On Believing the Worst of Women

The Credibility Gap

“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio behind the movie It Ends With Us wrote to Melissa Nathan, a crisis management expert (1). The “he” in question is Justin Baldoni, an actor who was honored for his work in “elevating women”. The (alleged) burial in question was kicked when Blake Lively, the A-list actress starting in It Ends With Us, privately complained that the men had repeatedly violated physical boundaries and made sexual and other inappropriate comments to her, to the studio, Wayfarer. Within days of the August 9, 2024 movie release date, Lively had “ -experienced the biggest reputational hit of her career. She was branded tone-deaf, difficult to work with, a bully. Sales of her new hair-care line plummeted,” per the New York Times (1). The New York Times exposé about the Blake Lively accusations goes into detail about the (alleged) smear campaign: that crisis management expert Melissa Nathan had previously worked Johnny Depp, her firm’s chief investor is Scooter Baum (who famously feuded with Taylor Swift), proposals were made for “full social account take downs” that would be “untraceable”, a campaign that (allegedly) began on Reddit, a brand marketing consultant found that thirty-five percent of Google search results for Blake Lively, whose career and fame are both decades-long, showed her name appearing with Justin Baldoni, which (allegedly) shows social media manipulation, and Daily Mail reported negatively on Blake Lively, legitimizing the social media smear campaign and giving it further credibility. Blake Lively has filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department. The New York Times article about the smear campaign against her career came over four months after her reputational damage began.

“Whether we realize it or not, we’re prone to credibility judgments that work to the detriment of people who lack social power….The rule is simple: credibility is meted out too sparingly to women, whether cis or trans, whatever their race or socioeconomic status, their sexual orientation or immigration status.” (1). “Women in general are at the bottom of the food chain…I feel like we are pretty much the last, but then I also feel like, as a woman and a [racial] minority, I am the last of the last,” said Aja Newman, who is a black woman who was sexually violated by a physician in 2016 (3). Who is considered credible is related to intersectionality, as per the opening quote of this paragraph, a term coined by law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. The general public considered women of color to be less credible, or perhaps it’s not that they aren’t believed, but that people around them unconsciously (or consciously) consider them to be less systemically crucial, meaning the contributions and psychological safety of men are prioritized (4). This is a pattern I’ve found in my work, in that Asian-American women are targeted.

Blake Lively is unique in that she has every advantage and would appear highly credible: she’s much more famous and far wealthier than the man she’s accused, she’s also conventionally attractive, white, cis-gender, married to a man with whom she has children. Everything was in her favor for being the most credible category of misconduct accuser. If the argument is that the men accused do more work, Lively upends that in her economic output is vastly greater than that of most men. Despite that, she is alleging that months-long smear campaign negatively impacted her business, reputation, and career. What’s striking about the situation is that many members of the general public, many of them likely her fans before the alleged campaign, were so quick to believe the allegations against Lively. Combined with rumors and accusations, like many other accusers, Lively had “made mistakes”, that is, she’s human. She promoted an alcohol brand in relation to It Ends with Us, which is about domestic violence, detractors said that she was “tone deaf” in how she promoted the movie overall, which was genuinely hurtful to survivors of domestic violence. The generous explanation of this would be misunderstanding the emotions and triggers of survivors and the dynamics of domestic violence and misconduct, which is something that people who bought into the smear campaign could also be accused of doing, that those folks are also contributing to the campaign allegedly started by the accused to discredit the accusations because those folks do not understand that discrediting an accuser is one of the common tactics when an accusation is made. Further, the studio behind the movie and the accused actor Justin Baldoni could also be accused of being “tone deaf” in marketing a romantic story that is about domestic violence and in profiting from it, and yet, the social media attacks against them were not nearly as damaging or virulent as they were on Lively (5).

Melisssa Nathan, the crisis management expert, privately wrote “And socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women” (1). Rose McGowan, one of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, said “It makes them feel better about something horrible that’s happened, you know? They can tuck themselves in at night, rest assured that it only happens to bad people, but that’s not the case” (1). What this story shows is that even one of the people allegedly running the smear campaign agrees: that women, by virtue of their gender alone, are viewed as being less credible. Being less credible and less likely to be believed means that women are more likely to be targeted for misconduct. If someone such as Blake Lively isn’t immune to this, imagine how much greater the risk is for everyday women in the workplace or in community. Most of all, if we’re to have an impact on preventing misconduct, the big picture is that we, as a society, have to work on gender inclusion and shifting our culture to one that’s more equal.

Citations:

(1) Twohey, Megan, McIntire, Mike, Tate, Julie. “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The New York Times. December 21, 2024. Accessed December 22, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/business/media/blake-lively-justin-baldoni-it-ends-with-us.html

(2)Tuerkheimer, Deborah. “The Credibility Discount: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers.” Lithub.com September 20, 2021. Accessed December 22, 2024. https://lithub.com/the-credibility-discount-why-we-doubt-accusers-and-protect-abusers/

(3) Tuerkheimer, Deborah. The Credibility Discount: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers. 2021. Harper Collins.

(4). This is something I touched upon in an essay I wrote around the time I shifted to doing this work professionally, that is, even if the accusers are believed, the man being accused is often “too important” for folks around him to want to bring light to the accusations. The essay is about the relationship I found between race of the accused and especially on targets of sexual misconduct. It’s available here: https://clearlysafe.substack.com/p/rape-and-race

(5). The author, Colleen Hoover, has been accused of profiting off of domestic violence in relation to a calendar she was marketing that ties to the book. She’s currently publicly supporting Lively following the New York Times article.