A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. Okay,

so Emily, I need to ask you a question.

Okay. Why

is a business podcast called Slate Money devoted to the business and finance news of the week talking about celebrity gossip? Because

it's not just celebrity gossip, Felix. It is an event, a volley of lawsuits between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, two entertainers, actors, and media elites, business people. And this is a story about Hollywood, the entertainment industry. It's a story about public relations, how the media works in 2024. It's not just a gossip story. If you think that this news about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni and the hit movie, It Ends With Us, is merely a bit of fluffy celebrity gossip, then you are thinking about it all wrong. And that's why we are here to talk about it on Slate Money.

So my angle, which appeared on Axios.com, is that this is symptomatic of a much bigger phenomenon that is the way in which people wanting to make public accusations are doing it through lawsuits. not really filing lawsuits for the purpose of, I want a judge to, or jury to, you know, find the verdicts and deliver a judgment so much as this is a PR move and a way of making accusations in public. And we've seen this in the Sean Combs case. We've seen this in the Leon Black case. We've seen this kind of sort of with Bill Ackman versus Business Insider and in multiple entertainment examples. Emily, you had a couple as well. And it's really interesting to me the way in which the internet has done this, because when you file a lawsuit, within minutes, that lawsuit, the full PDF is available on Twitter for people to download. And it's basically a publication and it goes into enormous amounts of detail and no one's, oh, you know, that's too long. I didn't bother reading that whole thing. You know, this is very boring or a crap reporter. You know, they're like, oh, wow, this is lots of juicy, salacious stuff. And it's a great way of disintermediating the media or allowing the media to write about things that maybe they might otherwise be a little bit chery of writing about. And also just going straight to the public with something that looks very official and true, because people generally, there's something truthy about that format. You know what I mean?

Well, let's just back up and just can we be clear and at least explain a little bit more about why we're talking about this sure so over the holiday break news dropped that the actress blake lively filed a complaint in california against the actor justin baldoni and his production company, I believe, basically accusing them of retaliation. She says she was sexually harassed on the set of the movie. And then she got Justin Baldoni and his producing partner to agree to sort of a list of demands, you know, that they, TLDR, don't sexually harass her on the set of the movie anymore. And then in retaliation for that and out of fear that she would come forward and talk about that harassment, they waged this public relations campaign against her that damaged her reputation. So once she filed that complaint, the New York Times published a report on it from Megan Tuohy, who's one of the iconic Me Too reporters, Pulitzer winners, who reported on Harvey Weinstein. It made a huge splash. And then since then, there's been more lawsuits. Justin Baldoni filed his own lawsuit. Blake Lively, who had just initially filed a complaint, filed her own lawsuit. So it's all been volleyed back and forth and covered in the press. And that is why we're talking about it. I just wanted to get that out there.

Also, you know, just to complicate things further, there was also a lawsuit, you know, a sort of intra-PR company lawsuit between the woman who ran the PR company and the former employee who was going to leave the PR company who was working with Jason Baldoni. The whole thing is very messy and we don't need to sort of litigate it. But the big picture in terms of what everyone seems to want here is a good reputation. And Blake Lively, in the wake of the press campaign for the movie, had a bad reputation for reasons that may or may not have been justified. When the New York Times article came out, that served to largely turn around her education. It was like a very successful PR move, whatever its merits on the sort of jurisprudential front. Then Justin Baldoni suffered a reputational hit from that article. And so then he filed his own lawsuit, which was ostensibly a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, which he has no chance of winning, but really, again, is a way of salvaging or an attempt to salvage his reputation, and so on and so forth. And what we're seeing here is an exercise in reputation management being waged through the courts. And I feel on some level that this is a kind of waste of time for the courts. It's kind of not a great look for courts to be dragged into what is really a reputation management thing, but that seems to be where we are.