Blake Lively Under Scrutiny For Controversial 2006 Interview, But That Doesn’t Dismiss Her Case Against Justin Baldoni

Blake Lively’s name has scarcely been out of the headlines since her It Ends With Us lawsuit against co-star and director Justin Baldoni kicked off. She alleges that he sexually harassed her on the movie set and that he started a smear campaign against her to invalidate her claims.

Baldoni says she’s lying and that she was the problem on set. It’s a case that may continue for some time, and both parties are having a lot of scrutiny aimed at them right now.

However, now there’s been a new social media backlash against Lively in particular. She was already a controversial figure because of her decision to marry husband Ryan Reynolds at a former slave plantation, and a newly unearthed 2006 video certainly doesn’t do her any favors.

The video was taken by MTV at a Comic-Con and also features Justin Long. He and Lively have a conversation about “geeks.” Long says, “When hot girls say they’re geeks, it pisses me off.” Putting the misogyny of that aside, Lively then goes on to defend herself in the worst way possible. “When my best friend and I were in tenth grade, we had like crazy crushes, We would drive around, like stalk, these guys,” she said. “We decided one night to go to the arcade where they were, and I put bronzer all over myself and a Scary Spice ‘fro so I thought they would think I was like a black girl.”

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Obviously, this is blackface. (Justin Long, incidentally, described it as “sweet and charming.”) While 2006 was a very different time, blackface was still not okay back then, and it’s shocking to hear Lively describe it so casually. The video is going viral on social media now, and people are rolling their eyes at her.

Unfortunately for Lively, she’s never escaped accusations of being a racist. Her plantation wedding took place in 2012, but it’s still talked about today. However, she did apologize for it. In 2020, during the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, she and Reynolds donated $200,000 to the NAACP defense fund and released a joint statement. “We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is,” it read. “We’ve been teaching our children differently than the way our parents taught us. We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it… especially our own complicity.”

While it was a step in the right direction, many people didn’t buy it and thus were on Baldoni’s side when the Lively-Baldoni scandal hit. But there’s a danger in thinking that just because a person isn’t great, they can’t ever be a victim. Although Baldoni has released footage of himself and Lively filming scenes for It Ends With Us, claiming it proves Lively is lying about being sexually harassed, he’s failed to defend himself against some of the other charges Lively put against him, such as his constantly talking to her about a porn addiction and claiming that he could communicate with her dead father.

One of the comments on the r/Fauxmoi thread about the video reads, “weird s***ty thing for her to say and do. still doesn’t justify her getting sexually harassed.” That neatly sums it up. Lively may not be the sort of person you’d be friends with in real life, and that’s valid, but her complaints against Baldoni shouldn’t be dismissed.