Blake Lively and Amber Heard: When history repeats itself before we learn our lesson.
The deep dive you've been looking for on what happens when astroturfing meets patriarchy. And how exactly we keep falling for it.
I never really had an opinion one way or the other towards actress Blake Lively, so last summer when I witnessed the overwhelming onslaught of criticism towards her I assumed there must be a valid reason for so many people to unite against her.
A few years ago I had never heard of Amber Heard, so when I encountered extreme vitriol against her online during the Johnny Depp trial, I figured everyone must know more than me.
After all, millions and millions of people couldn’t all be duped…
Could they?
Justin V Blake
The internet was big mad at Blake Lively this summer for starring in a movie about domestic violence, but treating it as if it were a rom com. There were giggles, floral dresses and admonitions to go grab your girlfriends and watch the movie together.
The movie was It Ends With Us. During its press tour, Blake was busy promoting her hair care line and being rude to interviewers. At best: tone deaf. At worst: rude and harmful to victims of domestic abuse.
By stark contrast, the internet crowned Justin Baldoni, director and co-star of It Ends With Us, a hero among women. He was not telling you to go see the movie in a pink dress with your girlfriends, he was giving you the number for the domestic abuse hotline.
Not only that, he is a co-host of the “Man Enough” podcast all about how to make masculinity healthier.
Everyone was in agreement: Blake Lively: Bad. Hates women. Justin Baldoni: Our king. Loves women.
Questioning Justin: a cautionary tale
I didn’t think about Justin or Blake too much myself, but I didn’t question the prevailing narrative.
That is until I listened to this podcast episode by Shameless Media called “The ‘It Ends With Us’ Mess” back in August.
The hosts Zara and Michelle were the first people I had heard asking the question why are so many people against Blake?
They weren’t even saying Blake was right or Justin was wrong, they were just asking why the discussion felt so incredibly one-sided and offered some evidence for why this doesn’t actually make sense.
After listening, I wondered what others thought of the podcast episode. I popped over to their TikTok account to check the comments only to find hundreds of comments aggressively criticizing Zara, Michelle and Blake Lively for not supporting Justin Baldoni.
What was usually one of the most agreeable, silly-meme-sharing communities online turned vicious. Quick. Reddit threads were popping up to complain about the podcast. Long-time subscribers were dipping out.
Michelle and Zara later said that in six years of podcasting, they’ve received tons of pushback, but nothing like when they came out questioning Justin Baldoni.
This intense response made them even more suspicious. Michelle said, “Even when someone is on trial for murder, 20% of comments will be defending them, but this was 99% against Blake.”
That is fishy. Why were we all so anxious to believe Justin and distrust Blake? Why was I?
The New York Times vindicates Blake Lively
Fast forward four months and I wish I could have seen Zara and Michelle’s faces when they saw this article published by The New York Times last week:
Turns out Zara and Michelle were spot on in their suspicions. Turns out there was a very non-organic reason the internet was 99:1 in favor of Justin and against Blake.
Turns out Justin Baldoni hired the very same PR crisis team, led by Melissa Nathan, that Johnny Depp hired in his trial against Amber Heard.
Here’s how Melissa Nathan described her services in a quote she emailed Justin and his team:
”Quote one $175k—this will be for 3-4 month period and includes: website (to discuss) full Reddit, full social account take downs, full social crisis team on hand for anything—engage with audiences in the right way, start threads of theories (to discuss) this is the way to be fully 100% protected.
”Quote two $25k per month—min 3 months as it needs to seed same as above—this will be for creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change the narrative and stay on track.” Ms. Nathan stated, ”All of this will be most importantly untraceable. There is a lot more to both of these quotes but easier to discuss via phone in terms of capabilities and what I have personally experienced in and out of crisis scenarios.” - Melissa Nathan.
(These are all public. You can read 80 pages of these emails and texts here. And you should! They are very educational on how smear campaigns specifically work)
And?
The hiring of Melissa Nathan and her team was unbelievably successful. So successful even she couldn’t believe it. This is a text exchange between Justin’s publicist, Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan:
Those two articles Jennifer Abel is referencing? Those hit on the actual beginning to all of this mess: Blake Lively’s allegations of Justin Baldoni’s sexual harassment.
Wait. Turns out this whole thing is a sexual harassment story!!?? What? From the feminist podcaster?! Plot twist!
