Before filing a legal complaint and lawsuit against co-star and director Justin Baldoni – and an explosive court filing revealed he wanted to “bury” her – what would people have said about Blake Lively?

Last summer, surrounding the press tour for the film It Ends With Us, Lively became the internet’s favourite villain for nearly a month. Her crimes included giving dismissive interviews, being badly dressed, too chipper, too rude and, most of all, annoying.

For weeks, she was eviscerated online by millions on TikTok, X and Instagram – by some for failing to grasp the film’s message about the cycle of domestic violence (and simultaneously promoting her haircare line and her husband, Ryan Reynolds’ gin brand), but by many, many more for simply giving off bad vibes. There was always something off about her, they concurred.

At the time, this vitriol felt as if it came out of nowhere – but we now understand it appears to have been driven by a calculated smear campaign orchestrated by Baldoni’s PR team. Dozens of subpoenaed text messages and documents unveiled an apparent plan for how to make hate for Lively go viral, seemingly in an attempt to stem public support if she were to come forward with a complaint she made about Baldoni during filming. Details included comments appearing to take credit for the avalanche of criticism against Lively (“We’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative”).

One message mentioned Lively’s friendship with the singer Taylor Swift, and how they could “explore planting stories about the weaponisation of feminism” given Swift had been accused of such tactics. Even the tone deaf messaging appeared to have been directed by production – telling the cast to focus on the “uplifting” aspects of the film – leaving Baldoni the sole star speaking sensitively while Lively, as instructed, encouraged people to “grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it”.

Beyond the manipulation, Lively’s allegations about Baldoni’s behaviour claimed he violated physical boundaries, made sexual and inappropriate comments and that she did not have an intimacy coordinator on set.

The alleged campaign against Lively was certainly clever. But why was it so successful? In August, many noted how minor Lively’s perceived wrongdoings were, especially relative to the volume of the backlash. It was also public knowledge that Baldoni had hired the same crisis management firm that represented Johnny Depp during his trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard, where Heard then experienced arguably the greatest targeted online abuse of any person in history.

We knew then that the film’s core cast had all unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram and were dodging questions about him on the red carpet, all while praising (and following) Lively as a performer and colleague. And yet, none of this raised any meaningful suspicion: Baldoni was saint, Lively sinner even with this lopsided array of red flags.

The answer isn’t complicated – in the words of Baldoni’s own crisis management representative: “It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” It is part of a growing trend in the past decade, where lip service is paid to a nebulous idea of feminism, but its principles aren’t adopted, obscuring (despite the popular slogan) what a feminist actually looks like.

When Lively went viral online, many of the people tearing her down would have self-identified as feminists, even in that very moment. Maybe in the past they had implored their followers to “believe women” or used the hashtag #MeToo. In spite of this high cultural salience of supposedly feminist politics, a modern iteration of an age-old standard persists: that a man can do almost anything, but as long as a woman has done an inch of wrong, she will be the one that people – eagerly, gleefully – want to watch burn.

Many women (even some men) may be reading this and rolling their eyes at the obviousness of these statements. But a new pattern is emerging where millions of people are professing to understand sexism and patriarchy, claiming they have interrogated its impulses, fully grasped how much society hates women – but will do little to challenge or combat it in practice.

The mob mentality of social media has only exacerbated and accelerated this phenomenon, where you can go online and immediately see hundreds of posts egging each other on to attack one woman while, in the same breath, saying that this is justice and not misogyny. Lively has been brave to take this case forward. She easily could have hung back, let everything blow over and allow someone else to become the internet’s most hated woman in a few months’ time. This lawsuit will be costly and draw her more ire than goodwill. And the backlash has already begun: Baldoni has filed his own lawsuit against the New York Times for $250m for reporting on Lively’s filing and his lawyer has said he plans to file a countersuit against Lively that will “shock everyone”.

A blind belief in Baldoni’s lawyer’s statement has made Lively go viral again, attacking her for what is being framed as equally bad (if not worse) behaviour than she has alleged of Baldoni, including “bombshell revelations” like having her wardrobe sent to her house rather than travelling to the set, and spending $5,000 on shoes.

Most of the arguments we’ll see in the coming months will try to assert who was right and who was wrong – poring over the details of each other’s accusations and claims from others who were on set during filming. But this misses what this saga has unearthed about our culture.

What we grapple with now is why so many were eager to jump to Baldoni’s defence and hungrily annihilated Lively, and how much is needed for a man to be wrong and how much more for a woman to be right.

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