‘It's the misogyny slop ecosystem!' How Candace Owens and the American right declared war on Blake Lively

The Guardian

06-05-2025

Rarely has a film been so un-presciently named as It Ends With Us. This domestic abuse drama was released in August 2024 and was a huge success, earning over $350m worldwide. But that was only the beginning. What has followed is an offscreen conflagration that is not only threatening to consume the careers of the film's lead actors, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, but continues to set social media and the entertainment industry ablaze. We've still got a long way to go before it really ends – a trial is set for March 2026.
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It's easy to see why this case attracted so much attention initially – everyone loves a good celebrity dust-up – but having begun as just another Hollywood feud destined to be adapted into a prestige miniseries a decade hence, the Lively/Baldoni saga is morphing into something larger and possibly more ominous.
For one thing, the case drags the dark arts of celebrity public relations into the spotlight like never before. For another, it has attracted an inordinate amount of attention from rightwing political figures in the US. Combine these two trends and we are seeing a disturbing blurring of lines – between genuine and manufactured 'public opinion', and between celebrity and political discourse.
The ins and outs of the saga itself are almost too labyrinthine to follow. In a nutshell, Lively alleges that Baldoni sexually harassed her during the making of It Ends With Us (in the story, Lively falls in love with an abusive man, played by Baldoni). He alleges that Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, tried to take control of the film, which Baldoni also directed and co-produced. In a flurry of suits and countersuits, each side has alleged misconduct, and accused the other of orchestrating a 'smear campaign' against them.
Many Hollywood figures and organisations have come out in support of Lively, but America's right wing has taken an inordinate interest in the case, and is overwhelmingly siding with Baldoni. Fox News, for example, has run nearly 80 stories on the case on its website this year. Joe Rogan mentioned it on his podcast with comedian Brendan Schaub, accusing Lively and Reynolds of 'trying to take over the movie'. And then there's Candace Owens, who has discussed the case at least 25 times this year on her YouTube show and podcast, eagerly responding to each new development in granular detail. Owens' allegiance is unambiguous: 'She has proven herself not to be a kind person,' she said of Lively in January. 'And that's largely due to the fact that she is a modern feminist.'
By focusing on such ostensibly apolitical celebrity content, Owens has boosted her following considerably, appealing to viewers (predominantly female) who may have little interest in rightwing politics, or knowledge of her more extreme beliefs, which range from downplaying the Holocaust, to appearing with Kanye West in a 'White Lives Matter' T-shirt, alleging that Brigitte Macron, wife of French president, Emmanuel, is a man, and calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a 'welfare queen'. Now we are seeing articles headlined How Candace Owens Is Uniting Conservatives and Liberals with her 'It Ends With Us' Coverage – although that appeared in conservative-leaning women's magazine Evie, whose coverage has also been largely anti-Lively.
Another rightwing commentator with a newfound interest in the case is Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News presenter. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Kelly made Lively/Baldoni the central topic of her on-stage presentation. She described Lively as 'an avatar for leftist overreach', and attempted to tie the case to a broader rightwing grievance narrative: 'You've been gaslit to high heaven every time you've picked up a newspaper in the United States, every time you've turned on CNN … you have been the victim of overbearing and controlling leftists who think they are the final arbiters of what's best for you and your life.'
In the same way the 'manosphere' has used male-oriented sports and fitness content as a gateway into far-right politics, some are seeing this new celebrity focus as a way to draw women down the same path – and calling it 'the womanosphere'. Taking to heart Andrew Breitbart's famous dictum that 'politics is downstream from culture', the right's goal has long been to 'take back the culture', as self-tagged #ConservativeInfluencer Abby Shapiro (sister of rightwing commentator Ben) proclaimed in a 2020 YouTube video titled 'Conservative women, it's our time.'
'I used to think that that sounded really silly,' says feminist YouTuber Ophie Dokie of Shapiro's message, 'and then fast forward to 2025 and that's who people are listening to about things like Hollywood pop-culture gossip, which I did assume, until very recently, would be a more liberal conversation. It truly is not any more. It does feel very dominated by Conservatives, and intentionally so.'
