Kjersti Flaa Isn’t Done Talking About Blake Lively
Amid an outpouring of support for Blake Lively, Kjersti Flaa is still skeptical. On Friday, Lively filed a complaint against her It Ends With Us director and co-star Justin Baldoni, who she claims harassed her on set and orchestrated a highly successful smear campaign against her in the press. (Baldoni has denied the allegations.) During that alleged smear campaign, Flaa shared a video from a press junket in 2016, where Lively ices her out. It went massively viral, seemingly as proof that Lively was just as awful as Baldoni’s PR team wanted you to believe. Now, Flaa is saying that while she had no part in an orchestrated effort to take down Lively, she isn’t necessarily on her side either.
Back in August, at the height of what seemed at the time to just be a feud between Baldoni and Lively, Flaa released a video to her YouTube page called “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.” In it, Flaa congratulates Lively on her baby bump, to which Lively replies, “Congrats on your little bump.” Flaa is iced out for the rest of the interview with Lively keeping her eyes squarely on co-star Parker Posey. The video stoked anti-Lively sentiment and now has almost 6 million views.
In the New York Times report on Baldoni’s efforts to drum up negative press about Lively, Flaa’s contribution is mentioned. The Times used it as an example of “online backlash” against Lively and pointed out that Flaa had previously shared a video in support of Johnny Depp during his defamation case against Amber Heard. Depp had used the same PR firm as Baldoni. The Times pointed that out but did not insinuate that Flaa was part of a coordinated effort.
Flaa has seized on the moment yet again, this time releasing two YouTube videos over the weekend (both just long enough to qualify for mid-video ad breaks). The first was called “How I feel about being dragged into Blake Lively’s lawsuit and Justin Baldoni’s smear campaign.” In it, Flaa says that she had no part in Baldoni’s alleged efforts to take down Lively.
“I am a journalist, this is what I do for a living. I would never accept money to jeopardize my integrity as a journalist,” Flaa said. She claimed that she didn’t know about the controversy surrounding Lively when she posted their interaction but that she had seen the movie and didn’t like it. “I didn’t like the movie, I had a bad experience with Blake Lively, and at that time I had kind of had enough of Hollywood. So I wasn’t afraid of being canceled anymore, so I decided to post the video,” she said. Two months after she posted her encounter with Lively, she shared another video called “This might be my WORST interview idea ever,” in which Anne Hathaway declined to play along with Flaa singing all her questions during the Les Miserables junket. Hathaway apologized via email shortly after Flaa resurfaced the interview.
Flaa also addressed her support of Depp, saying that it had nothing to do with the PR company he had hired to drum up bad press against Amber Heard. “I like Johnny Depp, I had great experiences with him, and I thought Amber Heard was lying in court. I posted it to have sympathy with him and the fans that love him,” she explained.
In a follow-up video titled “New York Times just updated the article about the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni smear campaign,” Flaa claimed the Times had “insinuated that [she] had anything to do with” Baldoni’s efforts. (This is not what the Times did. It used her as an example of someone who appeared to have twice fallen for an orchestrated attempt to take down a woman.)
“That makes me wonder what the rest of this lawsuit, to be honest with you, what’s true and what’s not. Because now I know what [the Times] say about me is a lie,” Flaa said. Again, what it said about her is not that she was knowingly involved in anything but that she played right into the hands of a shadowy PR team. But that wouldn’t make for a good YouTube video, now would it?
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