Taylor Swift: A Complete Break Down Of Her 2016 Smear Campaign- And Why It’s Nothing Like That Of Blake Lively’s

We really can’t write an entire blog entry about Blake Lively and then not even mention Taylor Swift. That’s exactly what I did in my previous post. I didn’t mention Taylor Swift. To say that I feel awful would be an understatement. They’re besties. They’ve been friends for 10 years, at least. Swift is godmother to her children. Lively was even seen posing with Gigi Hadid, another one of Swift’s besties, at the ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ premiere last year. And even though I didn’t mention Swift in my post about the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni legal battle, Lively made sure to mention her superstar friend in her complaint against Baldoni. First, the complaint mentioned, ‘The Scenario Planning document states that TAG could ‘also explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in [Lively’s] circle like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.’ TAG is the company owned by Scooter Braun, talent manager and entrepreneur who infamously acquired Swift’s entire catalogue for $300 million in 2019 and then sold them without her knowledge in 2020. This resulted in Swift re-recording the 6 albums that he purchased. As of the publishing of this post, Swift has two more albums to re-release.

Swift is then mentioned again in a text that read, ‘We have seen the most innocuous issues turn giant due to socials or the hugest crisis have no effects on social whatsoever- you just cannot tell at this stage. But, [Lively] does have some of the [Swift] fanbase so we will be taking it extremely seriously.’ This was an alleged text message written by Melissa Nathan, a crisis management expert at TAG. With that being said, it’s very obvious that Swift is a powerful woman; one whose reputation was almost destroyed by multiple men in the industry. It wasn’t just Braun at the time, who also managed talents like Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande. It was also Kanye West (and Kim Kardashian by association) who tried to destroy her; to the point that she completely disappeared from the public eye for two years. It was these men who inspired her 2017 album, ‘Reputation’, which she’s yet to re-release, on top of her debut album, ‘Taylor Swift’.

I heavily mentioned how Blake Lively’s reputation and negative image was brought to her by her own damn self. Even if Baldoni had something to do with it, he didn’t have to try hard negatively impact how she was treated by the public and on social media. Her attitude, tone-deaf interviews, and some terrible business decisions did all of that for her. She comes from wealth and privilege, and I guess it all just got to her head. The same couldn’t be said about Taylor Swift. She, too, came from wealth and privilege. Her grandmother was Marjorie Moehlenkamp, an opera singer and television personality. Swift dedicated two songs to her, ‘Marjorie’, from her ninth studio album, ‘Evermore’, as well as ‘Timeless’ from her ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) re-recorded album. Unlike Lively, Swift has never let her privilege get to her head. She’s humble. She’s kind. She’s giving. She’s empathetic. She, unlike Lively, is the epiphany of feminism, female empowerment, and girlhood.

When I think of how Swift has been portrayed in the media, I can’t help but look back on her acceptance speech when she received Billboard’s Woman Of The Decade award in 2019, which was presented to her by ‘The Good Place’ actress, Jameela Jamil, another feminist. It goes something like this:

‘I’m Taylor, good evening. I wanna first thank Billboard from the bottom of my heart for this honor…I wanna say thank you so much to Billboard for giving me this honor, for naming me as their Woman of the Decade.

So what does it mean to be the woman of this decade? Well, it means I’ve seen a lot. When this decade began I was 20 years old and I had put out my self-titled debut album when I was 16, and then the album that would become my breakthrough album, which was called Fearless. And I saw that there was a world of music and experience beyond country music that I was really curious about.

I saw pop stations send my songs ‘Love Story’ and ‘You Belong With Me’ to number one for the first time. And I saw that as a female in this industry, some people will always have slight reservations about you. Whether you deserve to be there, whether your male producer or co-writer is the reason for your success, or whether it was a savvy record label. It wasn’t.

I saw that people love to explain away a woman’s success in the music industry, and I saw something in me change due to this realization. This was the decade when I became a mirror for my detractors. Whatever they decided I couldn’t do is exactly what I did….Whatever they criticized about me became material for musical satires or inspirational anthems, and the best lyrical examples I can think of are songs like ‘Mean,’ ‘Shake It Off,’ and ‘Blank Space.’ Basically if people had something to say about me, I usually said something back in my own way.

And this reflex dictated more than just my lyrics. When Fearless did win Album of the Year at the Grammys and I did become the youngest solo artist to ever win the award, with that win came criticism and backlash in 2010 that I’d never experienced before as a young new artist. All of a sudden people had doubts about my singing voice, was it strong enough? Was I a little bit pitchy? All of a sudden they weren’t sure if I was the one writing the songs because sometimes in the past I had had co-writers in the room.

