Lively vs. Baldoni: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Weaponizing the Fight to Take Down #MeToo
Taylor Lorenz writes that conservative commentators are leveraging the high-profile case to dismantle support for #MeToo and amass unprecedented audience growth.
Last month, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Megyn Kelly took the stage in front of thousands of people. "Have you heard about what's happening with the Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni case?" she asked the crowd. "Are you obsessed with this case? There are millions of people who are obsessed with this case." Over the course of the next 20 minutes, Kelly spoke in detail about Lively vs. Baldoni.
She called Lively, who claims that Justin Baldoni, her co-star in the movie ‘It Ends With Us,’ sexually harassed her and created a hostile work environment, a "high maintenance diva bully brat." Kelly said that after Lively's claims of sexual harassment became public, "Blake Lively believed she'd be received like an Alyssa Milano or Ashley Judd #MeToo victim” but “is instead looking a lot more like Amber Heard.”
Kelly is just one of a roster of conservative influencers dominating the Lively vs. Baldoni coverage. Right-wing creators, including Candace Owens, have been at the forefront of the case, while mainstream liberal creators follow in their footsteps, often laundering right-wing talking points to their progressive audiences.
Conservative influencers are not just covering the Lively vs Baldoni story more frequently than everyone else; they're covering it faster, in more detail, and providing the most compelling, up-to-the-minute storylines.
"It has brought in a new audience and changed my demographics," Candace Owens, the conservative commentator who has been making an aggressive effort to target women lately, told me. Owens said that she's seen a surge of liberals, who normally wouldn't claim to agree with her politics, tuning in for her pop culture coverage. "It has brought in people… who have never listened to my content because they feel so passionate about it and Justin Baldoni," she said.
Owens has relentlessly live-streamed herself discussing the case, posting about it on Instagram and X. She created an entire YouTube playlist on her channel documenting her coverage, which is approaching 25 million collective views. In a complaint filed by Lively's team with the court on Feb. 25, Lively’s attorneys cited Owens' coverage as deeply influential over public sentiment, noting that a slew of "online content creators" have spread "misleading accusations." The filing claims that Owens’ posts are setting the media narratives about the case. Owens celebrated the name check in a YouTube video, which amassed 1.6 million views.
As the writer Gary Baum at The Hollywood Reporter noted in January, “For those on the right, [Justin Baldoni represents] that most sympathetic of figures in contemporary American life: the canceled man. Meanwhile, Lively is a liberal who has received publicity for repeatedly donating to left-coded Indigenous causes and is perhaps best known for her close friendship with Taylor Swift, an enemy of President Donald Trump.” Most importantly, conservatives have recognized that the case, much like Johnny Depp’s crusade against Amber Heard, can be weaponized to dismantle support for the #MeToo movement, which conservatives have long sought to roll back.
When the Democrats lost again to Trump last fall, mainstream liberals all over the internet claimed that the party needed to do some major soul-searching. For a brief moment, they seemed to realize that their political movement was completely out of step with the culture. They held countless panels, forums, and strategy sessions that emphasized the urgent quest for Democrats to identify or cultivate their version(s) of "the left's Joe Rogan.” In other words, influential online figures who could speak authentically to a broad audience on cultural topics.
Liberals spoke about the need to leverage pop culture and seemingly non-political topics as a bridge to engage the public in political ideas indirectly, thus enhancing Democratic appeal. Liberal pundit Chris Hayes went on Ezra Klein’s podcast to bemoan Democrats “losing the attention war, badly.” This realization prompted political action committees (PACs) and wealthy Democratic donors to shower mainstream liberal influencers with funding, promising greater cultural relevance and audience reach.
Five months later, the Lively vs. Baldoni coverage reveals what a spectacular failure their efforts have been. Fox News has published near-daily updates on the case, and conservative influencers are owning the story, skyrocketing their audience numbers and transforming the public narrative on #MeToo, while mainstream liberals either parrot Candace Owens’ talking points or refuse to acknowledge the case at all.
