Crisis manager Molly McPherson breaks down why Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni settled instead of going to trial. Lively stops the leak of damaging information and protects her brand, but gets no public vindication. Baldoni can rebuild his image without admitting wrongdoing, but the confidentiality clause keeps him from fully defending himself.
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni settle. What does this mean for them from a reputational point of view? Are we surprised that they settled? Well, not at all. If you're someone who works in crisis management like I do, you could see the writing on the wall. This was a path of mutual destruction if they went through this court case. Through some of the pros and cons for settling, if you want more of this dive, if we get— we'll get into the PR machinations of it all and the reputational challenges. May 14th, my Substack, 12 PM Eastern Time. Here are the pros for settling. One, for Blake Lively, she no longer has to worry about the pariah or the Amber Heard of it all. Think of it— has anyone heard from Amber Heard? That court case severely damaged her reputation. Also stops the drip, drip, drip of information coming from studio executives and people within the entertainment industry. I've noticed over the past week there's been a lot of stories about her businesses and her brand. So prevents a lot of cross- cross-examination, getting into the details, uh, tax, the Taylor Swift of it all. It also prevents exposure to business interests, not only for Blake Lively but her husband Ryan Reynolds as well. The cons, and this is the biggest, there's no public vindication. It doesn't look like they won at all. And by extension, Wayfair. It stops the conversation about the public smearing. Working with the crisis PR team, or publicists working as crisis PR people, uh, in all of the other cases that were coming up. Rebel Wilson. I mean, this was a story that wasn't going away, and every time it came up, it was tied to Justin Baldoni. Allows him to rebuild his socially conscious public persona. Justin Baldoni has not done much in terms of PR for himself since this whole legal situation started. Now he can kick that into high gear, and it gives him room to be able to take some accountability, talk about his role in everything without admitting to any type of smear campaign. Or him also, no formal public exoneration or a clear-cut victory. Any payment that comes from this case is a tacit acknowledgement that there was something to the argument that Blake Lively was making. The confidentiality clause in place, likely it will limit how aggressively he can defend himself, uh, to say that it was creative disagreement over misconduct that's going to limit him from fully coming back. But the positive for all three, the path to mutual destruction ends. Yeah, of celebrities hating each other so much, that doesn't benefit anyone. But what harms all of them is this fog of war fog of ambiguity. No one really understands what happened, why it happened. I want to go a little bit deeper into this story, the PR machinations, the reputation
