Blake Lively Turns the Shame Around

Opinion|Blake Lively Turns the Shame Around

The actress 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 P.R. smear campaign against her. Lively also names Baldoni and several public relations experts in the suit.

Ironies abound. The film is in part about how men get away with mistreating women around them. As my Times colleagues noted in their 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-chairman.

“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.”