It's not just rightwing figures weighing in against Lively; everyone seems to be at it. Go on X or YouTube or TikTok and you'll be served up an endless stream of videos discussing and analysing the case in forensic detail, overwhelmingly from an anti-Lively point of view. Content creators have been in a feeding frenzy over the case: there are celebrity gossip 'tea channels', body language experts, AI-powered pseudo-journalism – all supported by an army of 'mommy sleuths', laptop detectives whose examination of every nuance of the case often verges on conspiracy theory. Is Lively out for revenge because she was secretly in love with Baldoni? Is Lively's new comms manager, Nick Shapiro, a former CIA agent, using 'black box tricks' to stifle negative stories? Did she burp and fart all the time on the set of Gossip Girl? Content scrutinising Baldoni's behaviour or background in similar detail is much harder to find.
All this activity has whipped up a maelstrom of clickbait: content creators, celebrity media and prominent public figures feeding off each other's output, recycling and regurgitating the same low-quality, primarily anti-woman information – all boosted by engagement-targeting social media algorithms. 'It's a perfect storm,' says Dokie. She calls it the 'misogyny slop ecosystem'.
As an example, she points to a clip followers of the Lively/Baldoni case will doubtless have seen several times: an interview Lively did while promoting a Woody Allen movie in 2016, in which she was judged to have been rude to Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa. Flaa says, 'Congrats on your little bump,' to Lively, who was pregnant at the time; 'Congrats on your little bump,' Lively replies to Flaa (who is not pregnant). 'The amount of people who have recirculated that clip and who have spoken about that specific interaction, and then they'll make 20, 30 minutes [of content] about it, and their audience will eat it up because they also thought she was really rude in that clip,' says Dokie. 'And it's like, if everybody wasn't recycling that clip, you wouldn't have known about it, because that happened 10 years ago.' Flaa, incidentally, is now selling 'Justice for Justin' T-shirts on her Etsy site.
'Probably misogyny slop has always existed,' Dokie says, citing figures such as Anita Hill or Monica Lewinsky who were vilified in the pre-digital media age. 'But I feel like around the time of the Depp v Heard trial, there was this real increase in social clout, almost, in making fun of women who are alleging abuse.'
All of this feels a long way from Lively's original complaint, which was that Baldoni was abusive towards her. When filming of It Ends With Us resumed after the actors' strikes, in January 2024, Lively only agreed to continue if Baldoni signed a 17–point agreement 'for the physical and emotional safety' of her and her team, according to a legal complaint she filed with the California Civil Rights Department. The conditions include: 'An intimacy coordinator must be present at all times when [Lively] is on set'; 'No discussions of personal experiences with sex or nudity, including as it relates to conduct with spouses or others'; 'No spontaneous improvising of any scenes involving physical touching, simulated sex, or nudity.' The filing also complained that Baldoni criticised Lively's weight and body, that he entered her dressing room without permission while she was breastfeeding, and, bizarrely, that he claimed he could speak to her dead father.
Baldoni responded with a $250m lawsuit against the New York Times, which broke the story, denying team Lively's claims and alleging that they had 'cherrypicked and altered communications stripped of necessary context'. The same day, Lively filed a federal lawsuit against team Baldoni, repeating the allegations made in her initial filing. In response to that, in January this year, Baldoni filed a $400m lawsuit against Lively, her publicist and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, accusing them of attempting to take control of the film, and detailing a long list of rebuttals and counter-allegations. It's become less a matter of 'he said, she said' than 'he sued, she sued'.
We've been here before, and not that long ago. In 2022, the entertainment world was gripped by another 'trial of the century': Johnny Depp v Amber Heard. The similarities are striking: a famous woman alleging abuse; a famous man counter-claiming victim status himself, and online opinion apparently coming down heavily in favour of the man. Hashtags such as #JusticeforJohnnyDepp and #AmberHeardIsAnAbuser dominated social media ahead of the US trial. (Depp initially sued the Sun newspaper in the UK for calling him a 'wife beater' and lost; he then sued Heard in the US for defamation, and won.)
