Spin Class Interview: Crisis Comms and the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni Saga

Two crisis comms experts on the biggest celebrity PR battle of 2025

Obsessed with the legal/PR of it all. Still haven’t seen the movie/read the book.

If we’ve hung out in person during the last six months, there’s a solid chance we’ve talked about the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni PR and legal wars. For those new to this drama, 1) what rock have you been living under, and does it host weekend guests, and 2) this saga = truly one of the reasons I started Spin Class. If you need a primer, from The Cut’s running summary:

In August, It Ends With Us arrived amid a flurry of press-tour drama, suggesting a messy rift between the movie’s star, Blake Lively, and her co-star and director, Justin Baldoni. By the time the film had managed to pull in $345 million globally, tensions seemed to settle — that is, until December, when Lively filed a legal complaint with the California Civil Rights Department. She accused Baldoni, his production studio Wayfarer, his business partners, and several publicists of mounting a retaliatory smear campaign against her after she complained about sexual harassment on set.

The New York Times published a report based on her claims, co-bylined by prominent Me Too reporter Megan Twohey and peppered with text messages that appeared to show Baldoni and his PR team conspiring to tank Lively’s reputation. On their face, these texts looked damning, but then Baldoni came forward with a lawsuit of his own. Suing the Times for defamation, he alleged that Lively’s team had doctored its supposed evidence, covering up a plot by the actress to tarnish his good name and stage a “hostile takeover” of the film. A few hours later, Lively officially sued Baldoni for sexual harassment and retaliation, he sued her back, and now the two are now locked in a protracted legal battle — and a war of reputations — that may well go to trial.

And that doesn’t even cover the part where Baldoni’s lawyers tried to depose Taylor Swift, gaaaah.

One of our Spin Class pillars is that “serious” professionals like policymakers, politicians, and corporations ignore pop culture at their peril. Ignore pop culture and celebrity gossip at your peril, my fellow nerds: it’s where our modern myths are being shaped in real time.

[Stefon voice] The Lively-Baldoni case has everything: hundreds of millions of dollars in film and publishing IP, #MeToo and how power is held/wielded, legacy media vs. influencers, labor conditions and rights, and so, so much more. It’s about archetypes and heuristics (aka mental shortcuts), how flacks and reporters shape stories for audience consumption, but also how audiences are no longer content with being in passive receiving mode. And it’s unfolding amidst massive political, cultural, and media upheavals, warping the lenses through which audiences are processing every twist.

We can’t possibly cover all of this in one newsletter, but got a good start with fellow strategic crisis and communications pro Anne Marie Malecha, CEO of Dezenhall Resources. Anne Marie is soon launching a new podcast called “Reputation Nation” whose first several episodes will go deep on the comms aspects of the Lively-Baldoni PR war, and kindly gave us a preview, including:

• Why Lively’s NYT exclusive announcing her lawsuit wound up backfiring;

• How #MeToo narratives have evolved, and why this case plays so differently in 2025 than it would have in 2017;

• The Victim-Villain-Vindicator triad (and why it’s not static);

• Possible endgames, and how comms/the information space can help force a legal end point; and

• Lessons for policy and corporate comms teams.

This newsletter is going out free to all current subscribers but we’re going to paywall some of the specific recommendations on the post, so this is a great opportunity to upgrade your Spin Class subscription. A Spin Class subscription is only $5/month, less than I paid for a regular drip coffee after school drop-off today.¹ Also, I’ve hired a part-time editor to help with interviews like this, and your subscriptions go directly towards paying her a fair market wage. THANK YOU!

Emily: Tell me a little bit about your podcast that you’re launching. Who’s your audience, where are they, and what’s the impact that you want to have on them?

Anne Marie: The podcast is called “Reputation Nation.” My co-host, attorney Stacy Bratcher, and I look at the concept of reputation from the communication and legal sides. And there are so many cases, particularly the Baldoni-Lively case, that have gotten people interested in this topic in a way that they maybe hadn't been before.

Don’t get me wrong, I love celebrity gossip. But our goal is to give folks actionable insights. “Ok this is happening in this case - how do I apply [lessons] to a situation my company is in?” “What are some key takeaways I can do from a planning perspective, so I don’t find myself in this situation?” Or, “if I do find myself in this situation, I'm ready with a few things at hand.”

You’ve been in DC for most of your career. Why choose something from the entertainment world for your first case study?

[The Baldoni-Lively case] is a great case study for [crisis and reputation management] work. Most policy issues, if you’re trying to change a piece of legislation, or there’s an industry that’s being regulated differently - those are months-long efforts, if not years. This is happening in far shorter order.

