“She’s really giving throwback oblivious mean girl, it’s kind of amazing.” “Omg her saying she got her husband involved, she is SO that woman.” I would love to tell you that these comments, written this summer about Blake Lively, the lead actor in domestic violence drama It Ends With Us, were posted on Reddit by some anonymous misogynistic troll.

Lively had made what looked like tone-deaf promotional appearances to push her haircare and drinks line alongside the film. It was revealed that she had had a scene rewritten by her husband, actor/director Ryan Reynolds, and that she took control over the final cut, which also featured a song by her best friend, Taylor Swift. Everything from Lively’s conduct to her predilection for florals seemed like fair game, spawning a vast amount of negative discourse and tanking her reputation. But the comments above were texts written by me, made in my most active group chat.

On Saturday, Lively filed a complaint with the California civil rights department against Justin Baldoni, both the film’s director and her male co-lead, producer Jamey Heath, production company Wayfarer Studios and its public relations/crisis management retinue, alleging that they actively sought to harm her reputation to pre-empt any possibility of her going public with an HR complaint she made during the film’s making.

Alleging the violation of physical boundaries, sexual and inappropriate comments and the absence of intimacy coordination, the court filing is an astonishing read. It claims that Heath showed Lively unsolicited footage of his wife giving birth as they filmed a scene where her character does so; that Baldoni’s “best friend” was drafted in to play the obstetrician-gynaecologist in that scene, in which Lively was “nearly nude” in front of dozens of crew; that Baldoni talked to her about non-consensual sexual encounters; that he wept in her trailer over reactions to paparazzi photos from shooting that called her old and unattractive, prompting her to remind him that in those scenes her character had just been abused by her husband, and that she should look........

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