At that time I couldn’t understand why this wave of harsh criticism had hit me so hard. I believe a popular headline back then was, ‘A Swift Backlash,’ which is clever, you gotta give it to ’em. And now I realize that this is just what happens to a woman in music if she achieves success or power beyond people’s comfort level. I now have come to expect that with good news comes some sort of pushback. But I didn’t know that then.

So then I decided that I would be the only songwriter on my third album, Speak Now, and that I would tour constantly, work on my vocals every day, and perfect my stamina in a live show. I decided I would be what they said I couldn’t be. I didn’t know then that soon enough people would decide on something else I wasn’t quite doing right, and then the circle would keep going on and on and rolling along and I would keep accommodating, over-correcting, in an effort to appease my critics.

They’re saying I’m dating too much in my 20s? Okay, I’ll stop, I’ll just be single. For years. Now they’re saying my album Red is filled with too many breakup songs? Okay, okay, I’ll make one about moving to New York and deciding that really my life is more fun with just my friends. Oh, they’re saying my music is changing too much for me to stay in country music? All right. Okay, here’s an entire genre shift and a pop album called 1989.

Now it’s that I’m showing you too many pictures of me with my friends, okay, I can stop doing that too. Now I’m actually a calculated manipulator rather than a smart businesswoman? Okay, I’ll disappear from public view for years. Now I’m being cast a villain to you? Okay, here’s an album called Reputation and there are lots of snakes everywhere.

In the last 10 years I have watched as women in this industry are criticized and measured up to each other and picked at for their bodies, their romantic lives, their fashion, or have you ever heard someone say about a male artist, I really like his songs but I don’t know what it is, there’s just something about him I don’t like? No! That criticism is reserved for us!’

The speech didn’t end there, but the point I’m trying to make does. This particular portion of Swift’s acceptance is very telling of how women are perceived by society. In one text message obtained as evidence by Lively in her complaint, Melissa Nathan, who also worked as a crisis manager for Johnny Depp in his trial against ex-wife, Amber Heard, wrote, ‘It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.’ And she was absolutely right. Regardless of whether her actual intention was to destroy Lively’s career or not, she was absolutely right. If anything, between Lively and Baldoni, Lively is the bigger star. She has more years of experience of working in the industry, and she comes from a well-known family, unlike Baldoni. Nevertheless, her 20 years of experience working as an actress didn’t help her case in avoiding the effects of a ‘smear campaign. In its debut, sales of her brand saw a drop of 87% a month.

A source revealed in December following Lively’s complaint against Baldoni & Co. filing, ‘Taylor is startled by the revelations surrounding the Blake Lively takedown and she is encouraging Blake to get to the bottom of it. She supports Blake and feels horrible that she had to go through all of this.’ During the time period where Swift was the most hated woman in America, I remember couldn’t help but feel for her. She certainly didn’t deserve the mistreatment that she received. She was simply hated for what a regular 20-something year old woman would do. And she was punished for it. In her Netflix documentary, ‘Miss Americana’, Swift revealed she suffered from an eating disorder in 2015 during her ‘1989’ world tour days. All she wanted to was to be left alone, but the media didn’t allow that for her. In 2016, a photo emerged of her hiking and walking backwards facing her bodyguard rather than the camera. She later opened up about the photos and said she turned to face her bodyguard because she just wanted to have a normal day out hiking and didn’t want to be photographed. She couldn’t even do the smallest of things in private anymore…and it was heartbreaking to watch everything unfold.

When it comes to Lively, on the other hand, it was very hard to watch her be hated and feel even the slightest bit of guilt about it. I’d never wish someone harm, but no one could ever say she didn’t have it coming. She’s an a**hole. She’s always been an a**hole. It just took everyone 20 years to make that realization. Her 2016 interview with Kjersti Flaa while promoting ‘Cafe Society’, made by Woody Allen, was just uncomfortable to watch. Lively got offended when Flaa said, ‘Congrats on your little bump’, to which Lively harshly responded, ‘Congrats on YOUR bump.’ Mind you, Lively was 8 months pregnant at the time and had recently announced that she was pregnant. Flaa, on the other hand, was going through infertility at the time. Lively didn’t even stop there. Flaa then asked the actress a question on her wardrobe in the movie, which was based in the 1930’s. Lively took offense to it and completely ignored the question…and Flaa… for the rest of the interview, even mocking her for the question while conversing with her co-star who was with her. Fast forward to her promotional tour for ‘It Ends With Us’ where a journalist asked her if someone came up to her asking for help in getting out of a domestic violence situation, how she could help, and she responded in a disrespectful, tone-deaf, demeaning manner. As a survivor of domestic violence, I all I felt was embarrassment as I watched the interview. Even her co-star, Brandon Sklenar, who played Atlas in the movie, seemed uncomfortable while listening to her answer the question.

