Denton, Gamergate and now Blake Lively

[RethinkingLife]

This article is a decent overview of not only how straightforward it is to destroy reputations, but how trivially easy it is to undermine women and feminism even or especially among those who consider themselves media savvy.

I grieve for how easy it is to operate from this playbook and it seems to consolidate tactics that have been all too successful.

“You know we can bury anyone,” crisis management expert Melissa Nathan wrote to PR executive Jennifer Abel, one of thousands of messages subpoenaed by Lively…
In a subsequent message, Nathan told Abel that Baldoni didn’t realise how lucky he was given the allegations they had heard about his on-set conduct…
In response to the social media response “really ramping up” in terms of criticism of Lively, Nathan texted Abel: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” A “scenario planning” document by Nathan’s firm, TAG PR, said it could “explore planting stories about the weaponisation of feminism and how people in [Lively’s] circle like Taylor Swift have been accused of utilising these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.”…
… the idea of the Hollywood and PR machines perverting that concept to discredit a woman apparently intent on ensuring the safety of herself and others – on the chaotic set of a film about ending cycles of domestic abuse – is a level of 4D chess that is terrifying in its imperceptibility, effectiveness and potential prevalence.
There is a chilling disconnect in the way the crisis and publicity parties rejoice in their apparent PR victory – “So much mixed messaging It’s actually really funny if you think about it,” Nathan texted Abel – and the covert warfare they allegedly used to manipulate the tabloid media into parroting their narrative. “This went so well I am fucking dying … We have the four majors standing down on HR complaint,” Nathan told Abel. When MailOnline published a piece in August asking “Is Blake Lively set to be CANCELLED?” Abel texted Nathan: “You really outdid yourself with this piece.” These methods are deadly, acutely attuned to how to form and nurture media and social media sentiment against a woman. As Taylor Lorenz writes in her newsletter User Mag, it takes its cues directly from the Gamergate playbook.
How many women has this happened to? How many smear campaigns have seduced our most base and ungenerous instincts into swallowing their line?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/24/blake-lively-allegations-actor-it-ends-with-us-justin-baldoni

That bit about how much people want to hate women is on the nail.

You need look no further than mumsnet to see that. Which is really sad.
The threads about bl showed it very clearly.

Yes. I was on one of them. It started out as an interesting discussion, and ended up being completely derailed.

It is depressing to see how gullible people are. At the time of the Amber Heard libel trial, there was clearly a systematic attempt by Johnny Depp's PR team to destroy her reputation. Furthermore, an investigation by Tortoise found that a large proportion of the anti-Heard tweets were sent out by bot accounts in Saudi Arabia (Depp is close friends with the Crown Prince).

And people fell for it, hook, line and sinker, including women. Yet the same people didn't seem in the slightest bit bothered about the viciously sadistic texts Depp sent about heard. It's so depressing.

Regarding the title of this thread, can anyone explain Gamergate to me? All I know is that it was a thing and that Brianna Wu was somehow at the centre of it all.

In the linked post from the OP, the Gamergate Playbook link is

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/08/gamergate-trolls-woke-game-consultants

Formal account of it:

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/09/gamergate-gamers-first-stand-up-against-grievance-social-justice/

Glinner has said that originally being on the 'wrong' side of Gamergate and belatedly understanding the impact on women was part of the impetus for his later actions. This is a recent account by him:

NB: I've not addressed the matter of Wu for various reasons because I'd rather emphasise what happened to Watson and women who were comparable then.

Thank you.

Wu keeps mentioning Gamergate as if Wu was solely and personally responsible for defending female game devs during that whole nasty attack. It’s such a strong part of Wu’s curated public identity (and appears to be part of Wu’s shtick in order to get asked onto female tech podcasts) because Wu goes on and on about Wu’s white knighting for women in tech. I’ve seen this strategy in action in the UK as well, with regards to feminist activism and Kristina Harrison & Debbie Hayton. The ways it goes is that you stand up for women under attack, they’re grateful and they let you join their club. Et voila! You’re where you want to be: seen as one of the girls.

Yeah, but how else would women know how to feminist properly?

You have got to be kidding me.

It is super clear already that the list of allegations are true. The fact of the meetings, and the lawsuit says it is. The events since then are his written admission that they are true.

And your answer, to young people is “Oh well we don’t know what’s true”?

Your absolutely disgusting analysis is “follow the money”. What do you think that means?
The first message it sends to your sons and daughters is that the truth is of no relevance to you. You have been quite clear that … and pick any item off the list…. None of what he has done is the issue.
You are also clear that only Lively’s actions are the issue here. Given that basically Baldoni has in effect already admitted his actions, why did you moderate a household of young people where her actions were put through the mill, and his weren’t .
What actions could Blake Lively have taken at the time that would have avoided your opprobrium? What should she have done to avoid you participating in criticism of her, something that was both personally and busy savvy.?

And lastly- why should there not be a Taylor Swift song on the soundtrack. She’s very popular with the target audience, she’s a great songwriter. Sounds like a wise business decision to me. My guess is you’d send business the way of friends or family, and if you feel entitled to do that with receiving a snide ch-ching, then why shouldn’t the production company?

