Blake Lively's claims put spotlight on 'sinister' Hollywood tactics

Actress Blake Lively was arguably the internet's public enemy number one for a couple of weeks in the summer. She's now filed an explosive legal case that she claims lifts the lid on "hostile work environments" that are created to harm reputations in Hollywood - and which are making people question who and what to believe.

Blake Lively had always been a pretty inoffensive kind of actress.

She had been in successful TV shows and films, like Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. She married fellow superstar Ryan Reynolds. She's friends with Taylor Swift.

Then in August, while promoting her latest movie It Ends With Us, she suddenly became controversial, to the verge of being cancelled.

She was criticised for comments appearing to downplay domestic violence, the film's theme; while awkward old interviews were resurfaced and repurposed as evidence of bullying behaviour.

Public opinion - at least among those who knew and cared - seemed to have turned against her.

Then the film came out, the furore died down, and social media moved on.

But Lively has now filed a legal case that claims she suffered sexual harassment by It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni - and that when she complained, he and his studio Wayfarer retaliated by waging a campaign to "destroy" her reputation.

She was the subject of "a sophisticated, co-ordinated, and well-financed retaliation plan" designed "to silence her", involving a "weaponised a digital army" and fake stories being fed to "unwitting reporters", her lawyers have alleged - and that's why she became the focus of negative publicity.

Throughout the complaint, which spans some 80 pages, Lively's team repeatedly accuses Badoni and Wayfarer of creating a "hostile work environment that nearly derailed production of the film".

Her lawyers have published text messages sent between Baldoni's publicist Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan, a crisis communications specialist hired by his studio to help manage the harassment complaint. They appear to give a rare glimpse into conversations that are normally kept well out of the spotlight.

Nathan pitched a strategy to "start threads of theories" on social media, to "create, seed, and promote content that appeared to be authentic", and engage in "social manipulation", according to the legal papers.

"You know we can bury anyone," Nathan wrote to Abel in one damning discussion.

Now, the people hired to do crisis PR for Baldoni are doing crisis PR for themselves.

Abel has said Lively's lawyers "cherry picked" messages to include in their case without crucial context, and that there was "no 'smear' implemented".

"No negative press was ever facilitated, no social combat plan, although we were prepared for it as it's our job to be ready for any scenario.

"But we didn't have to implement anything because the internet was doing the work for us."

The backlash against Lively occurred naturally and didn't need their help, Abel said.

Lawyer Bryan Freedman, representing Baldoni and his studio as well as Abel and Nathan, echoed that.

He said Baldoni hired a crisis manager due to "multiple demands and threats" allegedly made by Lively, including "threatening to not [show] up to set, threatening to not promote the film, ultimately leading to its demise during release, if her demands were not met".

He said the plan drawn up by Nathan's firm "proved unnecessary as audiences found Lively's own actions, interviews and marketing during the promotional tour distasteful, and responded organically to that, which the media themselves picked up on".

Overall, Freedman called Lively's complaint "shameful" and full of "categorically false accusations".

The New York Times, which broke the story of Lively's complaint at the weekend, said she "denied that she or any of her representatives planted or spread negative information about Mr Baldoni or Wayfarer".

The paper also pointed out that "it is impossible to know how much of the negative publicity" towards Lively was originally seeded by those working on behalf of Baldoni, "and how much they noticed and amplified".

Some fans have stressed that their criticisms were genuine, but many who turned against Lively now see the situation in a different light.

"We are so able to be manipulated into hating a woman that all it takes is a co-ordinated PR effort for us to switch sides against a domestic abuse victim, or a long-beloved American sweetheart," wrote Maddy Mussen in the Standard.

"Now our eyes are open, will we be harder to fool? Or will we still want any excuse to turn on a famous woman who is suddenly, in our eyes and the eyes of the ones manipulating us, no longer worthy?"

The Guardian's Laura Snapes wrote that she and her friends had now "looked back, horrified, on what we had said about her in recent months".

She added: "Lively's complaint has left my head spinning. What can you really trust?"