It's also taken the legacy media and the new media by storm. We haven’t seen a corporate case do that in recent history in the same way. It’s also very approachable. The sides are very clear - who’s for you, who’s against you, how that’s working.

One of really interesting things about this case is that it started off in a very “traditional media” way: Blake Lively’s team secured a big splashy New York Times exclusive with Megan Twohey, the reporter who broke the Harvey Weinstein story that kicked off the #MeToo movement. They’re focused on creating that first cannonball moment, less so the second- and third-order waves that are going to come from that big splash.

In this case, I think it was a very deliberate choice to go to the New York Times and to go to the specific reporter, because they needed to have some credibility in the arguments that were being made. The receipts, as we’re calling them now, that they went to the NYT - I would love to get my hands on the totality of what was presented to Megan. And, not to discredit any journalists or any outlet, but I think this story was shaped in a way that was favorable to the Lively camp. That’s her team doing their job.

It is still important, if you are introducing a story into the world, that there is something for folks to point to. And there is nothing better, frankly, than a Washington Post or a New York Times piece. A legacy media outlet that has a link, that has social, that has all the things that we still believe journalistic outlets have - or at least some of us do, I don’t know that that’s a universal belief anymore. But it matters.

However, once the story is out there, giving it life of its own is the entire point of a lot of these influence efforts. That doesn’t necessarily need the participation of legacy media in the same way it used to, and we’ve seen that here.

[So] when we saw the second and third shots across the bow and saw more context, and then the rebuttal from the Baldoni camp, putting more information and context started to create a very different picture. I’ve certainly seen this before in my career: someone’s released a snippet of information. We, internally, have got the whole piece. But for legal reasons we couldn’t release it, or it wasn’t the right strategic choice, or the timing wasn’t right. In [the Baldoni-Lively case], adding more information in the world, was a game- changer in how people saw the groups at play here.

Let’s talk more about the receipts that the NYT published. This seemed to be an effort by the Lively camp to try to give fodder to influencers - to put raw information out, and try to shape that second wave of commentary or influencer analysis. Do you think that’s accurate, and if so, do you think it worked as they intended?

Yes, and I think it did work as it was intended, until the pieces around the original receipts were provided. If you look at just two text messages alone, but not the five text messages [preceding or following] them, you get a very different picture. That’s probably true for anyone’s text history.

Thinking through the scenario planning that the communications and legal teams likely did together is, I’ve asked myself a hundred times ,“how did they not anticipate that that would come back?” Or that the Baldoni camp wouldn’t necessarily release the raw footage of some of the things that they claimed maybe looked differently than if you saw the entire thing.

Can you talk more about that interplay between legacy/traditional media and new media? How this case first came to public attention, how it’s evolved, and what the respective Lively and Baldoni camps have done with this case in the court of public opinion (as well as the court of law).

You can’t just operate with the idea of, “well, let me put out a statement to a couple reporters I know.” Content creators or influencers can move a lot faster than the standard editorial structure of a legacy media outlet. It’s making folks change the game. Journalists who trained for decades are now turning to more influencer-like tactics, because that’s where people are getting their information.

One of the interesting things for me is how we’re getting into these really niche audiences. I think that’s where this case has really thrived. Nancy Grace is what Nancy Grace is. I remember watching the OJ Simpson trial and being fascinated by that. But now, that can happen on a micro level. Are you really focused on the entertainment law piece of it? Are you focused on how these companies are playing with each other, and what that means for future projects in the entertainment industry? There’s something for everybody.

Then there’s the layer of all the amplification. Both sides have used influencers and new media, as well as legacy media through traditional channels like publicists, to move the story and sway public opinion.

Every time there’s an article that comes out about this case, the first assumption should be that it is not organic. It was pitched. And that’s been something that’s been happening in policy communications for decades as well. I think you have written a Substack about that, how you should assume whenever you see something that it came from somewhere, not necessarily that it was organic.

So, what does that mean? We’re seeing a shift in the weight of where information comes from and how it’s looked at. Journalistic standards of what gets printed in an [legacy media] outlet that has a legal department and is concerned about defamation are very different than [for] Jane Doe content creator, [who] is putting out information that is their opinion.

As an aside, I am curious about what’s going to happen from a regulatory perspective about that, in terms of constitutional rights and those [defamation and standards] processes. But that’s a question for another day.

