Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni & the Journo: ‘This Proves How Nasty Hollywood Is'
The 'New York Times' insinuated Kjersti Flaa was part of a smear campaign. Trolls online told her to kill herself. Now she says the paper 'owes her an apology'
As Hollywood takes its annual holiday break, one story has been the talk of the town — and of Everytown, USA too: Justin Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign against Blake Lively.
On Dec. 20, Lively and her team filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, among others, alleging a coordinated effort to tarnish her image after she sought an end to alleged sexual misconduct on the set of Sony Pictures’ It Ends with Us (Baldoni starred opposite Lively, directed the film and produced it via his Wayfarer Studios). The next day, the New York Times published a feature that revealed text messages between Baldoni and his PR team, supposedly plotting and bragging about their plans to tear Lively down on social media. Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, spoke on Sunday about his client’s plan for a countersuit that will “uncover and expose the false and destructive narrative that was intentionally engineered by a trusted media publication.”
Largely, the Times’ reporting attributes the rise of trolling and online hate directed at Lively to bots and accounts that were created by Baldoni’s PR team. But the story also makes mention of Kjersti Flaa, 51, a Norwegian entertainment reporter who in August — around the release of It Ends with Us — uploaded an interview clip from a 2016 junket with Lively. In Flaa’s video, titled “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job,” she congratulates the pregnant star on her “little bump,” to which Lively snaps back by remarking on Flaa’s “little bump.” (Flaa was not pregnant.)
The clip landed just as rumors of a rift between Baldoni and Lively were building, a narrative that Flaa was completely unaware of, she says. The video scored Flaa more than 6 million views on her YouTube channel, generated negative comments about Lively across the internet and reached millions more in impressions among those who saw the video on social media.
In its story, the Times mentions Flaa’s Lively video, then notes that she also posted clips of her past interviews with Johnny Depp — another client of Baldoni’s crisis PR rep, Melissa Nathan — during his 2022 defamation trial against Amber Heard, appending the hashtag #JusticeforJohnnyDepp. It’s not explicit, but the inference is inevitable: that Flaa was in cahoots with Baldoni’s team.
After the story’s publication, Flaa reached out to the reporters of the piece — Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate — and the Times then amended the section to include her denial of involvement with Baldoni’s smear campaign. As for why the reporters didn’t seek to speak with Flaa in advance, none of the New York Times reporters on the story nor a spokesperson responded to my request for comment over the last few days. In Lively’s 80-page legal complaint, Flaa is mentioned only once, in a footnote, alongside several other journalists who covered the Baldoni-Lively dustup (none of whom were named in the Times report).
Flaa tells me, “It’s terrible. And I feel like the New York Times owes me an apology.”
Flaa, who lives in Los Angeles, has posted other videos on YouTube (where she has 141,000 subscribers) detailing her experiences interviewing celebrities — she actually was the subject of a brief New York Times profile in October. She has posted three videos since the Times’ Dec. 21 story, denying any part in an orchestrated campaign, discussing her communication with the paper, and defending her journalism, but this is her first interview about the matter. She tells me she’s had no contact with Lively’s camp, her lawyers or Baldoni’s. But in our hourlong conversation, Flaa goes into detail about what happened, the inner workings of Hollywood’s PR machinery and how it feels to be caught in the crossfire of the Lively-Baldoni war.