Here’s how The New York Times reports on Lively’s sexual harassment concerns:
“She detailed her complaints during a meeting with Mr. Baldoni, Mr. Heath and other producers in January, according to the legal filing. She claimed Mr. Baldoni had improvised unwanted kissing and discussed his sex life, including encounters in which he said he may not have received consent. Mr. Heath had shown her a video of his wife naked, she said, and he had watched Ms. Lively in her trailer when she was topless and having body makeup removed, despite her asking him to look away. She said that both men repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.” - The New York Times
Blake claims that Justin introduced “improvised gratuitous sexual content and/or scenes involving nudity” into the film without prior discussion or agreement.
Justin told his publicist he wanted a game plan set in place so his public image wouldn’t tank in case the allegations came to light. He texted her a social media thread accusing Hailey Bieber of bullying behavior that had 19 million views. “This is what we would need” he wrote.
So he hired Melissa Nathan and boy did she deliver.
And in an act of unbidden generosity toward feminist think-piece writers, when speaking of her successful smear campaign against Blake Lively she delivered this text to Justin’s publicist:
“It’s actually sad because it shows you have people really want to hate on women.”
I wonder where that have/how typo falls on the list of Melissa Nathan’s regrets because that is one hell of a quote. See if you can spot it making fun cameos throughout this article!
What we are talking about vs what we should be talking about
Justin Baldoni has not taken this New York Times exposé sitting down. He is suing The New York Times. In the two weeks since the original article came out, new articles have come out every day sharing his side of things.
He denies any sexual harassment and provides evidence of Blake being very difficult to work with. She made long lists of demands refusing to continue filming until her demands were met. She overruled his edit of the film by producing one of her own. She didn’t let anyone stand near Justin during the premiere and just was an all around pain in the ass to work with.
I don’t doubt that she was a mighty pain in Justin’s ass during this entire thing.
However.
Being a pain in the ass is not illegal.
Sexual harassment and retaliation is illegal.
Its incredibly frustrating to read article after article after article presenting this whole thing as a nail-biting, back-and-forth, neck-and-neck tennis match. “She said this!” “He said this!” “Now she says this!” “Now he says this!” Who knows who will win?!?!
If this is a tennis match, the hiring of Johnny Depp’s PR team is the equivalent of everyone in the stands suddenly finding Baldoni jerseys under their seats with chants of “Baldoni is our king” blaring from the speakers.
If this is a tennis match, centuries of patriarchal conditioning make it so Blake Lively, a woman accusing a man of sexual harassment, starts the match with a licorice stick instead of a racket.
There’s a lot of chatter of her being more powerful and popular and using her influence and her own PR team to bury and bully Baldoni. There’s a lot of chatter of women in general accusing men of sexual harassment just for their own gain- money, notoriety, support, popularity.
But we do not live in a world where women accusing men of sexual harassment are rewarded with heaps of prestige and applause.
We don’t even live in a world where they are believed. (Please see the “Examples of us not learning our lesson” section for specific reference points on this.)
We live in a world where women who come forward with sexual harassment allegations are punished. Even when they are proved correct, their character is slandered. We call them attention-seeking liars and take away their job opportunities.
If it were true that women are believed and rewarded when they accuse men of sexual harassment, then Blake’s public perception would raise at least a little after the New York Times article came out.
But that’s not what happened.
In tracking hundreds of thousands of posts on X, YouTube, Reddit and Tumblr, Business Insider reports that the week after The New York Times article came out, negative posts and comments of Blake Lively jumped from 29% to 61%.
Her public image is not benefitting from this. People are still calling her bitchy, whiney, difficult, tone-deaf and a liar1.
We are witnessing in real time as Justin Baldoni utilizes patriarchy’s oldest trick in the book to deflect and distract from sexual harassment allegations: character assassination of the woman who accused him.
And we are watching it work!
It’s actually sad because it shows you have people really want to hate on women.
In the midst of pulling my hair out watching the tennis match coverage this week, I came across this Reddit comment and felt like whooping:
“We are intentionally being flooded with stories on every little action these people are taking to keep the focus on Justin vs Blake. We don’t need stories on one party’s plans to submit evidence in a legal battle. Good journalism would be taking a deeper look at how this smear campaign was so effective, what are other examples of this tactic in the past, and how can we prevent ourselves from falling victim in the future." - this Reddit thread
Yes!!! That’s exactly what we should be talking about here!!! Please can someone write that article?!?!
In fact, those three points would make an excellent article outline…
Ok fine, pull my leg, I’ll write that article.
Oh you thought this article was winding up? We’re just getting started baby. Buckle up because this shit is important.
Thank you Reddit user Ancient_Coconut_5880. I hope you’re not a bot because this one is for you.
Let’s discuss:
How smear campaigns are so effective.
What are other examples of this in the past and
How can we prevent ourselves from falling victim in the future?