Phil DeFranco, the number one news influencer in America according to Pew Research, who is watched by a large liberal audience, has only covered the case once on his channel in a segment he described as a "surface level normie breakdown." In the segment, he both-sides Lively's harassment claims and proceeds to highlight commentary from an extreme far right influencer who has terrorized Me Too victims and pushed people to follow creators defending Harvey Weinstein. Practically all other liberal news pundits have simply ignored the story.
If you're on social media platforms, especially if you're a woman or under the age of 40, content about Lively vs. Baldoni has likely become inescapable. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram videos about the case are amassing millions of views, Google searches have skyrocketed, and, as Megyn Kelly said on stage, all of America seems to be obsessed with the controversy.
Right-wing creators have become expert at tapping into online trends and cultural conversations, and immediately recognized the opportunity. Last fall, after Baldoni's smear campaign against Lively was revealed in the New York Times, conservative influencers sprung to action. They flooded the zone with exhaustive coverage aimed at discrediting Lively.
They have used the case to dismantle public support for #MeToo, especially among liberal women. So far, it's working. Recently, two co-founders of Betches, a liberal women's media company that has done work with the DNC, repeated Owens' exact framing of the case on Instagram, attacking Lively to their audience of progressive women followers. They lambasted the New York Times for their coverage and called Lively a “narcissistic egomaniac.”
"It’s a vindication for me," Owens told me. "I'm not kidding when I say that I was the first public person in the political sphere where, on the day that #MeToo started trending, I made statements against it."
"I have not moved my position on Me Too at all," she added, "I've been consistent, but people weren't ready to hear it."
Brett Cooper, a conservative influencer who recently left right-wing media outlet The Daily Wire to go independent, launched her YouTube channel with content about Lively vs Baldoni. In the second episode of her new podcast, titled "How Blake Lively Ended Her Own Career," Cooper rails against Lively and claims that Ryan Reynolds is set to lose his entire fortune and career because of his wife's "ego."
"This is just yet another example of women weaponizing Me Too for their own gain," Cooper says. Talking directly to Blake, she adds, "You thought the feminists would just rally behind you and that we were still in 2015 and that we would believe all women… but that was obviously very misguided.” The video has 3.4 million views. Top comments compare Lively to Amber Heard, calling her "entitled" and "insufferable." "I am not someone who ever paid attention to pop culture until I found your videos," one user commented. "Now I am so much more informed."
One of the next videos on Cooper’s channel is titled "It’s Time to Abolish the Department of Education." "Young people, especially young women might be interested [in watching my channel] because of a celebrity thing, then will stick around for something else," Cooper told me. "The video on the Department of Education is just as important, it might just be less flashy."
Cooper said that leaning into pop culture coverage has helped shift the public’s perception of her. "I've seen a lot of comments like, I don't usually listen to conservatives, but you're very palatable and you've changed my mind about what conservatives are and you open my eyes and a lot of things," she said.
Cooper added that the Lively vs Baldoni case reveals a broader generational shift in conservative media. "A lot of it is this new breed of younger people in right wing media," she said. She cited Ben Shapiro's viral movie reviews of ‘Wicked’ and ‘Barbie,’ as examples of how adept conservative commentators are at discussing Hollywood.
"The older generation of conservatives," she said, "they looked down on art, they looked down on Hollywood. They felt like it was not important. They looked at celebrities as something that should be shunned, like a cancer on society or whatever. I don't think most of us these days, the Bens, the Candaces, the Amirs, we don't think that way. We're very engaged in culture and in art. I was an actor. I'm a bona fide theater kid. As a young person who is on social media, I've engaged with all of these stories and I understand they're relevance in a way that probably older generations of conservatives didn't. I'm watching these videos with you. I'm watching these insane celebrity things unfold. I'm watching the same crappy movies that you are, and we should talk about it, because this is real life."
