A Celebrity Beef For The Ages
Initial thoughts on Baldoni v Lively; the interiors resource I've been gatekeeping; and the perfect leopard print coat.
Greetings Spendthrifts - and Happy New Year!
Thank you so much to everyone who filled out last month’s reader survey (which is still open if you haven’t already). The results were very enlightening, not least because it turns out the vast majority of you did in fact come to this newsletter because of my books, journalism, podcast etc., and are very happy for me to include more writing in this newsletter (literally 99% of you answered ‘yes please’ to that question, which genuinely came as a surprise! I really thought you guys were just here for the clothes..)
So with that in mind, I plan to start including more writing in this newsletter - think opinions, cultural commentary and column-y pieces (I’ve always wanted a column) on whatever I’m finding interesting or notable. As always, I shall endeavour to earn my place in your inbox and make my emails worth your time - we all get enough of them as it is, and I don’t take it lightly that people welcome me into theirs.
And so, without further ado…
HERE’S EVERYTHING I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THE BLAKE LIVELY VS JUSTIN BALDONI FEUD
Okay so by now there’s pretty much zero chance you’re unaware of the celebrity feud that’s shaping up to be one of THEE juiciest celebrity dramas of 2025 (and I write that only one week into January). I am of course talking about the lawsuit Blake Lively recently filed against her It Ends With Us co-star/director Justin Baldoni, and the series of lawsuits, counterlawsuits, denials and general messiness wrought in its wake.
First off, can we all just agree that the timing of the suit was itself an excellent PR move? News of the drama broke in the New York Times only a few days before Christmas, just as people were logging off work and onto their phones for the holidays. I personally spent much of the holiday period texting various friends my increasingly unhinged theories about the drama and Googling various iterations of ‘Justin Baldoni manbun’ - heck, I even drafted several hundred words of this newsletter on Christmas Eve, which to my dismay/delight became increasingly obsolete as the days rolled by and the lawsuits and countersuits came pouring in. (Also please note the byline on that NYT article, Megan Twohey being one of the two journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017...Camp Lively were off to a flying start with that).
Lively’s suit (which is well worth a read) makes for pretty astonishing reading. I consider myself a fairly media literate person, but I was still stunned by some of the claims it made, specifically those concerning the media tactics publicists might employ to protect their clients. I’d never heard of the term ‘astroturfing’ before, although I understood it as a concept - I just assumed it was the sort of niche behaviour only dodgy fascist politicians and Elon Musk-types engaged in, rather than something mainstream Hollywood entertainment publicists put in their new biz pitch decks. The breeziness with which Baldoni’s PRs discussed potentially “burying” Lively’s reputation using online manipulation makes me think those strategies are probably far more common than we all realise.
(Can I also say that it is INSANE how much of their plans Baldoni’s team put in writing?? People talk about meetings that could’ve been an email, but these are some emails that should’ve been meetings!)
That said, it’s still unclear to what extent Justin Baldoni’s team were in fact responsible for the negative press Blake Lively garnered during the It Ends With Us press tour, and how much of that was generated by her own goofy missteps. (I am inclined to believe her claims of inappropriate on-set behaviour by Baldoni. The evidence he’s offered as proof of his innocence on that count is extremely thin, to say the least - and the fact none of their other cast members seemed to really fuck with him even before this lawsuit became public feels pretty material).
Baldoni has so far responded to Blake Lively’s complaint by suing the New York Times - an organisation that hasn’t lost a libel case since the 1960s - for $250 MILLION, claiming their article was inaccurate and defamatory, and alleging that the paper essentially colluded with Blake Lively to besmirch his honour which… okay! You can read his lawsuit here: it includes a semiotic analysis of the upside down smiley emoji that has truly tickled me, as well as an assertion by Baldoni that Ryan Reynolds (i.e. Blake Lively’s husband) berated him “perhaps intentionally, as other celebrity friends were coming in and out of their penthouse”, which I find to be such a telling detail to have included. It smacks of someone harbouring insecurities about his celebrity status, and IMO sheds light on some of the undercurrents at the heart of this saga.