1. Just how effective can a smear campaign be? Examining Depp V Heard
In 2022, the world was united in being big mad at Amber Heard. And when I say big mad, I don’t mean just a little big mad, I mean BIIIIIIIIIIIIIG MAD. The biggest mad.
She wrote a piece for the Washington Post in 2018 about being a victim of domestic violence. While she did not mention her ex-husband Johnny Depp by name in the piece, people inferred. Specifically Johnny Depp inferred and sued her for defamation for writing the article.
The people crowned Johnny Depp our hero, innocent victim of Amber’s relentless abuse.
Just to give one teensy, tinsy example of how extreme this discourse was- a few weeks ago I wrote a piece about botox and included the reaction to Nicole Kidman’s botox misadventure a few years back.
I referenced an Instagram post of Nicole’s from 2022 and guess what else I came across in that comment section? Heaps of shame thrown at Nicole Kidman for supporting Amber Heard.
What did she do to support her I wondered? Go to dinner with her? Wear an “I support Amber” shirt? Start an Amber Heard fan club?
No. She happened to follow Amber’s Instagram account.
That’s it. That’s the extent of her sin and for this act of heresy, she must be brought to repentance:
Destroying people’s lives for following someone on Instagram.
For my part in 2022, I still thought myself above such petty dribble as the squabbles of celebrities. (I wasn’t like other girls.)
As someone who followed the case only against my will, I remember seeing lots of zoom ins of her suspicious face in court compared with Johnny Depp’s calm, cool demeanor. I remember the poop in the bed. But mostly I remember hearing that it was SHE not HE who was the real abuser. He was the victim, not her.
Here are a few things I did not hear in 2022, but learned while writing this article:
Amber Heard met Johnny Depp when she was 22 and he was 46 in her first big role.
Johnny Depp has a long, detailed history of substance abuse and violence, frequently referring to the man he becomes while drunk as “the monster.”
When Amber filed to divorce Johnny in 2016, she was issued a restraining order against him and left court with a bruise on her face.
A British publication called The Sun published a piece calling Johnny “a wife beater.”
Johnny sued The Sun for this and was expected to win since the burden of proof would be on The Sun to prove in court that Johnny abused Amber.
But Johnny lost. The English court ruled that Johnny was violent against Amber on 12 separate occasions.
When Amber wrote her article for the Washington Post, Johnny sued her for defamation. Despite losing the case in England, Johnny wins two years later in Virginia.
Given this information doesn’t it seem a little odd that during the trial, videos tagged #justiceforjohnnydepp had over 5 billion views on Tiktok, while videos tagged #justiceforamberheard had only 21 million views?
Is it backwards day?
Wouldn’t the exact opposite make more sense?
Before the comments take me to court (I will be so happy to be proved wrong, but I have a hunch I won’t be), I’m not saying Amber did nothing wrong. I’m not saying she didn’t hit Johnny Depp. I’m not saying everyone has to support her.
What I am saying is that given that Johnny Depp was already found guilty of 12 counts of violence against Amber, wouldn’t we expect the ratio of support for Amber vs Johnny to be at least 50/50? Or at the very least 25/75?
Instead, according to the #justicefor hashtags, the ratio was 99:1 in support of Johnny.
Given that a court of law proved she was abused, these numbers are absolutely mind blowing.
More than mind blowing. It just doesn’t make any sense. Hitler is perceived as the worst villain of the past century and even he has more support than Amber Heard. People are never this united on anything or anyone. Let alone someone with such strong counter evidence.
What’s going on? What happened between the two court cases to sway everyone so strongly towards Johnny Depp?
In short, astroturfing happened.
Years of very advanced, aggressive, targeted astroturfing against Amber Heard.
A quick lesson in astroturfing
What is astroturfing? The Merriam Webster dictionary describes it thusly:
“organized activity that is intended to create a false impression of a widespread, spontaneously arising, grassroots movement in support of or in opposition to something but that is in reality initiated and controlled by a concealed group or organization.”
In the case of Depp v Heard, the astroturfing involved bot campaigns.
Wait wait wait (this is me playing devil’s advocate), you’re telling me that I don’t trust Amber Heard because… robots told me not to?
You’re delusional. You’re a conspiracy theorist. That doesn’t make any sense.
We are smart, logical, intelligent human beings with actual brains capable of viewing things with our own eyes, weighing both sides of data and coming to our own well-reasoned conclusions.
Why on earth would something a robot says in a comment section on Instagram have any sway whatsoever on my independent thought formation?
Well.
What if you could make bots so human-like that you had no idea they were bots?
