Cancel Culture Has Reached The Courtroom: Exploring the Role of Social Media in Celebrity Legal Disputes

The film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling romance novel It Ends With Us, which follows a young woman’s experience breaking the cycle of abuse and surviving domestic violence, was one of last summer’s most anticipated movies. Although the film was a box office hit, it became better known for the controversies and tensions surrounding lead actress Blake Lively, director and lead actor Justin Baldoni, and lead producer Jamey Heath. Lively starred as the film’s protagonist Lily Bloom, while Baldoni starred as her abusive husband Ryle. 

Rumors of bad blood between Lively and Baldoni gained traction due to Baldoni’s absence from the press tour and fans noticing that Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, other cast members, and Hoover had unfollowed Baldoni on social media. It was widely speculated that creative differences had arisen between Baldoni and Lively, since both stars were executive producers on the film and made their own cuts of the movie. Fans also suspected Reynolds’s supposedly heavy involvement in the film may have contributed to the rift between the co-stars.

In the early days of the controversy, Lively received the brunt of the heat from fans’ discontent with the press tour and marketing of the film. She received significant backlash online for promoting her beverage companies and new hair care line while evading questions about the film’s themes of domestic violence and abuse on the press tour, with many criticizing her behavior as “shallow and tone deaf.” The discourse surrounding Lively’s marketing approach spread rampantly on TikTok, with simultaneous praise of Baldoni’s apparent efforts to promote awareness surrounding these issues.

The public appeared firmly in favor of Baldoni until Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department in December 2024 accusing him of sexually harassing her and attempting to “destroy her reputation.” The 80-page complaint alleged that Baldoni and his team at Wayfarer Studios launched a digital smear campaign against Lively on platforms including TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Reddit in response to her allegations of sexual misconduct. Baldoni and Heath allegedly sought to protect their reputations as “feminist allies in the #MeToo era.” Lively also accused Baldoni and Heath of forcing her to view “pornographic” content and discuss Heath’s “previous ‘pornography addiction’” and “personal experiences with sex,” failing to hire an intimacy coordinator, and adding unnecessary sex scenes. Lively’s complaint provided text messages between Baldoni and various public relations professionals he retained as evidence of the smear campaign. 

In one of the many text messages, Melissa Nathan, a crisis communications specialist hired by Baldoni, wrote, “All press is so overwhelming. We’ve confused people. So much mixed messaging. It’s actually really funny if you think about it…The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don’t even agree with half of them lol.” Baldoni texted Jennifer Abel, another public relations executive, a social media thread with over 19 million views in which a celebrity was accused of bullying, stating, “This is what we would need.” Among other similar texts, Nathan wrote that “...we can bury anyone” and “all of this will be most importantly untraceable.” 

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Megan Twohey, known for her role in breaking the story of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and sparking the #MeToo movement, published a viral piece alongside fellow New York Times journalists Mike McIntire and Julie Tate detailing Baldoni’s “largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era” against Lively. Baldoni responded by filing a defamation claim against the New York Times and a $400 million lawsuit against Lively and Reynolds, accusing them of “civil extortion, defamation, and invasion of privacy.” 

Baldoni and his team have maintained that Lively’s sexual harassment allegations are baseless and that he did not conduct the smear campaign, releasing his own slew of text messages to back up his side of the story. While the two have not yet had their day in court, the prevalence of social media in the biggest celebrity legal dispute of the past year adds to a marked trend of “cases in which a plaintiff’s damages claims relies heavily upon the change in their social media presence.”

In an age where reputations are built and burnt on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter), celebrity libel cases almost always focus on the role of social media. Lively’s lawsuit may be the most notorious example, but it is certainly not unique. There are clear parallels between Lively’s case and the 2022 legal battle between Johnny Depp and his former wife, Amber Heard. Heard’s attorney, Elaine Bredehoft, asserted that the broadly negative sentiment, including death threats towards Heard on social media, contributed to her loss in court against Depp’s defamation suit. Bredehoft argued that “[jurors] went home every night. They have families. The families are on social media. We had a 10-day break in the middle because of the judicial conference. There’s no way they couldn’t have been influenced by it.” 

