Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Blake Lively showed up on the Met Gala red carpet Monday evening in a giant poof of a dress with an over-the-top train. I’ve scrolled by multiple online comments calling it hideous. All is right with the world.
OK, so maybe I couldn’t resist saying so in the shadiest possible way, but I was genuinely happy to see Lively show up at one of the biggest fashion and celebrity events of the year, just hours after the news broke that she settled her lawsuit with Justin Baldoni over their 2024 film It Ends With Us. The outcome of the case was ambiguous: Though more details could still emerge, TMZ noted that the joint statement both sides released contained no apology from Baldoni and that apparently no money exchanged hands. It’s a far cry from the decisive victory Lively was hoping for when she filed a legal complaint alleging sexual harassment and retaliation a year and a half ago. And yet, for Lively to step out in front of a bunch of cameras right as all of this is coming to a less-than-favorable conclusion is a statement of its own. If the average person’s reaction to her is back to criticizing what she wears instead of another overheated conspiracy about her Hollywood cabal, maybe there’s hope for the future.
The case settled just weeks before a trial was scheduled to begin. Legal experts have expected a settlement all along, as tends to be the norm with celebrity trials. The surprise was that this one went on as long as it did, and got as ugly as it did. Lively started all this to restore her reputation after the release of It Ends With Us, which should have been a huge triumph given its box office, but left her with a giant public relations problem instead. Her initial legal complaint, accompanied by a sympathetic New York Times write-up that revealed some of the crisis communications machinations behind the scenes, looked like it might do the trick in helping her to repair her image. But Baldoni and his studio, Wayfarer, hit back hard in response, serving Lively (and the Times) with a defamation suit and putting effort into promoting their own timeline of events and evidence that supposedly disproved hers. It worked remarkably well, and Baldoni developed a groundswell of support online. Though it was never clear how large this group was, it was vocal, and if Lively’s reputation wasn’t a wreck before, with this contingent on board, no comments section or Reddit thread was safe.
I understood why both sides wanted to keep fighting: Despite Baldoni’s online army, his reputation in Hollywood seemed more or less ruined. Lively’s efforts to rehabilitate her image, too, seemed to do just as much harm as they did good: Texts and emails that made her and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, look like divas came to light, and many speculated about whether anyone would want to work with her. Things only would have gotten uglier had the case gone to trial. Plus, Baldoni’s suit against Lively was dismissed last year, but in recent weeks, so were her sexual harassment allegations—the scope of the case and the potential benefits to winning kept getting smaller and smaller. Finally, after millions of dollars and untold damage to their own reputations, both sides flinched.
Heather Schwedel
The Devil Wears Prada 2 Is Full of Beautiful People. Unfortunately, One of Them Sticks Out.
Read More
All along, this case has been a Rorschach test, with people seeing in it what they want to see in it, and it strikes me that the ambiguity of the ending means that it will remain that way forever. Baldoni’s side can interpret the settlement as a win; they got Lively to back down. But Lively’s side can claim it as a win, too. M.J. Morley, a lawyer who has been commenting on the case from a pro-Lively standpoint, wrote online that “the statement tells you what you need to know about who had the leverage in that room”: “The team that spent 18 months calling her complaints ‘revoltingly false’ and ‘a huge lie’ agreed to sign a statement saying her concerns deserved to be heard.”
I had a hard time reading the very wishy-washy statement that way. My initial read was that Lively lost. Though it’s not quite Johnny Depp and Amber Heard all over again, where Heard lost and was essentially driven out of Hollywood, it was another woman attempting to fight weaponized misogyny and being forced to give up.
That’s why it mattered that Lively showed up on the red carpet on Monday. Longtime Lively heads surely thought of her old Gossip Girl character, Serena, in the show’s first episode, when she has to walk through Grand Central cloaked in scandal and knowing how many eyes are on her. There have been rumors in recent weeks that Lively plans to retreat from the spotlight, but this appearance suggests that she isn’t going anywhere. She no doubt will be carrying herself differently, and you can already see that in the quickie interview she did with La La Anthony, where she showed off a bag that incorporated her children’s artwork and claimed to be shy. Blake Lively, shy? I’m rooting for her, but even I’m not buying that.
The LDS Church Is Suing One of Its Most Vocal Critics for a Seemingly Silly Reason. It Could Change What We Know About Mormonism.
Lively has hurt her credibility in Hollywood, but an invitation to the Met ball proves that she still has enough institutional support to attempt a comeback. I noticed she posed for a photo with Anne Hathaway, a woman who knows a thing or two about surviving a hate cycle. Getting past all this won’t be easy—I saw plenty of comments spreading the rumor that she showed up uninvited (as if you can show up to the Met ball uninvited without being instantly tackled—come on, it’s not the White House correspondents’ dinner over here). Others were happy to note that she seemed to be back to her old diva ways, ordering around the people carrying her dress’s train. Whatever: There are a certain number of people who will always hold this case against her, and there’s not much she can do about that. All she needs is for most people to give her a chance to go back to being a normal, annoying celebrity. From that vantage point, people hating her dress is a great first step. It may be the best thing that’s happened to Lively in years.
Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.