What if the bot accounts had hundreds of Instagram photos of their everyday lives with their families and friends? What if they went to college and had credible advanced degrees? What if they had a backlog of over a decade of intelligent tweets?
What if you could produce thousands of these realistic accounts in seconds with a click of a button?
What if these thousands and thousands of accounts started sharing the same hashtag on the same day? All across the world? On all different platforms?
What if you got real influencers to do the same?
What if, say, on November 7, 2020, one day after it was announced that Johnny Depp wasn’t offered a role in the second Fantastic Beasts movie and one week after he loses his trial in the UK, what if on this day within a matter of hours hundreds of accounts suddenly start generating thousands of tweets and retweets against Amber Heard and in support of Johnny Depp causing the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp to start trending?
What if at this same time right-wing Chilean influencers suddenly shift all their former political content to pro-Johnny Depp content? What if at this same time hundreds of Saudi Arabian accounts supporting a Saudi politician all start slandering Amber Heard on the same day?
What if Johnny Depp’s lawyer is not allowed on the case because he leaked tampered sound recordings to select online influencers? What if those influencers made hundreds of thousands of dollars from spreading those sound recordings?
What if two years before the US trial started, evidence of Amber Heard’s poor character was so widely-spread and firmly solidified that when the trial did start, all the gears were already in place to effectively convince everyone, even feminists who had never even heard of her that Amber is a monster?
This is precisely what happened as detailed in the 6-episode podcast Who Trolled Amber? by Tortoise Media, which I highly recommend you listen to if you plan on being online again ever.
It’s crucial we understand how easily public opinion can be swayed. How effectively even very savvy, educated, intelligent people are influenced when they see 99% of people all vehemently believing the same thing.
It’s enough to make you question even your most strongly held beliefs (like say believing victims of sexual assault).
And if you did happen to be in that 1% coming out in support of Amber Heard? Heaven help you. Remember what happened when Michelle and Zara questioned Justin Baldoni? Remember how people reacted to Nicole Kidman following Amber’s Instagram account? Retribution for moving against the 99 is swift and intense. The intense pushback effectively dissuades anyone who does disagree with the 99 from speaking out against them.
And now history repeats itself and it comes out that Justin Baldoni has hired the very same PR team that Johnny Depp hired.
How interesting.
Justin is not being very subtle about following Johnny Depp’s road map: Don’t sue the woman at first, sue the publication she published on, so the burden of proof is on them to prove his wrong-doing rather than on him to prove hers.
Both Johnny’s and Justin’s tactics are textbook examples of DARVO, an acronym describing how those accused of wrongdoing deflect their accusation:
Deny - the accused denies any wrongdoing.
Attack - the accused attacks the character and credibility of the accuser.
Reverse Victim and Offender- She’s not the victim, I am. I’m not the abuser, she is.
After Johnny Depp’s first court ruling found he abused Amber, he was clearly extremely effective in reversing victim and offender. Justin is now shooting for the same. This headline came out on AOL this week:
'It Ends With Us' producer says he and Justin Baldoni are the ones being harassed.
We are living smack in the middle of history repeating itself. We are given all the evidence that it is repeating itself with the exact same tactics and string-pullers and still, still are choosing to be on the side of the man accused of harassment instead of the woman.
Like absolute suckers, we fall for distrusting women again and again and again.
Even when we’ve seen this exact story play out and have been wrong so very many times before.
2. Examples of us not learning from our past mistakes
The online astroturfing may be new, but the ease with which we distrust women is not.
The story goes like this:
A woman comes out with an allegation against a man. Or she is slandered for some other reason.
We do not believe her. We call her an attention-seeking, gold-digging slutty liar.
Years later we realize we made a mistake. What she said was true. We went too far. We were unfair. We didn’t have all the evidence. Whoopsie daisy.
The cycle continues with no reparations made or lessons learned.
Barbara Bowman.
When Barbara said that Bill Cosby drugged her wine and raped her in 1986 when she was 18 and he was 49, no one believed her. When she spoke out, Cosby tried to destroy her career and no one would cast her. In 2015 she wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled “Bill Cosby raped me. Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story?”
Whoopsie.
Clara Bow
Clara was the starlet silent film star of the 1930s raking in 40,000 fan letters a week. But when an article came out accusing her of all manner of loose behavior including bestiality and threesomes with married men, everyone believed it. She said it wasn’t true, but she was fired from her studio. She never starred in another film again and died destitute in an asylum. Years later it came out that everything in the article was false.
Whoopsie.
