Amber Heard is the latest star speaking out in support of Blake Lively in the wake of her lawsuit against It Ends With Us director and co-star Justin Baldoni.
The actress released the following statement to NBC News:
Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying 'A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on.' I saw this firsthand and up close. It’s as horrifying as it is destructive.
Amber Heard
Heard knows exactly what she's talking about, too. Lively's legal complaint alleges that Baldoni retained the public relations crisis manager Melissa Nathan for services during the film's publicity tour. Nathan, as it turns out, is the same woman that actor Johnny Depp hired during his extremely high-profile defamation trial against his former wife, Heard.
During the trial, a jury found that Heard had defamed Depp, and he was awarded $5 million in punitive damages and $10 million in compensatory damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million in compensatory damages in her counterclaim against him.
Folks will no doubt remember the unending coverage and social media discourse surrounding the Depp/Heard case. At its conclusion, Heard released a statement via her own Instagram, which stated that, "the vilification I have faced on social media is an amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimized when they come forward."
This time, it seems, social media and the world at large has a better understanding of just how easy it is to manipulate the discourse surrounding these sort of events—particularly when it comes to engineering negative press around the women involved. Society has, notoriously, been unkind to women who speak up for themselves. Particularly if they cannot be viewed as a "perfect victim."
As former Bachelor star Nick Viall said on his podcast back in August, "This PR team eviscerated Amber Heard online. It was, like, an all-out assault on her character." He added that people were not asking the right questions, with social media focusing on whether or not these women "deserved" the blowback given their alleged reputations, rather than asking themselves things like why "the entire cast has unfollowed Justin Baldoni" on social media.
According to Bryan Freedman—the lawyer representing Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and all its representatives—the allegations in Lively's complaint are "categorically false," adding that Wayfarer and Baldoni only hired a crisis communications team because Lively allegedly threatened not to show up to set during filming, or to promote the film after its release.
Freedman told NBC News—in response to Heard's statement—that "TAG PR must be the most powerful group of publicists the world has ever seen for it to be able to completely change the perception of both Amber Heard and Blake Lively." He added that the only correlation between the two cases is that, "every move they have made has been out there for everyone to see, widely filmed and documented for the public to make up their own minds—which they did, organically."