Let’s talk about the #MeToo dynamic in which this is being released. To what degree, in cases like this, are comms professionals and legal professionals mindful of the broader narratives in which they’re unfurling a particular story? If you’re working with a client who is doing something zeitgeist-adjacent, or is going to be interpreted through a particular lens, how do you think about that balance?

First, I hate that any of this conversation comes from a place of, “well, do we not believe her?” I don’t like that in the modern era as a woman, as a human.

The moment is everything. And “meeting the moment” is a phrase I use more often than not in explaining the context of how we’re approaching a strategy for a potential client, whatever the case is. It’s not 2018 anymore, when we were at the height of the #MeToo movement. It’s 2025, and a lot has shifted.

It’s a pendulum swing. It goes hard one way, hard the other way, and then we sort of come back into the middle. We have this shift in understanding of how some of these situations have happened in the past. We’re not at the peak of them anymore. I don’t think this case would be treated the same way it is being treated now as it would have been in 2018. That could arguably be a miscalculation by the Lively camp.

From working on Capitol Hill, I know you have to check your own beliefs and biases at the door. You also have to consider the broader audiences of who you're talking to. There has been in both politics, policy and entertainment, this sort of insular perception of audiences around you. Not everyone is an East or West Coast elite. Not everyone is paying attention to the ins and outs of policy.

This idea that you can operate with just one audience is okay in certain circumstances. If you're dealing with a Washington policy elite case, fine. But if you're looking at a broader public, you really need to understand who you're speaking to, and then you need to speak to the lowest common denominator of that group.

When I'm working with a legal team, I’m often focused on the interplay between the facts of the case and the heuristics of the case. So there's the particular facts that exist that we all internally have access to. And then there's the shortcuts that audiences with busy lives and their own priorities, are going to use to process this story. They're going to say this is about men vs. women, or this is a David and Goliath story about power imbalance, or this is about an individual vs. a system. They have these tropes that they sort of slot into.

What do you think about the heuristics that each side is trying to use, and have they done so successfully? How have those evolved?

Heuristics are where the miscalculations happened. You can't really blame one factor on that. I'm sure it's a compilation of things. You also have to realize how any case, whatever it is, evolves as you're in it with whatever moments are happening around it at the same time.

We're in a time right now where the onslaught of information is the greatest I've ever seen. If we thought clickbait was a thing before, holy cow, [now] you're barely reading a headline. So, these shortcuts really matter to audiences.

My sense is, Baldoni’s team probably had a fear of, “okay, I'm going to be framed as the guy that's the worst thing in the world, and I need to be ready to address that.” And that wasn't the feeling that came right away. I think there was that wave, but then there was this sort of counter-wave very quickly. And then, they really launched their counterpunch.

I think that Lively's camp wanted some things to be true, that are not necessarily true, about how people receive information. I think Baldoni’s team saw the reaction to that and shifted their strategy accordingly. I don't think that Baldoni’s team had a master plan to say, “okay, she's going to do this. We're going to do all these things now.” I think they saw the reaction and they adjusted accordingly.

How have you assessed their timing of their reactive movements?

The Baldoni’s camp reactive movement of filing the suit against the New York Times in New York as their first legal shot across the bow was brilliant. Because if you want to take the victim shaming component out of it, they've removed that. They went after the outlet that published it, as opposed to the person.

There have been subsequent stories and subsequent actions since then that go into the more personal or the companies behind them, but I think that was a brilliant way to play it. It gave them the opportunity to say all the things that they needed to say without attempting to get into the mud, so to speak.

The back-and-forths of legal filings have been entertaining to watch. The calls for gag orders here are hilarious because they all want them, but they're all going out to the press. Whether people want to believe that or not, that's happening. This information is getting fed to influencers and to reporters, and that's how this game works.

I think about the end game a lot: when is this going to end, and what will the ending look like? If I were in either camp, I would now be thinking, “we're running into high dollar legal bills that are not - there's no end in sight.”

They're also in the phases of discovery. You've seen the stories of, are the other famous folks in the Lively orbit in particular going to be deposed? I think that's going to potentially change how we see some of these next steps. Because I guarantee you, Taylor Swift and Hugh Jackman's press folks don't want them anywhere near this. And I think there was potentially an element of calling the Lively camp’s bluff that they wouldn't do that. But Baldoni’s team is.

The Taylor Swift of it all definitely pushed it into another echelon of PR shenanigans and, frankly, public attention that I don't know that it would have had without that particular nexus.

But both camps have toggled between these big, who-are-we-now sweeping cultural tropes and attention-grabbing details. I've not even seen the movie, but feel like I have a visual of Lively having to act out a birth scene with an open set and no protective covering. That's a very powerful image to place in someone's mind.

