‘As horrifying as it’s destructive’: Amber Heard empathises with Blake Lively over alleged smear campaign
For those who smelt the red flag when Justin Baldoni hired the PR team that worked with Johnny Depp during the trial against Amber Heard, this is a moment of quiet vindication. After Blake Lively filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against her It Ends With Us costar and director, also alleging his crisis PR team attempted a smear campaign against her, Heard has spoken up in support of the actress.
In a statement to NBC news, Amber Heard empathised with Blake Lively, having gone through a similar targeted campaign against her character during the 2022 trial against ex-husband Johnny Depp. “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.”
While Depp was awarded a total of $15 million in damages at the end of their defamation trial, Heard was awarded only $2 million. And the hate against her on social media did more damage. The Aquaman actress has practically withdrawn from movies and now lives in Spain.
Earlier this year, when the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s BookTok sensation novel was due for release, all eyeballs were focused not on the film but on a rumoured falling out between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, with the entire cast siding with Lively. After months of speculation and sparse details over what their feud was about, Blake Lively has come forth with a list of horrifying allegations against Baldoni, from sexual harassment on set to targeted efforts at maligning her.
One of the major allegations the actress has made against Baldoni is astroturfing, which is the practice of deceiving people into thinking that an orchestrated negative campaign against a person or organisation is actually organic and from unsolicited general public.
When the news dropped that Baldoni had hired Johnny Depp’s publicist Jennifer Abel, the first seeds of doubt against him were sown in what was otherwise a generally supportive sentiment towards the Jane The Virgin actor. Many thought it sus that right after Abel was hired, articles, social media discourse, and even an old interview clip that portrayed Lively in a negative light suddenly began surfacing. It was too closely reminiscent of the kind of vitriolic sentiment that was developed around Amber Heard during the trial with Depp.
According to the report by The New York Times, the complaint filed by Blake Lively cites alleged texts and emails exchanged between Justin Baldoni and his team discussing an online strategy that they could deploy to protect their client’s image while weakening Lively’s. “We can bury anyone,” one of the messages suggested. In another exchange, the team is even celebrating negative social media sentiment against Lively.
As Amber Heard rightly said, it is indeed terrifying that even a woman with the social and financial clout that Lively has, both as an actress and as the wife of an actor like Ryan Reynolds, can be easily targeted with a malicious and damaging campaign. Thanks to the patriarchy, people love to hate on women and don’t need much convincing to turn against them and side with a man. In the case of both Heard and Lively, they’re both not too liked, and therefore not ‘the perfect victim’, which makes it easier to discredit their stories even if there was proof suggesting otherwise.
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