Nicholas Kristof: Blake Lively turns the shame around

Actor Blake Lively worked with me on a 2015 PBS documentary exploring sex trafficking in the United States. She was shaken by what we found, deeply compassionate toward survivors and willing to look unflinchingly at an ugliness that many avert their eyes from.

The villains then were easy to spot: brutes who raped, sold and enslaved underage girls. In the real world, it’s more complicated. Predators can hold glamorous jobs, present themselves as feminists and be celebrated for their roles empowering women.

That’s the situation Lively describes in an explosive legal complaint that she filed Friday against Wayfarer Studios, maker of her recent film “It Ends With Us.” She alleges that after she protested sexual harassment by Justin Baldoni, her co-star and the film’s director, the studio retaliated with a PR smear campaign against her. Lively also names Baldoni and several public relations experts in the lawsuit.

The film is in part about how men get away with mistreating women around them. As my New York Times colleagues noted in a must-read article, Baldoni was honored this month at an event heralding men who “elevate women” and “promote gender equality.” And he reportedly has described himself as a feminist and has said things like, “Let’s just shut up and finally listen to the women in our lives.”

So, with the caveat that the complaint presents just one side, let’s listen.

Lively alleges that Baldoni added sexual content and gratuitous nude scenes to the film and treated women disrespectfully. During a childbirth scene, the filing says, the studio allowed “nonessential crew to pass through while Ms. Lively was mostly nude with her legs spread wide in stirrups and only a small piece of fabric covering her genitalia.” Among the nonessential people who showed up, she says, was a Wayfarer co-chair.

“Ms. Lively became even more alarmed when Mr. Baldoni introduced his ‘best friend’ to play the role of the OB-GYN,” the complaint states. It adds that “the selection of Mr. Baldoni’s friend for this intimate role, in which the actor’s face and hands were in close proximity to her nearly nude genitalia for a birth scene, was invasive and humiliating.”

Lively’s complaint says that executives entered her trailer uninvited when she was undressed, ogled her when she was topless, asked intimate questions and commented inappropriately on various women involved in the film.

Text messages and emails obtained by Lively’s lawyers through a subpoena suggest that Wayfarer organized a social media campaign to pre-emptively discredit her, for fear that she would speak up about her claims.

“We can bury anyone,” boasted a crisis management expert hired by the studio, in an exchange about her.

Wayfarer and Baldoni strongly deny the allegations.

“It is shameful that Ms. Lively and her representatives would make such serious and categorically false accusations,” a lawyer for the studio said in a statement to the Times.

After she raised initial concerns, Wayfarer agreed to provide an intimacy coordinator and added other safeguards.

What is clear is that Lively faced a surge of online negativity last summer, with the Daily Mail asking if she was about to be canceled and suggesting that her star might be forever tarnished. Sales of her hair care products fell.

Even in an age when wild lies and deepfakes catch fire on social media, it’s a little scary to think that a few PR professionals could manage to undercut one of America’s best-known celebrities so successfully, swiftly and effortlessly. If “social manipulation,” as the internal messages referred to the apparent campaign, can damage a famous person like Lively, is anyone safe? As one of the people hired by Wayfarer put it, “People really want to hate on women.”

I suspect that the last thing Lively wants is for us to be discussing people leering at her while she was naked. This suit prolongs the humiliation. But the only way to end impunity is to speak up.

In a different context, in France, Gisèle Pelicot spoke out after her husband arranged for dozens of men to rape her while she was drugged. “The shame must change sides,” she said, and of course, she was right: The shame lies with the rapists, not with their targets. And while what Lively faced is not the same, it’s also true that on a movie set or anywhere else, the stigma and humiliation should fall on the abusers, not the abused. That’s the only way forward, and it happens when people step forward and file suits with painful details.

We don’t know all that happened on the set of “It Ends With Us,” and Baldoni and the studio executives have a right to be heard. More will emerge as this case proceeds.

The online campaign against Lively suggested that she was a diva and difficult to work with. All I know is that during the collaboration with Lively on the documentary, “A Path Appears,” by Show of Force, I found her authentic, delightful and committed. She wanted to use her stardom to help others who needed the attention more, such as survivors of human trafficking. She wanted to use her celebrity to help chip away at misogyny and oppression.

She was particularly moved by the courage of women who shared harrowing accounts of being trafficked. “I just have so much admiration and respect for these women, for opening up and telling their stories,” Lively said at the time. “Because it makes me think, if that happened to me, would I have the courage?”

Then she said something that shapes how I see her in this moment. Speaking of the trafficking survivors we met, Lively said: “They don’t want to hear, ‘You’re so inspirational,’ because that implies you’re a victim. It’s like, ‘I don’t want to be an inspiration. I just want to be a woman. I just want to be an equal.’ ”

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at the New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10018.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.