And again, there may well be the facts of the case, but there's also no denying that anecdotes and moments like this play emotionally on an audience. How do you think about creating characters and moments in a communication strategy like this?

Anne Marie: My initial reaction to your question is to go a different way than your question.

Please!

I watched this movie. I would have never watched this movie if it weren't for the [PR and legal] case. But I felt I had to in order to be able to talk about it. And I didn't read the books. People I know that have read the books said they didn't love the movie that much, and people who didn't read the books thought the movie was actually pretty well done.

But I had no sense [from the movie] that there was turmoil on that set. You don't get that from what I saw - at least, that was my feeling. I have seen that, though, in other films where there is tension between actors, and you know about that. You see the art, the piece, the product, looks different. So either my own perception wasn't impacted enough by it, or they did a good enough job [in] the cutting room to make it look that way.

There is a Machiavellian angle here: is all of this to get people to watch the movie, and are they going to do a second one and this is all part of it? People are going to say, “You're a conspiracy theorist,” but I've seen crazier things.

Now, will you ask your question again, and I'll actually answer it?

No, it's a fascinating answer. My original question was about the toggle between sort of macro tropes and individual details that make characters come alive. That’s felt very constructed to me on both sides. And I don't mean that as a criticism, just a description. Clearly some very savvy comms pros are at play. And I wonder what you think about the lesson there.

One of the first things we do with any client is say “tell me as much information as you can.” As a communications professional, I have to understand your entire body of evidence. They do, but in the days, weeks, hours, you get all these different nuggets that, if you had two hours ago, you might have thought about something differently.

I don't know what the behind the scenes looked like here, but whoever [on both teams] got all the information had enough of a base of knowledge to know that, “okay, we have this they don't,” or “we're going to be framed this way. The counter to that is this.” I think that was very carefully crafted. We don't always get the opportunity to do that in the work that we do.

They also had a unique element in the fact that there were thousands of hours of raw film footage around a lot of this, to which they had access. If you have a narrative in your head, and you can play, “Person A can say this, Person B can say that, Item A can give me this….” you can see them constructing a story from that raw material. They're almost acting like how I think journalists have written stories for years, in my experience.

When I was on the Hill, I’d get a call from a reporter asking me what my boss thought about something, and I knew I was literally just being inserted into paragraph four [because] they're looking for a very specific quote. I feel like these comms teams have done that with the narratives, and they're doing it with their legal filings too, which is a really important point. The easiest way to make private information public is to put it in a legal filing that can then be reported on, whether by legacy media or a creator.

That also acknowledges the journalist’s imperative, which is to break news. They can't just describe something that already exists and expect to get eyeballs or attention for it. They get attention by being the first to write about something new.

So, creating events that allow people to comment on them, to write about them, is going to be a hugely important part of any communication strategy. Whether it's through legal filings or disclosures of new information, or revealed-for-the-first-time behind-the-scenes footage, you have to create those moments for people to react to. You can't just put it all out in a massive buffet and let people pick what they will as they're hungry.

The Baldoni-Lively case is a master class in the slow drip of catalyst creation. We're still talking about this case, what, almost year later from the [movie PR tour and surrounding rumors]? And we're going to continue talking about it, because there has been a steady drumbeat of pieces of information that change how people are thinking about the case. It's brilliant.

I want to talk about the Baldoni camp and their work in two camps. They’ve done a lot with the creator economy, but have also also leaned into some traditional news outlets like TMZ and the Daily Mail: outlets that are more likely to run with anti-#MeToo narratives.

But they haven't overtly gone full right-wing manosphere, which I think is interesting. They have allowed some of that to flourish, and I'm sure there's been some behind the scenes. But the legal team doesn't go on Joe Rogan. They don't talk with Theo Von. They’re not encouraging the red-pilled parts of the internet to do this overtly.

There are double standards in the world that exist on how folks are treated in the center-right media, particularly the new media, the Joe Rogan shows of the world, that's not universal. So the way that the President is treated in those conversations isn't necessarily the same for any other person.

Now, I think we're seeing more of a shift to an openness to these long-form conversations. In a legal battle, a long-form conversation with a principal is the scariest thing you could possibly consider. So taking Joe Rogan as an example, specifically putting Justin Baldoni in that chair, is…

Non-starter.

Exactly. That's why we've seen the legal team going out there [in some of these spaces]. I think they've taken advantage of that and moved as close to the line as possible.

