We love stories that humanize villains. Just look at the box office successes of Maleficent, Cruella, and most recently Wicked. Each of these films takes an infamous villain and makes her sympathetic, demonstrating her humanity and the injustice that led to her inaccurate portrayal as a villain. But what happens when these stories get reversed in the real world? What happens when a princess gets inaccurately portrayed as the villain?
When Blake Lively began marketing her new movie, It Ends with Us, there was a perceptible shift in public attitudes against her. A woman that just a few months prior was known for being a generally respected actress and fashionista was suddenly conniving and arrogant. She was insensitive and more interested in promoting her new movie and its floral patterns or her hair care line than addressing the film's underlying themes of domestic violence.
And then there was Justin Baldoni, the male lead and primary romantic counterpart to Lively’s character in the film. While online chatter flourished with critiques of Lively’s insensitivity, Baldoni was the quiet hero. He stood alone as a woman's rights advocate overshadowed by the ignorance of his own female co-star.
This narrative would prevail for months, until a lawsuit by Lively and an accompanying profile by the New York Times shattered the straightforward tale of a woman who flew too close to the sun and the man she was dragging down with her. It revealed that Lively had complained to the studio producing the film about sexual harassment coming from Justin Baldoni, and the matter had been quietly settled during the production of the movie. But Baldoni got scared, and hired a PR firm to preemptively discredit her in case anything got out. As his publicist told a crisis manager, “He wants to feel like she can be buried.” And so they buried her.
What has since followed has been countless lawsuits and counternarratives amidst an already contentious news cycle. I’m not going to try to tell you who is right and who is wrong. But I will say that regardless of how you feel about the situation, or if you even care, an important revelation has emerged as a result of this mess. There are PR firms that are capable of shifting public perception in ways that are almost undetectable in real-time. The organized destruction of another person that feels organic, and yet never even stood trial in the court of public opinion.
Our capacity to recognize truth matters, even if that truth feels like meaningless tabloid fodder, because people matter. People, and our accurate perception of them, are the primary engines for democracy and our very capacity to live a happy life. We make decisions about who to vote for, who to associate with, who to work for, and who inspires us based on our understanding of their character. If one only needs to pay the right price to shift the wind of public opinion by silently manipulating the digital world, then what does that mean for our relationship with reality? What does it mean for our elections? It doesn’t bode well for our country if, instead of debating or reforming policy, candidates spend more time and money altering our social media algorithms.
We can even look beyond politics to see why this matters. For the average person, two of the most important influences on your life will be your job and your spouse. In today’s digital age, our online reputations are our primary mechanisms for vetting whether or not someone is worth our time. Companies will scour your LinkedIn and digital footprint to determine if you ought to be interviewed or hired. We vet each other constantly using details on dating apps to find social media accounts and expose red flags before we invest too much into a new relationship. As tools increasingly become available to hide and distort truth in the digital sphere, we need to be aware of how they are used and push back against them. This means paying attention as these systems are exposed and recognizing how they are used as technology continues to evolve.
If the case of Blake Lively is any indication, no one is invincible in our new age of digital distortion–especially women. If Mrs. Lively’s case is to be believed (and after sorting through countless articles and legal documents, I do believe it is) then she will be spending the next several months to years in a messy legal battle solely because a man got scared when she called him out for workplace sexual harassment. This is not a new phenomenon. Women like Meghan Markle, Taylor Swift, Amber Heard, and Monica Lewinsky have all faced undeserved backlash in the face of combating injustice or sexism. But it is getting harder to detect in real time. For the sake of our society, our democracy, our jobs, and our relationships, it is critical that the mechanisms for deception continue to be exposed and regulated.
