Media Ethics and Reporting on Allegations: PR Lessons from the Lively/Baldoni Case

The New York Times exposé published on Dec. 21, 2024, about actor/director Justin Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign against actress Blake Lively highlighted the dark side of PR. The report claimed that Baldoni, who worked with Lively on the film “It Ends With Us,” leveraged PR to sink the actress’s reputation and weaken the impact of her incendiary claims about his unprofessional behavior. 

A week later, however, Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Times, saying the media outlet got the story wrong. His lawsuit accuses The Times of building its story “almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative” while disregarding information that would have shown the narrative to be false. 

Ultimately, the legal questions in Baldoni’s suit concern media ethics. If it proceeds, the court will decide whether the Times was misled by a smear campaign to report on allegations without doing enough to confirm their validity. But that could take a long time, and debates in the public arena could dramatically impact both Lively and Baldoni’s reputations. 

What can the actors do to protect themselves as the case unfolds? You can read about the steps they, as well as others in similar situations, should consider in the text on the PR News Online website. 

Source: PR News Online