Now, the choice of lawyers is important here. There are lawyers that are great in front of a camera, and there are lawyers that are not. If you've got a lawyer that knows what the lines are, that can do some of that moderating in real time, you'll see that.

I do think they are smart enough to understand that this case is not going to be won or lost in middle America. It's still being fought in New York and California. Most of the people who reach out to me about the Lively-Baldoni case are women. They are educated and interested in our field. And they're watching it both with an interest in entertainment, and also what I call a “political science lens” of analyzing the case and how people are reacting to it. So I think the Baldoni camp knows that keeping women on their side, or at least not having an adversarial position right away, is really important. Going on hard-right media that is perceived as potentially misogynistic doesn't help.

The second part of Team Baldoni’s strategy I’d love to discuss is their parallels with how state actors who push disinformation use tactics to push various narratives that are, if not actively advantageous to them, that are harmful for their adversaries. I'm thinking here of like the Ben Nimmo model of the four Ds of disinformation: Distort, dismay, distract and dismiss.

Where the objective is not trying to advance a single agenda, but rather introducing noise and mess that muddies your opponent, who is trying to push a single message, you maybe force a draw. Or, even if they win in some capacity, the fight is so messy that people will look at it and say, “yeah, but did anyone actually win?” That seems to be, at least tactically, a fair amount of what they're doing. What are your thoughts on that?

I think they're all playing the villain-victim-vindicator construct very interestingly. I would say that the victim and the villain have shifted multiple times. And the vindicator ends up, in most cases, being the media, whether it's legacy, new media, these audiences around it.

Before we go on with your answer, can you actually define that triad for audiences?

In every story and construct that has ever been, there's what we call the three V's. There's a Victim - so someone that is a sympathetic player that you should essentially feel bad for. There is a Villain - usually someone that is doing something wrong to the victim in some capacity. For example, a big bad corporation is hurting a little consumer.

And then there's a Vindicator. Sometimes the Vindicator is a regulator who's protecting that little consumer, or it's the media that broke a story, or it's the one little person that's risen up to create a movement, a grassroots movement, that then mobilizes people.

[The Three Vs] is a construct you have to think about whenever you're going public with a narrative. “How am I going to be painted? How do I want to be painted or reframed?” And then what are the levers that you use to work that triad, because it can shift. It's not necessarily static.

The Baldoni camp were reacting to something the Lively camp made public. So inherently, it's up to them to do that shift. How would you assess their progress?

The original triad was Lively as the victim, the New York Times as the vindicator and Baldoni as the villain. I believe Baldoni’s countersuits, and the subsequent comms piece after, didn't necessarily swing him directly to being the victim, but it made people question Lively being the victim. That is success, to an extent.

One of the biggest things people have to determine in these cases is “what’s your ultimate objective and what's ultimately achievable?” Because completely shifting the narrative on its head is probably not going to happen. There are some people that probably still think Justin Baldoni is not the greatest guy in the world, and frankly, that's okay to the Justin Baldoni camp. He doesn't need to have everyone love him. But muddying the water is a good thing. Making it confusing is a good thing, and I think that is what they're all doing a pretty good job of, in eliciting other folks to the fights.

Lively and Baldoni are motivated adversaries. They each have very clear stakes. But if I'm discrediting or distorting what somebody says, even if it's commenting on a post that says, “Who cares, this is the most uninteresting thing in the world,” that has an impact.

I've long told clients: think about the 80-20 rule. They'll see a story and say, “that's the worst thing I've ever seen.” And my response is, “well, 80% of it is right. 20% of it has no bearing on us. So is it the worst thing that you've ever seen?” Or we have, let’s call it a surrogate, that puts something out that they talk about, something they like that isn't necessarily related to the issue at hand. Fine!

You don't need people to all be out there going, “Blake Lively is the best!” “Justin Baldoni is the greatest thing that's ever happened to the world!” None of that is helpful. That looks orchestrated. All of this looks organic, whether you want to believe it or not, and questioning the intention behind information is exactly what state and non-state actors have done from a propaganda machine for time eternal.

The astroturfed appearance of it is crucial to its success. It cannot be something that smells of coordinated, inauthentic behavior or obvious PR machinations.

The term “astroturf” really bugs me, because that's just politics. That is what political campaigns have been since their inception - certainly since I've been in them. And, yeah, if you don't like it, fight back against it. Now listen, there are cases where that's not fair, and so obviously there's nuance. But that's why people like us exist.

Shifting a little bit back to our world. A lot of people who read Spin Class are Washington people - they're policy creatures like us. They come from a white paper world, not from a tabloid world. What are the key lessons that “serious people” need to know from this case?