Production didn’t capitulate- they negotiated from the very very weak position Jason Baldoni put them in. Because he’s the problem here, not Blake Lively.

edited to correct the SPAG from hammering on the keyboard in annoyance
TLDR: Quoted post is internalized misogyny masquerading as temple tapping “Follow the money, you know ch-ching, but she totes deserves all of it.”

Yeah that “summary” is pathetic and entirely misses the point.. She “made a list of 39 demands”? Makes it sound like she was “demanding” white M&ms or kittens. She asked not to be sexually harassed at work. How on any planet is that unreasonable? The rest is flannel and irrelevant waffle. You seem uneducated. Hope your kids have the wit to ignore your wittering.

It strikes me that her actions were villified not the man's as she is a woman and only women are subject to the double bind:

Women are expected to be kind and accommodating to others, more so than men.

If women show agency and advocate for themselves they are seen as cold and unlikeable, whereas men don't suffer this stigma.

So the double bind is: either be a doormat but likeable or stand up for yourself and unlikeable.

JB's PR agency used this deep instinct to their advantage (even though they probably didn't know they were doing it). One of the women there even said it was 'sad' to see how much people want to hate women

She's half way there.

People are conditioned to hate women who stand up for themselves. They just tapped into this and social media helped them do it on a global scale.

@Cailin66 Are you working for the crisis PR firm or something? Your post is the biggest load of disingenuous DARVO I’ve ever read.

A person senior in tv saw this happen to one of the actors working for her. Until you see it you can’t believe it. As she explained it we were horrified. It’s exactly the same scenario as this.

It's terrifying and not remotely surprising. I've thought this for a long time in fields like women's rights, politics, commercial organisations, celebrities, sport, you name it. MN gets infiltrated. It doesn't take long before 'independent thinkers' start spouting the guff they've ingested.

You can tell because they use the same examples and terminology. Chilling. I used to fear that I'd become a conspiracy theorist but reading this campaign makes use realise how cynical and persistent these campaigns are.

Evidently sex scenes which were supposedly ‘make-believe’ parts of the film were used by Baldoni and others as opportunities to commit ad hoc, unscripted, personal, sexual acts on Lively.

She seems to have been being sexually assaulted as a matter of course.

That's exactly what anyone reading this is going to get from it.

Talking about the size of your cock, ad libbing during kissing scenes, inviting your mates to come and act in intimate sex scenes?

I mean you could just pick one of the things on that loong list and it would be entirely unacceptable.

More than one does indeed look like opportunistic sexual assault.

But you're supposed to think the only reason Blake lively objected is to get more cash??

If any of this was the slightest bit untrue, wouldn't Blake Lively been getting sued for defamation (or whatever the US equivalent is)?

Apart from the DARVO, which is remarkable for its lack of subtlety, there's a strong stink of 'all women are whores' coming off this.

No. When there was all the fuss about the edited photos, Ms. Lively posted a joke edited photo herself, and then later apologised for that (an actual apology, not an "I'm sorry you feel that way" apology.

The comments under this article would appear to reflect exactly what Blake Lively is accusing the Baldoni camp of doing

Her main crime is that she appeared to have been rude in an interview about her baby bump and why is the daily mail changing tack, because there were so negative many stories about her recently!

Plus victim blaming of why didn't she leave the film, why wasn't there a lock on her trailer door.

Plus there's a lot of 'she can be rude', so therefore it's all okay?

Edited to add link

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14224709/blake-lively-justin-baldoni-lawsuit-legal-action.html?spot_im_scroll_to_comments=true&spot_im_highlight_immediate=true

A while back, I came across a discussion of a clip from Cape Fear where Robert de Niro sticks his thumb in Juliette Lewis' mouth (she was 17 at the time). The discussants claimed that JL had a major crush on de Niro, de Niro decided to use this and they all congratulated themselves because she blushed deeply with her reaction and it was such an amazing effect that they used it in the film.
The discussants lamented that, post #MeToo, you wouldn't be able to do this today.
I went looking to see if I could find it again and came across this quite dark thread on Reddit that make the whole business around that feel even more sleazy and emphasises the sexual exploitation and abuse of vulnerable, young people. And the tremendous difficulty girls and women have in curating their reputations and careers. The story about Diaz and Rogan's acceptance of it was wretched.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/knj4vf/the_scene_when_robert_deniro_meets_juliette_lewis/

It is horribly easy to wreck lives. And then to shame women who are sexually exploited and then shame them for speaking up.
Why is this such a wretchedly successful strategy? Is it because there's a current of misogyny into which to tap? Why the acceptance of these narratives by other women? (As Datun and PPs point out.)

So essentially if you are not at all times a fawning gushing “nice” girl you jolly well deserve to be sexually harassed at work. Got it.

That was my immediate thought when I read that post.

And if you have been paid for a job, sexual access to you is part of the deal

Yes I cannot think anything other than callin is in the pay of Baldonis team for that absolute drivel he posted (can only assume callin is a he though women can be misogynists too sadly)