Consider this a career misstep of epic proportions.
Recently unveiled documents in the ongoing dispute between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, made public on Tuesday, paint a harsh picture of unchecked Hollywood vanity.
To echo the sentiments of the iconic Carly Simon: No one is more fixated on celebrities than other celebrities themselves.
The texts and emails within these documents bear witness to this fact. Reading through them evokes a sense of secondhand embarrassment for these emotionally immature individuals, who appear determined to exclude Baldoni from the Hollywood elite and ostracize him like a high school outcast.
In essence, the situation is quite similar.
Moreover, despite assertions from her team that she is uninvolved, Taylor Swift emerges from this debacle with her reputation tarnished.
Here’s Lively, texting Swift for an ostensibly simple favor.
The latest tranche of unsealed documents in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni battle, released Tuesday, are a brutal indictment of Hollywood egotism run amok.
To paraphrase the legendary singer-songwriter Carly Simon: No one cares about famous people more than other famous people. (Pictured: Baldoni and Lively on set).
These texts and emails are proof of that. To read them is to feel secondhand embarrassment for these emotional juveniles. (Pictured: Swift and Lively in 2024).
‘If you get here [while] this doofus director of my movie is still here (I’ll be ushering him out, but hope he’s still here) can you do me a huge favor,’ Lively texted Swift on April 12, 2023. ‘I need help with him.’
Remember: This was a meeting Team Swift said she accidentally wound up witnessing, had zero interest in, and absolutely did not participate while Lively and her husband, the equally odious Ryan Reynolds, were allegedly remonstrating Baldoni over It Ends with Us — the film he was directing and starring in with Lively.
Swift’s reply to Lively’s text?
‘I’ll do anything for you!!’
Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? These two are so gratuitously mean. Now all that cosplaying as high-school cheerleaders at Travis Kelce’s football games makes sense.
Emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, these two are teenagers. Very immature, unkind, small-minded teenagers in love with their cool clique. And maybe a little with each other.
‘You were so epically heroic today,’ Lively wrote Swift, in something of a mash note after Baldoni left. ‘You making s**t up about me and lenses. And referring to yourself as my doll. This clown falling for all of it… You are the world’s absolute greatest friend ever.’
As we know, Swift didn’t stay Lively’s ‘greatest friend’ for much longer. The gory details of that break-up are coming.
But first! We’ve got cameos from Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Damon and his wife Luciana, blockbuster author Colleen Hoover and top execs at Sony.
In May 2024, after wresting control of It Ends with Us from Baldoni — who bought the rights to Hoover’s book, prequel and sequel — Lively sent an email to Affleck, who directed her in his 2010 film The Town.
‘Ben, it’s Blake,’ she wrote. ‘Don’t hang up.’ She again called Baldoni a ‘clown’ and asked Affleck if he’d take a look at her cut of the movie while going overkill on the flattery.
Reynolds, she told Affleck, was ‘blown away’ by him and was ‘equally effusive about your Dunkin’ commercial.’
His Dunkin’ commercial!
Lively also asked if Lopez, married to Affleck at the time, would also take a look.
‘I’m such a fan of Jennifer’s,’ she gushed, adding it would be ‘an honor’ to have a woman whose every movie in recent memory has bombed to give advice on directing.
No response of Affleck’s was logged with the court, which suggests he did not reply. Perhaps Affleck’s own BFF and producing partner Matt Damon played good cop?
In what looks to be a group text thread among Lively, Reynolds, Damon and his wife, Damon responds, ‘We’ll give you any help we can. And if this experience hasn’t totally destroyed your soul, Blake, you should come direct your next movie at Artists Equity’ — the company he co-founded with Affleck.
Surely these A-listers love being dragged into this mess. Surely they love all of us accessing their once private communications.
Not for nothing has Hugh Jackman, once very publicly a close pal of Reynolds, seemingly kept his distance.
It’s probably safe to assume, too, that Damon’s offer to Lively has quietly been rescinded.
‘Ben, it’s Blake,’ Lively wrote in an email to Affleck. ‘Don’t hang up.’ (Pictured: Lively and Affleck in 2010).
Not for nothing has Hugh Jackman (left), once very publicly a close pal of Reynolds, seemingly kept his distance.
In what looks to be a group text thread among Lively, Reynolds, Matt Damon and his wife, Damon writes: ‘We’ll give you any help we can. And if this experience hasn’t totally destroyed your soul, Blake, you should come direct your next movie at Artists Equity.’
Surely these A-listers love being dragged into this mess. Surely they love all of us accessing their once private communications.
After all, what’s most notable about these missives is what’s not here — at least as far as we can tell.
Not one mention of Baldoni sexually harassing Lively. When she first filed her lawsuit in late 2024, that was Lively’s bombshell claim: That Baldoni had subjected her to ‘severe’ sexual harassment, which he denies.
You might think that Lively, operating in a post-Weinstein, post-MeToo Hollywood, would lead with that.
Reynolds himself went scorched earth with his very powerful agent, Patrick Whitesell at WME, writing a lengthy hissy fit that otherwise passes for an email, griping about what he saw as a lack of support for Lively.
This is dated August 12, 2024:
‘I know I sound angry but I promise you I have way more rage in the tank… [Blake] went so far above and beyond what should be asked of anyone, in order to land a jumbo jet on a f**king dime.’
Further, Reynolds wrote: ‘I think I deserve to enjoy the work I’ve put in over the last three years on D & W.’
That would be Deadpool and Wolverine, cinema’s successor to Citizen Kane.
Reynolds and Lively won the battle but long ago lost the war, with no less than Sony president Sanford Panitch, whose studio produced It Ends With Us, calling Lively ‘unhireable’ less than two weeks later.
‘She is done for,’ Panitch wrote in emails to other Sony execs.
‘She did it to herself,’ Panitch continued. ‘If she just let [Baldoni] come to the premiere or didn’t make all the cast unfollow him or kick him off the movie and did what everyone ever has done in show business for time and memorial [sic] which is protect “the show” then none of the sleuthing would have happened. The hair sell at the same time’ — Lively was hawking her hair care line while promoting the film, which was about domestic violence — ‘was epic level stupid.’
Not since super-producer Scott Rudin called Angelina Jolie a ‘minimally talented spoiled brat’ and a ‘camp event’ in messages leaked in the 2014 Sony hack have celeb emails been this entertaining.
That hack cost Amy Pascal, then Sony Pictures entertainment chief, her job. She’s never fully recovered.
So, Blake and Ryan, take a good look at your inglorious future. It doesn’t even matter if these two win their lawsuit.
In the court of public opinion, they’re done.