Though Cooper said she doesn't think of her pop culture content as a "gateway drug" to conservatism, she just covers what she's interested in, it's undeniable that her and other right wing creators' coverage has that effect. Conservative content creators’ ability to seize cultural moments for audience growth and redirect the discourse on topics like the Depp vs. Heard case or Lively vs. Baldoni has resulted in more and more liberal women adopting right-wing ideology surrounding women's rights.
"Pop up culture and celebrity news discourse reveals so much about what we as a society will accept or not," said Dilly Maz, a pop culture commentator on TikTok. "The standards that we hold celebrities to says a lot about what standards we have as a society. When you start to see these types of shifts in these spaces, it's really important to pay attention to what that reveals about a broader cultural shift."
While more creators on the right tap into the Lively vs. Baldoni discourse, millions more liberals are falling into the right-wing media pipeline. Ophie Dokie, a feminist YouTuber, said that it doesn't matter if many of the women who have gone down the right-wing rabbit hole still identify as liberal, because they've already begun adopting a fundamentally right-wing ideology towards women.
"They think that they're surprised that they agree with Candace Owens," Ophie said, "but what they actually need to be surprised by is that Candace Owens picked out the things that they believe for them."
As the right amasses more power and online attention, the left-wing creator ecosystem’s complete detachment from cultural moments reveals liberals' total incapacity to engage and mobilize people around influential narratives.
"There's no coverage of Blake and Baldoni from anyone approaching this with a progressive, critical lens," said Caroline Kwan, a progressive Twitch streamer. "Anyone on the left who's formed an opinion on this, most likely they are getting their opinion from whatever is dominating online, which is conservatives."
Brendan Gahan, a creator marketing strategist and founder of Creator Authority, an influencer marketing agency, said that the Lively vs Baldoni situation shows yet again how completely out of touch Democrats are with culture and the dynamics of online attention.
"I think there's a lack of understanding of culture and a lack of willingness to hear out a lot of aspects of culture," he said. "They don't take these things seriously. They don't see it as political; they think it's celebrity gossip."
Kwan said that Democrat influencers' dismissal of these massive, high-profile attacks on famous women who have spoken out about sexual assault or workplace harassment as "celebrity gossip" is deeply out of touch.
"Amber Heard had a chilling effect on victims of abuse," she said. "Men who beat their girlfriends refer to them as Amber Heard. What we've seen with Justin Baldoni is that now, every time something like this happens, the playbook gets more insidious. [The right] gets better at fighting this battle online and winning in the court of public opinion. Blake lively is not the first, nor will she be the last."
"This is not about protecting rich white celebrity women," she added, "this is about society at large and how misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture, both online and offline."
Owens, meanwhile, is leveraging the runaway success of her anti-Blake Lively crusade to drive millions of eyeballs to her two latest series, a deep dive investigation claiming that the first lady of France is secretly a biological man, and a series vindicating Harvey Weinstein. Owens claims that Weinstein, like Baldoni and Depp, is a victim of the justice system and that the #MeToo movement has gone too far.
She also doesn't plan to let up on her Lively coverage. "I'm totally invested," she said. "I wake up, and I check to see what's been filed. I think it's really important that goodness wins. I will keep covering this topic as long as there's something to cover." Owens said that more people across the political spectrum are waking up and seeing her view of the world.
"They're watching my content," she said. "They're watching the Blake Lively [videos]. And they're staying on."
This essay was originally published on User Magazine, an independent outlet on Substack founded by Taylor Lorenz, the acclaimed tech and online culture journalist who is also the author of the new Zeteo column, ‘Network Effect.’
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This article purports to tell facts but likening Baldoni to the right vs Lively to the left is disingenuous.
Agreed. I think the article is really well researched and well written and we do need to all be wary of Candace Owens amassing Democratic women to her cause with gateway content. However, people aren’t parroting her viewpoints - that is actually the mainstream opinion after a deluge of actual evidence flooded the public arena and we watched videos, read texts and listened to voice memos. No one is coming for Blake because she was some liberal icon; she and Ryan have been embarrassingly quiet about politics over the past eight years. They are coming for her because she has always been problematic and years of bad behaviors has finally caught up.