Days after filing that lawsuit, Justin Baldoni’s lawyer revealed that he also intends to sue Blake Lively “into oblivion”, having previously stated that he is “more than willing to take every single text message that exists out there, lay them out, put them on a website for the world to see, have them see the truth and determine the truth for themselves” (to which I immediately thought well let’s bloody have them then you tease).
Meanwhile, Justin Baldoni is also being sued by his former publicist Stephanie Jones (along with his current publicist Jennifer Abel) for breach of contract, having allegedly cut short their year-long agreement to skip off into the proverbial sunset with Abel, who is supposedly the one responsible for orchestrating the whole anti-Blake smear campaign. You can read that lawsuit in full here.
I’ve read a few articles speculating that Baldoni’s former publicist Stephanie Jones (i.e. the one who is now suing him) may have willingly handed over the texts and emails that have landed him in hot water, per the LA Times report below:
Some attorneys speculated that the subpoena had the hallmarks of a so-called “friendly subpoena,” where one side is seeking records from another party, who can use the subpoena as legal cover. Put another way, the owner of the records may want to give them up, and the subpoena allows them to say they were forced to comply.
It is notable that Blake Lively isn’t (yet?) suing Stephanie Jones, given the entire shitshow went down while Baldoni was still being represented by her PR firm.
If you’re still keeping up - well done. The whole saga is a rich, rich text, though I’m trying to resist the urge to offer any conclusive analysis about it given how many unknowns remain. Even as I type this, someone, somewhere is probably drafting a lawsuit against one of the involved parties.
From the outside though, this situation basically feels like a very expensive exercise in reputation management on both sides, from two people who are constitutionally incapable of taking an L - not to mention a pretext to (selectively) leak screenshots of texts and emails that seemingly damn the other side. The legal documents both parties have filed so far seem written as much for the benefit of the general public as for the legal bodies who will eventually adjudicate their merits - Blake Lively’s lawyers actually released a statement saying “while we will not litigate this matter in the press, we do encourage people to read Ms. Lively’s complaint in its entirety,” which to me seems a wholly contradictory sequence of words. Everyone involved in this is very much fighting in the court of public opinion - why else would Stephanie Jones (Baldoni’s former publicist - the one who is now suing him and his current publicist Jennifer Abel... keep up!) include screenshots of disparaging texts ABEL had sent about BALDONI in the lawsuit she’s filing against the pair of them?
I’m no lawyer so I might be wrong on this but - those texts don’t seem all that material to the thrust of Jones’ case. To me they read like someone who’s tryna get her lick back against a former employee that a) allegedly stole a client and slagged her off to industry peers and b) has dragged her into an unGodly mess that’s left her scrambling to placate one of Hollywood’s most powerful couples. (Jones denies having had any involvement in or knowledge of the anti-Blake smear campaign plan, despite Abel being an employee of hers at the time said plan was allegedly executed. A likely story!)
I’m also fascinated by the logic being employed by both Baldoni and Lively’s legal teams, which implies that the leaked texts and emails (while very revealing and damning and all of that stuff) necessarily paint a complete picture of whatever transpired, either on set or afterwards. Baldoni in particular has presented texts he sent to others as definitive proof of what transpired on set, as though it’s impossible for someone to misrepresent (deliberately or otherwise) a situation in their texts to a third party. I could text my mum right now and say “btw yesterday Dad promised to give me a million pounds” - doesn’t mean that actually happened.
I wouldn’t be surprised if either or both parties (though my money’s on Baldoni) are quietly documenting proceedings on camera for the eventual documentary drop in a year or two, as a way of further spinning the narrative.
I think we can all agree though on the moral of this story, which is that Colleen Hoover urgently needs to be deplatformed, as without her books NONE of this would have happened.
Also in this month’s issue:
The Shoppies: everything I’ve got my eye on at the moment, including the perfect leopard coat.
The interiors resource I’ve been gatekeeping (and will continue to, soz - this one’s for paid subscribers only)
Reading: about the (supposed) demise of the “performatively messy womanhood” literary trend; and a therapist discusses how her private life being made public affected her patient relationships.
Watching: a beautiful period(ish) drama that moved me to tears.
Let’s go.