Over the weekend, the It Ends With Us drama reached fever pitch when Blake Lively sued her co-star and the film’s director Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment on set and orchestrating a campaign to “destroy” her reputation. Now, a journalist who released a video earlier this year showed a pretty sour interview experience with Lively back in 2016, has denied that she was part of Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign.
As per The New York Times, Lively’s legal complaint alleges that Baldoni and a producer on the film, Jamey Heath, acted inappropriately towards Lively on the set of It Ends With Us. In response, there was a meeting which occurred to address the “hostile work environment”. The complaint alleges that after this meeting, Baldoni and his publicity team — which includes expert crisis public relations manager Melissa Nathan — used social media tactics to orchestrate an alleged smear campaign.
The complaint by Lively’s legal team claims that Baldoni and his team “weaponised a digital army around the country from New York to Los Angeles to create, seed, and promote content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums”.
While Baldoni’s legal team has denied these allegations, the original New York Times article mentioned an interview by journalist Kjertsi Flaa who shared a negative clip of an old interview with the Gossip Girl alum from 2016 in August. Flaa uploaded the clip to YouTube, entitled “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job”.
Now, Flaa has taken to her YouTube channel to deny that she had anything to do with Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign.
“Some people have started these conspiracies that somehow I am connected to the PR campaign against Blake Lively. That is not true,” Flaa said in the video.
“I am a journalist, this is what I do for a living. I would never accept money to jeopardise my integrity as a journalist. I see how people are trying to make a connection here that I’ve been working with the PR company because it was just too much of a coincidence that my video was posted at that time.”
Flaa claimed that she wasn’t up to date with the online narrative about Lively, and posted the video after a six-week holiday because she had “had enough of Hollywood” and “wasn’t that afraid of being cancelled anymore”.
“My video speaks for itself. If you ask me, I just post this happened,” she said. “There’s no context around it. It was just like me and her and Parker Posey. I tried to interview them. It wasn’t a great interview experience at all, and that’s also why it blew off online.”
Flaa also denied the implications of the New York Times article that she was paid to share content in Johnny Depp‘s favour during his trial with Amber Heard, despite Depp also being a PR client of Nathan.
“The reason I posted the video with Johnny Depp was not because I was paid by the same PR company. It was because I like Johnny Depp. I had great experiences with him. I thought Amber Heard was lying in court, and I posted it to have sympathy with him and the fans that love him, and that was the only reason,” she said.
Flaa says that this whole scenario just proves “how dirty Hollywood is”.
“If any of this stuff that she’s saying is true, then Justin Baldoni is not a good guy. And I never defended him. I don’t know him. I never met him. Actually, I didn’t know he existed until It Ends With Us,” she said.
“So I have no sympathy towards any of these people that are involved. I don’t know anything about them. I just know my personal experiences with Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who I’ve met several times.”
In case you need a refresher, the chat Flaa is referring to is was with Lively and Parker Posey to promote the film Cafe Society and it kicked off with Flaa congratulating Lively on her baby bump. Although that’s usually a no-no if you don’t know without a shadow of a doubt that someone is pregnant, Lively had recently announced that she was expecting.
Lively appeared not to enjoy that comment and responded: “Congrats on your little bump”.
Flaa laughed it off and Posey jumped in.
“What about my bump?” she asked, rubbing her butt.
As someone who has interviewed a bunch of celebrities in junkets like this, I can confirm this interview continued to be a shit show after they got off on the wrong foot. You can watch it down below.
At the time, Flaa said she posted the video because she was “contacted by another reporter who told me a story that was a little similar to this one”.
She said she posted the video because she wanted to call out Lively for her behaviour.
“It affected me for a while cause it made me nervous when I was interviewing other people after that. And I blamed myself for it for a long time cause I felt like I did or said something wrong,” she said in a follow-up video.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Flaa shared that she is infertile, making the interaction sting even more.
“To be honest, it hurts because I obviously wasn’t pregnant and I could never get pregnant,” she said.
Obviously, as the lawsuit proceeds, the drama will continue. However, I would like to point out one thing. As an entertainment journalist, part of the job is to monitor trends and what people are talking about. I find it very hard to believe Kjertsi Flaa just woke up one day and decided to post an eight-year-old interview with Lively as she claims.
In my opinion, what’s more likely is that she saw the negative discourse slowly building and bubbling, and recognised that she had some content that fit the bill. The same thing happened with Johnny Depp.
Does that mean that she’s part of this alleged conspiracy? No. It just means she’s trying to get her content in front of as many eyes as possible and knew that if she posted the video at the right time, chances of viral success were higher.
Food for thought, no?
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