Throughout Baldoni’s career, no one who’s ever worked with him ever had anything negative to say about him. He’d gotten nothing but praise from his friends, former co-stars, and colleagues, as well as collaborators. Yael Grobglas and Brett Dier, his co-stars on ‘Jane The Virgin’, even went to see ‘It Ends With Us’ in theatres together in August. She wrote on her Instagram at the time, ‘Our genius friend @justinbaldoni made a phenomenal film. I cried an embarrassing amount and tried to hide it but probably failed. I am so proud of you and I love you friend !!!!’ Baldoni also worked with Dier’s former longtime girlfriend, Haley Lu Richardson, when he directed her in ‘Five Feet Apart’, and she also had nothing but praise for him. Lively received an enormous amount of support from the public since news of her filing a complaint against Baldoni became public. The industry has been nothing but kind to her. Lively’s former ‘Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants’ co-stars issued a joint official statement showing their support, her ‘It Ends With Us’ co-stars showed support, with Jenny Slate releasing an entire statement showing support and solidarity towards Lively, as did Colleen Hoover, the author behind ‘It Ends With Us’. So did Lively’s ‘A Simple Favour’ director, Paul Feig, and co-star, Michele Morrone. Oddly enough, none of her former ‘Gossip Girl’ co-stars came to her defence.

Blake Lively once said:

• If you ever want something badly, let it go. If it comes back to you, then it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never yours to begin with.

• You can learn a lot from criticism if you can take what’s constructive out of it. If you read a review that starts with, ‘This person is an idiot; who do they think they are?’, you’re not going to learn anything from that.
• People just wanna talk. They wanna create negative things about you and your life and make up things. You can’t let them affect you!
• People gossip. People are insecure, so they talk about other people so that they won’t be talked about. They point out flaws in other people to make them feel good about themselves. I think at any age or any social class, that’s present.
• The most beautiful thing you can wear is confidence.
  

It’s become easy to hate on women. In a Glamour published last month following Lively’s complaint against Baldoni, senior editor Stephanie McNeal writes, ‘It’s never been easier to destroy a woman’s reputation using the internet. In wake of the Blake Lively lawsuit, how should we engage?’ In the case of Taylor Swift, I absolutely believe this to be true 100%. In the case of Blake Lively, on the other hand…

The complaint states, ‘There are days when she has struggled to get out of bed, and she frequently chooses not to venture outside in public.’ But didn’t Lively previously that she didn’t care what other people thought of her? Didn’t she previously encourage others to not take criticism to heart, but learn from it instead? Didn’t she previously encourage others to not take anything people might say to heart because people will talk regardless? Didn’t she previously that gossip was just gossip? Maybe she’s never been as confident as she made herself out to be. Or…

…maybe she wanted to take control of the situation and change the narrative entirely. Maybe she saw her friend suffer so much during her smear campaign, saw the impact it had years after, and decided to take it as an opportunity to get what she wanted. She has more than enough reasons to do so. Colleen Hoover does as well. And so does the rest of the cast of ‘It Ends With Us.’ As of now, Baldoni owns the rights to the book and the movie. Hoover published a sequel called ‘It Starts With Us’, and of course, Baldoni is the one who currently owns the rights to the book, and he’s the one who gets to decide whether a movie is made or not. With ‘It Ends With Us’ having done so well in the box office and beyond, why wouldn’t Lively, Hoover and the rest of the cast not want to do another movie? It’s money in the bank for all of them. Without Baldoni in the picture, it’d be a perfect win for all of them. That’s why we’re seeing every single person who was involved in making the movie side with Lively. Yes, Baldoni starred as Ryle in the movie, but the character didn’t appear much in the sequel book. Therefore, he could easily be omitted altogether. Baldoni didn’t seem very interested in making a sequel. When asked by a reporter at the New York premiere of the film if he’d be interested in making a sequel, he laughed off the idea and said, ‘I think Blake Lively is ready to direct. That’s what I think.’ This is very telling of how frustrating it must’ve been to make the movie. Getting him out of the equation would benefit everyone else in making the sequel happen.