Megan Thee Stallion
When Megan said that rapper Tory Lanez shot her in the leg in 2020, no one believed her. Even when she proved she was hospitalized and showed pictures of the gun wound, still people insisted she was lying and had never been shot. (Many now believe Tory hired a PR team to discredit Megan). Then it was proven in court that Tory did shoot her. He’s now in prison for 10 years.
Whoopsie.
Monica Lewinsky
Despite Monica not wanting to go public with what happened between her and Bill Clinton, when it came out as evidence in another woman’s court case and Bill said he didn’t do it- everyone called Monica a fat, gold-digging, slutty liar. Later during the impeachment trial it was found that she was telling the truth.
Whoopsie.
Taylor Swift
In 2016, Kanye West came out with a music video depicting a nude wax figure of Taylor in bed with Kanye. Kanye said she gave him permission. Taylor said she didn’t. Kanye and his wife Kim published a voicemail showing that she did. Everyone called Taylor a liar. #Taylorswiftisoverparty reached such a fever pitch that Taylor didn’t go out in public for a year. Then it came out that Taylor was telling the truth and that voicemail had been doctored.
Whoopsie.
Britney Spears
When Justin Timberlake came out with Cry Me a River and said Britney cheated on him, everyone believed him. She tried to defend herself but no one believed her. We called her a crazy, baby-hungry slut and delighted to watch the starlet fall, fall, fall. Years later it comes out that Justin was the first to cheat and did so frequently. Also he forced her to get an abortion and she could have really used help and support during some very dark years of public slander.
Whoopsie.
To be clear, I do not see female celebrities as either innocent angels or inspirational role models. None of these women are perfect, but they shouldn’t have to be perfect to be believed.
And if no one believes rich, famous (usually white) celebrities? What chance do the rest of us have?
It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.
3. How can we prevent ourselves from making this same mistake in the future?
We can educate ourselves on our long history of slandering a woman’s character when she gets uppity. We can learn why it feels new for so many women to be speaking out all of the sudden.
We can acknowledge that it’s not men who are primarily posting against Blake and Amber. It’s women. We can learn about internalized misogyny. We can understand that this is not a men vs women thing, this is an all of us vs patriarchy thing.
We can internalize that the EPFL found that 20% of global Twitter trends in 2019 were inauthentic created by fake or compromised accounts.
As we scroll through Google, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or anywhere online, we can assume that about 20% of stuff we are reading was likely bought and paid for in order to make us think a certain way.
We can know that we are not too smart to be swayed by PR teams and parties with large amounts of money and an agenda. And if we are this easily swayed against one female celebrity, what does that mean for our sway-ability in say political elections?
Finally, we can zoom out and place Amber Heard and Blake Lively where they fit in our current historical context.
Progress is always one step forward, two steps back.
What happened just before the Amber Heard trial?
The #MeToo movement where millions of women spoke out against their abusers.
What could possibly be a more effective step back from #MeToo than keeping women quiet when they are abused?
And what could be a bigger deterrent to speaking out against your abuser than the entire world watching a woman come forward about domestic abuse only to be forced to pay her abuser millions of dollars, be called a dirty liar the world over, have her career obliterated, and have to move to Spain due to dozens of death threats deemed credible by the FBI?
As the man already proven guilty of 12 counts of abuse against her walks free, fame and career intact, still hailed as both the victim and the hero?
I can’t think of anything more effective to shut women up.
Except maybe the same people orchestrating the same thing to happen again.
One step forward.
Two steps back.
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And again, you can be bitchy, whiney and tone deaf and still be sexually harassed.
Although it was not domestic abuse . Pretty sure this is what’s happened to Megan Markle
Wow. And here I thought PR people helped craft someone’s brand and helped them reply to social media stuff in the best way possible. I had no idea you could hire a company to do… this…
It took me a long time to believe Amber (about as long as a bunch of the internet near as I can tell) but I believed Blake right away. I figured “ha! They messed with the wrong woman this time.” I figured the difference is in her advantages: well established, known for being kind, well supported (Amber notably did not have a well known white husband at her side telling everyone she’s telling the truth- shouldn’t make a difference but…. Uh, it does.).
But it sounds like internet-wise it is playing out the same. Which means my believing her wasn’t necessarily because she has a better chance… but because Amber-timeline-me didn’t know what Blake-timeline-me knows. And my biggest change was this summer when your “the men who don’t like women and the men who do. We can tell.” article went viral. You became one of my news sources (now one of several non-legacy-media) - and the first person to teach me about female history.
Education matters. This research matters. News stories matter. You are making a difference. It is working. Thank you. From, like, a lot of us I’m pretty sure.