I’ve been pretending to be a man that I’m not my entire life,” says Justin Baldoni in his viral Ted Talk from 2017. You’d be forgiven for thinking the quote was more current, in light of recent headlines.
By now, you’ll be familiar with the lawsuit filed against the 40-year-old actor by Blake Lively, who has accused Baldoni of sexual harassment months after rumours of an on-set feud between the pair circulated online – claims which his lawyer has denied, calling them “false” and “intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt”.
The document states that midway through filming It Ends With Us – an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling book of the same name – a meeting took place to address what Lively calls a “hostile work environment”, in which she listed a series of requirements for her to continue working on the film. These included no showing nude videos or images of women to Lively, as well as no more discussions about the Gossip Girl star’s personal experiences with sex. No further mentions of cast and crew’s genitalia, as well as no more inquiries about her weight.
The lawsuit also alleges that Baldoni “inserted improvised gratuitous sexual content and/or scenes involving nudity into the film (including for an underage character) in highly unsettling ways”.
There are many more allegations listed in the lawsuit, which also claims that fan backlash against Lively in the lead-up to the film and after its release was part of a carefully orchestrated effort by Baldoni’s PR team to “destroy” her reputation.
Baldoni has built an entire brand around being an ally to women.
It began on social media, where Baldoni regularly spoke about feminism, but was cemented by the aforementioned Ted Talk – in which the actor performed a mea culpa on behalf of masculinity. “I believe that as men, it’s time we start to see past our privilege and recognise that we are not just part of the problem,” he said. “Fellas, we are the problem.”
This is rhetoric Baldoni has continued to espouse ad nauseam ever since, including during the press run for It Ends with Us. “I really wanted an audience to feel how it feels to be gaslit, to feel what it was like to question if everything they saw was a lie and if everything they felt wasn’t true because that is the reality for so many women,” he said of the film on the podcast “How to Fail with Elizabeth Day”, in an episode that Day has since removed in light of Lively’s claims.
If Baldoni is guilty of what Lively has accused him of, those words would take on a whole new meaning: that his talk of allyship was nothing more than empty virtue signalling – like greenwashing, only pink.
At this stage, we do not know. But what I do know is that all this stings given that women need male allies now more than ever.
In addition to the casual misogyny and sexual harassment women face every day, as demonstrated by the recent allegations against Gregg Wallace, violence against women and girls is also on the rise – so much so that it has been dubbed a “national emergency” by UN Women.
But it’s not just here in the UK that it’s a problem – from the brutal death of Miss Switzerland finalist Kristina Joksimovic to the killing of Olympic long-distance runner Rebecca Cheptegei and the recent rape convictions of Gisèle Pelicot’s former husband Dominique and 51 others.
Personally, I’d like to see more men talking about these things instead of spouting empty words about male privilege on a podcast. Because women do need men to speak up and fight alongside them.
But their actions need to match their words. If they don’t, well, all we’re left with is a bunch of men pretending to be people they aren’t.