Bot Sentinel, a nonpartisan group, found evidence backing up Heard’s concerns about a concerted smear campaign. Studying over 14,000 tweets, they found “a calculated effort to manipulate hashtag trends…[and] deceive Twitter’s algorithms,” with “over 24% of the accounts tweeting and using negative hashtags about Heard…created in the last seven months.” These accounts often used “vulgar and threatening language”—one even targeted a Heard supporter using photos of their deceased child. Perhaps most alarmingly, these accounts subsequently attacked other women who came forward about abuse, including Evan Rachel Wood and Cassidy Hutchinson. Indeed, brand marketing consultant Terakeet released a report concluding that Lively had suffered a “targeted, multichannel online attack” in the vein of the one Heard allegedly faced, though it did not identify the perpetrator of the attack.

Despite these reports, Depp’s legal team denied any involvement in a coordinated smear campaign, disputing that social media impacted the trial’s outcome. Although the viral New York Times article that caused Baldoni to sue the publication cites numerous text messages between him and members of his public relations team substantiating the alleged smear campaign against Lively, “it is impossible to know how much of the negative publicity [surrounding Lively] was seeded by … their team, and how much they noticed and amplified.”

The parallels between Heard’s 2022 case and Lively’s 2024 complaint were clear even to Heard herself, who came out in support of Blake Lively in the wake of her lawsuit.  Referencing Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign, Heard stated that “social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying ‘a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on’...I saw this firsthand and up close. It’s as horrifying as it is destructive.” It should also be noted that Depp and Baldoni both hired Melissa Nathan to mastermind their crisis public relations strategy.

Social media is playing an increasingly important role in establishing a professional presence in any industry, whether publicizing a business or connecting with recruiters. Social media “influencers” are able to live a glamorous lifestyle by simply posting about their lives, as long as they establish strong personal branding and continue to attract new followers. Beyond her reputation, Lively claimed in her complaint that the alleged social media smear campaign against her damaged her beverage companies, Betty Buzz and Betty Booze, as well as her hair care line, Blake Brown Beauty, decreasing sales by 56-78%. 

Regardless of the guilt or innocence of either party, which has yet to be established in court, litigation advanced by both Lively and Baldoni is likely to focus on opposing parties’ use of social media to tarnish their reputation to the detriment of their career. Due to the increasing professional importance of a strong social media presence, social media-related damages are likely to become more ubiquitous in libel suits (instances of written defamation). In the context of the Depp v. Head trial, John Culhane, a law professor at Widener University Delaware Law School, explained how social media feeds celebrity defamation suits and then “throws justice to the court of popular opinion.” According to Culhane, though defamation trials have historically functioned as a way for celebrities to restore their reputations, social media complicates matters by publicizing every action celebrities take and shaping public perception. 

While Culhane has long been an advocate for televising public court proceedings to make them more accessible, the social media weaponization of the Depp v. Heard trial drew his attention to the potential “voyeuristic” nature of such viewing, allowing people to mock and trivialize serious legal conflicts. Some argue that people turned the case, which centered on Depp allegedly sexually and physically abusing Heard, into entertainment. NBC News Correspondent Jacob Ward pointed out how, whether intentional or not, the social media mobilization in favor of Baldoni could be a strategy others seek to emulate: “...if you're in the public eye, and you're in crisis, going forward, you're going look back at this episode, and you're going to think to yourself, how can I get the treatment that Johnny Depp did?”. 

As Lively formalized her complaint into a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York and Baldoni has sued both Lively and the New York Times, much of their legal battle remains unresolved.  Their dispute will continue the trend of social media metaphorically inviting the public into the courtroom to adjudicate celebrity defamation cases. With celebrities’ careers crumbling in the blink of an eye due to being “canceled” on social media, content from apps like X, Instagram, and TikTok has come to play a critical role in libel cases. Social media continues to color court proceedings as they play out, with viral videos of key moments framing legal disputes like reality television. With the potential weaponization of social media into smear campaigns, paper trails of text messages and Reddit threads, and a hungry audience with increasing access to A-list legal battles, the relationship between social media and the law is rife with complexities and will be critical to observe in the coming years.

Aditi Bhattacharjya is a first-year studying International and Public Affairs and Economics at Brown University. She is a staff writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be reached at aditi_bhattacharjya@brown.edu.

Maia Eng is a junior studying International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She is a blog editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be reached at maia_lourdes_eng@brown.edu.