Data experts later found that much of Depp's social media support was 'inorganic': spread by accounts that were suspiciously coordinated, prolific, recently activated and/or single-minded in their focus on Depp/Heard and nothing else. An in-depth investigation by Tortoise media suggested most of the anti-Heard activity was almost certainly manufactured, and pointed fingers at hired troll farms in the Middle East.
A similar picture is emerging with Lively/Baldoni, says Zhouhan Chen, founder of social media data analysts Information Tracer. Chen helped investigate the Depp/Heard online activity and he has been looking at Lively/Baldoni. In his analysis of the top 500 tweets on the subject, he found that support is overwhelmingly pro-Baldoni – sharing hashtags like #BlakeLivelyIsALiar and #JusticeForJustinBaldoni – 'by a ratio of 1:150 to 1:300, depending on which metric you use'. Judging by the age of the accounts and the number of times they have posted, 'I would estimate more than 80% of pro-Justin Baldoni posts are inorganic,' Chen says.
As well as the abuse allegations, Lively's legal complaint alleged 'a multi-tiered plan that Mr Baldoni and his team described as 'social manipulation' designed to 'destroy' Ms Lively's reputation', and that they 'created, planted, amplified, and boosted content designed to eviscerate Ms Lively's credibility'. The filing included text exchanges between Baldoni's publicist, Jennifer Abel, and crisis communications expert, Melissa Nathan. In one exchange, Abel writes to Nathan that Baldoni 'wants to feel like [Lively] can be buried'; Nathan replies, 'You know we can bury anyone.' In another exchange, commenting on a shift in online sentiment against Lively and for Baldoni, Nathan writes to Abel: 'And socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.' Baldoni's lawyers argue that the text exchanges 'lack critical context', and that Lively is using the same PR tactics she is accusing Baldoni's side of implementing.
Hollywood has always used PR and behind-the-scenes media influence to construct or dismantle a celebrity's reputation, says Prof Sarah Banet-Weiser of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who researches gender and media. 'But what happens in the current moment of unregulated, unmoderated digital media that circulates so fast and that has so many nodes? You can make it look like it's grassroots, when, in fact, it's very calculated and very intentional.'
From their supporters' perspectives, the victimhood is the other way round, and it is men like Depp and Baldoni who are being persecuted. One Hollywood crisis-management veteran described Lively/Baldoni to me as a 'come to Jesus moment': 'The #MeToo movement was brought on by liberal progressives who started a movement of 'let's believe all women, all the time, no matter what'. And slowly but surely, that shroud has been breaking.' (In fact, #MeToo's initial slogan was just 'believe women', not 'believe all women'.)
'This is a rightwing multimedia campaign that is about painting women as inherently lying and manipulative,' says Banet-Weiser. 'That's why people say, 'MeToo has gone too far', that's what Andrew Tate says, that's what radicalised young men say: that women are trying to manipulate them, they're liars, they make false accusations, their whole goal is to ruin men. That is the broader cultural context in which this case, and the media attention to this case, starts to make sense.'
While privileged white women like Lively and Heard might not be the ideal torch-bearers for all victims of abuse, in this context they are painted as avatars for 'modern feminism' and 'leftist overreach', all the better to contrast them with a more traditionalist, conservative ideal of femininity. 'That idea of some women being seen as manipulative and lying, and other women being seen as virtuous and responding to a higher calling of motherhood and family and husband, seems to characterise some of the gender cultural dynamics ​at play right now,' Banet-Weiser observes. 'This demarcation of ideal femininity, at least in the US, is rooted in a very particular reactionary, authoritarian politics.'
Nobody really knows who is telling the truth in the Lively/Baldoni saga. But if the case ever does come to trial, as well as sending the internet into meltdown, it could shed light on far more than simply who said and did what to whom. Whatever the outcome, the battle being fought right now, outside the courtroom, on social and mainstream media, could be more significant: in terms of women coming forward as victims of abuse and sexual violence, especially, but also in terms of how much we trust what's presented as 'popular opinion', and by extension, how easily it can be manipulated, whether in pop culture or in politics – assuming they're still two different things.