When news first broke of her complaint filing against Baldoni, Lively wrote in a statement, ‘I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted.’ It was a very Taylor Swift-like statement. Are we supposed to blindly believe Lively that Baldoni had done everything that she’s accused him of? Abusers don’t just randomly become abusers. They have a history of abuse. They start abusing, whether it’s abusing physically, emotionally, mentally, or financially, early in life. It’s an internalized trauma and a response to it. They don’t just randomly start doing so at the age of 40. Baldoni has never had a history of abuse in the past, and if you read my previous post on his and Lively’s rift and legal battle, you’ll see that that none of the people he’d ever worked with had anything negative to say about him – EVER. Lively, on the other hand, has built a reputation for herself in the 20 years that she’s been a working actress and entrepreneur as a mean girl and a bully. The internet has old interviews of her that showcase just that. If she feels anyone is beneath her, she certainly doesn’t shy away from showing that.

Swift’s smear campaign didn’t just start in 2016. It actually started in 2009, when Kanye West infamously interrupted her accepted speech at the VMAs and ruthlessly took her microphone to voice that Beyoncé had the best album of all time. The ‘Imma let you finish’ sentence has now become a trademark in the entertainment industry. All seemed well between the two years later, and the they even posed together for photos at an awards show in 2015. Their friendship crashed and burned, though, when West release a song later that year with the lyrics, ‘I made that b*tch famous.’ In the music video for the song, West included a clothe-less wax figure that looked exactly like Swift. Swift bashed the music video and the lyric, saying she never approved of West using her that way. Kardashian leaked a video of West speaking to Swift on the phone, making it seem like Swift DID approve of the lyrics. Years later, however, the phone conversation was published to its entirety, confirming that Kardashian had edited the video when she first released it, as well as that West never told Swift that he’d be calling her a b*tch in the song.

Swift’s career has never been the same since then. She used to be an open book about her personal life. She used to post so many cute photos of herself hanging out with her friends on Instagram. Suddenly, out of the blue, she wiped all traces of her social media and we barely ever hear of her, even now, so many years later. She started posting again when it came time to promote her 6th studio album in 2017, but all of her posts have been work and promotion related in the years since. Even when she posts a personal photo, it has a marketing tactic to it. Throughout her relationship with Joe Alwyn, whom she dated between 2016 and 2023, Swift went to great lengths to not be photographed with him. We rarely ever saw them together, and she rarely ever spoke of their relationship. Mostly, it was in her songs that she ever gave glimpses into their relationship. In her ‘Miss Americana’ documentary, Swift said it was a conscious decision that they made together to keep their relationship private and not for the world to see. It’s only now in her relationship with Travis Kelce that we see Swift be more comfortable being present in the media.

A source close to Swift said in 2017 that she disappeared from the spotlight because she needed to reinvent herself. That she did, but it took her years to do so. She was made to be the villain, but she was actually the victim. With that being said, Blake Lively is the mere opposite. She’s making herself look like the perfect victim. But, in actuality, she’s not, and there’s enough proof now to showcase that she’s the villain in the entire Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni saga. We have enough reason to believe that everything that she’s been doing ever since ‘It Ends With Us’ started production in 2023 up to now is actually calculated.

And again, I’m not saying that Justin Baldoni is completely clear of Lively’s accusations. But I do strongly believe that she’s taken advantage of what Kate Beckinsale called a ‘machine’ which is a smear campaign against women. She saw the smear campaign against Taylor Swift as a business opportunity, as well as the opportunity to take down Justin Baldoni for her own personal and monetary gain. It seemed as though the entire world was against Blake Lively on social media back in August when the movie first came out. And now, the world, as well as those who know and worked with her, and even female celebrities who never even met her, are supporting her and apologizing to her for falling for the smear campaign that she alleges was put against her. But what makes you think we’re not falling for her accusations and are manipulated yet again by her and the notion that we’re always supposed to believe women? Not every woman has good intentions. Not every woman is as innocent as she might make herself out to be. Not every woman will be telling the entire truth. We have to remember all this as a society as well.

It’s safe to say that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s legal battle will be the biggest headline of the year, and we will all be keeping an eye out for it for sure. This is played to be the battle of the sexes. Lively herself is making it look that way as it would benefit her as a woman. But it’s not. In reality, it’s a battle of two people of two different backgrounds and power dynamics. I’m glad to see that Baldoni is fighting back, and I’m looking forward to see how it’s all going to be played out. We always have to remember that there’s always 3 different sides to every story: side A, side B, and the truth. Let’s all wait to see what the actual truth is in the court of law before we make any assumptions solely based on Lively’s gender and the smear campaigns that had been put on women like Swift, Amber Heard, and others in the past. As Kat Rosenfield wrote in her article for The Free Press about the matter, ‘Amid a turducken of lawsuits, it’s hard to know what’s true. But truth isn’t the point for the people spinning this. The point is who has the more believable story.’