Blake Lively calls out "sexist" magazine cover where she's Goliath-ing Justin Baldoni's David

William Hughes

Feb. 22, 2025, 6:04 p.m.

It’s in the nature of the current battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni for it to metastasize; in a fight rooted largely in controlling a public narrative (at least right now, before anyone’s actually set foot in court), every conversation about the pair has the potential to spawn a separate digression about how that little tributary also reveals attitudes about the conflict between the two. (Refresher: She has accused him of multiple instances of sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us, and then of launching a pre-emptive smear campaign to try to get out ahead of her talking about it; he says they had a lovely time making the movie and now she’s smearing him, and also that her husband turned him into a Deadpool character.)

Hence reports this weekend that Lively is pissed about a cover image run by The Hollywood Reporter this week, calling it (per The Daily Mail) “outrageously insulting as it plays into every sexist trope about women who dare file a workplace complaint.” There’s been enough comments like this from both sides in the fight at this point that we might not have taken an interest in this one, except Lively’s comments did cause us to take a closer look at the image in question, and, dang: It really is a weird one. (You can get a closer look at the full image here.)

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Credited to The Sporting Press—a name used by artist Neil Jamieson—the image only gets weirder the longer we look at it. There’s the obvious stuff: Lively as a sort of Galadriel-going-ham figure, attempting to slingshot a phone at Baldoni, who is… holding a copy of It Ends With Us sideways, as a shield, positioned as the David to her Goliath? (The Daily Mail suggests that the picture depicts Lively in the David position, because she’s wielding the smartphone-slingshot, but Baldoni is clearly holding a sling—Goliath killer No. 1—and is positioned in the underdog spot, so we think our interpretation makes more sense.) Looking at the wider version reveals even more oddities, though: Spears and shields (and a mace!) piled up on the sidelines, and a picture of Reynolds as Deadpool & Wolverine‘s “Nicepool,” positioned opposite Baldoni lawyer Brian Freedman, just looking like a dude. We have no clue why so many things in the sky are glowing—at first, we wondered if the battle was set on the twin-sunned desert planet of Tatooine, but, no: The artist was kind enough to paste The Hollywood Sign into the background so we’d know where it’s taking place. Nobody is standing like a human being has ever stood, and Lively’s dress is exploding into flowers. We know Lively’s complaint here is not about the artistic merit of the image, so much as its decision to show her as the aggressor, but we’ve been staring at this thing for like 30 minutes now and we’re still kind of taking it in.

Lively also wasn’t happy about the content of the article, mind you, which posits that some of the friction on It Ends With Us was caused by Lively being unfamiliar with the cultural mores of Baldoni’s Baha’i faith. In that same statement to The Daily Mail, a spokesperson for Lively said that “The story is extremely offensive as it incredibly seems to explain away documented examples of sexual harassment and retaliation by calling them ‘cultural misunderstandings.'”