 'cold' and 'unbothered'. An unlikeable woman cannot be wronged, she cannot be believed, and therein lies the problem.
If the #MeToo movement taught us anything, it was that women deserved to be believed when they spoke. The unravelling of those teachings of #MeToo happened slowly, then all at once. On Monday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the President of the United States, a man who's previously referred to women as 'retarded', 'pathetic' and 'disgusting.' In 2022, a jury found that actor Johnny Depp had been defamed by an op-ed his former wife Amber Heard's had written on the topic of domestic violence, despite never naming his explicitly. During the trial, Heard accused Depp of being a 'monster', hitting her repeatedly during jealous drug-induced rages, breaking furniture, and at one point sexually assaulting her in what she described as a 'cavity search' for cocaine he believed she had hidden from him. The real jury in today's celebrity circus resides in the court of public opinion, and so long as you have social media vigilantes on-side, your case is secured.
There's an insidious conditioning that has kneaded itself into our implicit understanding of the world. Men can do just about anything and be believed, but when a woman does the slightest thing in a way perceived to be 'wrong', huge swathes of society will happily, greedily, joyously watch them suffer the consequences. The reality of the It Ends With Us drama has yet to be revealed, but several truths can exist in tandem. Blake Lively could've been wrong, Justin Baldoni could've been wrong, but without believing and rationalising that both of these could be very possible scenarios, and that victims don't always look the way we might be conditioned to believe they are, it is a step back collectively for women everywhere.
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