Italian
In the Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni battle, which now has spawned dueling lawsuits claiming harassment and defamation, Kjersti Flaa is an unlikely casualty.
A 51-year-old Norwegian entertainment journalist who lives and works in the U.S., Flaa became part of the Lively-Baldoni story in August after she posted on an old interview she’d done with the It Ends With Us actress.
The interview was a short, four-minute, 17-second video shot in 2016 during the press junket for Woody Allen’s Café Society, in which Lively starred alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell. Titled “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job,” the cringe-worthy exchange starts with Flaa congratulating Lively — who had just announced her pregnancy — on her “little bump.” Visibly annoyed, Lively snaps back: “Congrats on your little bump.” Flaa was not pregnant.
Kjersti Flaa’s 2016 interview with Blake Lively went viral when she posted it in August. Flaa posted the video on Aug. 10, just as It Ends With Us — directed by and co-starring Baldoni — hit theaters and as social media was bubbling up with speculation of a rift between the two.
“I know people don’t believe me when I say this, but I didn’t know anything about the controversy [when I posted the video],” Flaa tells The Hollywood Reporter. She says the idea to resurface the interview came out if a conversation with a colleague from Norwegian television who was doing a story on “censorship in Hollywood.”
Back in 2016, Flaa says she had been too scared to post the video, afraid she’d be “blacklisted” and have her celebrity access cut off. “So no more Blake Lively interviews in the future, and probably none for clients of the same PR firm, or the studio.” she says.
But Flaa has been mostly off the junket circuit since COVID, when many in-person interviews shifted online.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘I’ve taken a step back from this.’ And I thought: ‘I want to post that interview.’”
For an online army of influencers, TikTokers and amateur sleuths digging into the allegations of behind-the-scenes drama at It Ends With Us, Flaa’s video became Exhibit One in the case against Blake Lively.
The clip quickly went viral, racking up more than 6 million views, and became a key component in online narratives surrounding the film’s marketing campaign. Lively came under attack for supposedly downplaying the movie’s story of domestic violence — it is based on the Colleen Hoover best-seller about the generational cycle of abuse within families — and instead pitching It Ends With Us as if it were Barbie 2, encouraging fans to “grab your friends, wear your florals” and cross-promoting tie-ins to her hair care and alcohol brands. For many, Flaa’s video seemed to prove the actress was insensitive, rude and tone-deaf.
With the online tide rising against her, Lively struck back, accusing Baldoni, It Ends With Us producer Jamey Heath, and their public relations team of carrying out a coordinated campaign to smear her in the press. The efforts, she claimed, were revenge for raising allegations of sexual misconduct on the set of It Ends With Us.
Drawing heavily from that narrative — and from thousands of pages of selected text messages and emails Lively submitted in a legal complaint against Baldoni, Heath and their studio, Wayfarer — The New York Times published an explosive investigative feature: “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” Shortly after the story went up, on Dec. 21, Baldoni’s agency WME, which also represents Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, dropped him. The agency has said the decision was not a result of pressure from Reynolds and Lively.
The Times piece mentioned Flaa’s video and suggested it might have been part of the alleged “smear campaign.” The story drew connections between Flaa and Melissa Nathan, a crisis management expert Baldoni had hired and who had previously worked with Johnny Depp during his much-publicized defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard. Flaa, the article pointedly noted, had also posted clips of interviews with Depp during the trial, under the hashtag #JusticeForJohnnyDepp.
“It was so shocking to read that in the newspaper, with this very strong insinuation that I was involved in this alleged smear campaign,” says Flaa. “People picked up on that quickly. I started getting backlash online and getting hate mail.”
Flaa vehemently denies having any contact with Baldoni and his team, before posting the video or afterward.
“Of course, my video didn’t put [Blake Lively] in a good light, so I’m sure they were happy about that,” she says. “But at no point did anyone contact me from his team or from [Blake’s] team. The thing is, she smeared herself in that video, and people reacted to it online. [The reason] for her becoming unpopular is because of her own behavior.”
Baldoni’s legal team agrees. On Dec. 31, Hollywood lawyer Bryan Freedman, who represents Baldoni as well as Nathan, filed a $250 million defamation suit against the Times, accusing the paper of conspiring with Lively’s PR team to advance an “unverified and self-serving narrative” using “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context” while simultaneously ignoring evidence that contradicted her claims.
As evidence, they cite an allegation, reported in the story, that Baldoni had entered Lively’s makeup trailer uninvited while she was breastfeeding, pointing to text messages, which the Times had access to but did not publish, that appear to show Lively inviting Baldoni her trailer “while pumping” to run through lines. Another published allegation, that Heath showed Lively “a video of his wife naked” neglected to mention the context that it was a film of his wife giving birth and that the filmmakers were debating with Lively whether she should be nude for a birthing scene in It Ends With Us.
The Times has denied the charges, saying its piece was “meticulously and responsibly reported.”
Flaa begs to differ.
At no point, she says, did the Times, which had done a largely positive profile of Flaa in October connected to her “cringey interviews,” contact her for comment. When Flaa called the paper after the article went online, the Times did not issue a correction but added her statement that she posted the Blake Lively video of her own accord. “It was neither coordinated nor influenced by anyone associated with the alleged [smear] campaign,” she wrote.
“I was just really disappointed that they didn’t contact me, [but] just followed one narrative without having any critical thinking around it,” says Flaa. “It hurt my reputation and it hurt me personally. I’m so disappointed in The New York Times. I have no words for it.”
The Times has not responded to The Hollywood Reporter‘s request for comment.
Kjersti Flaa Mona-Nordoy “I feel as if [Lively’s PR team] are using me as a pawn,” says Flaa. “My video was the one that had the most effect on her reputation. So it’s important for them to show it was part of this ‘smear campaign.’ But you have one of the most powerful couples in Hollywood [Lively and Reynolds] who can pay millions of dollars to lawyers. You have The New York Times, this powerful, powerful media institution. And you have me, a freelance journalist with basically nothing. And they’re trying to portray me as the bad guy. It’s just more evidence how nasty things can be in Hollywood and how cruel and dirty are the games they play.”
Flaa says she has not yet decided if she will pursue legal action of her own against the Times.
Jumping into the L.A. snake pit was a particular shock for Flaa after a life in polite and courteous Norway — “where celebrities don’t get seated before you at a restaurant, but wait in line like everyone else,” she says. Part of her motivation for posting her awkward interviews, she adds, is to highlight what she sees as unacceptable celebrity behavior toward journalists on the bottom rung of the entertainment food chain.
“I think a lot of journalists have had interviews like the one I had with Blake Lively, but they never talk about them and they don’t make them public, because they’re afraid to,” she says. “In that interview, when I congratulated her on her little bump, she could have just said thank you. It would have been very easy. Instead of being rude to me. As a journalist [on entertainment junkets] it’s like you’re not a real person.”
Despite her experience, both in 2016 and more recently, Flaa does not wish Lively ill. She says she’s waiting to hear “both sides of the story” when the twin lawsuits go to court before deciding who was at fault.
“What’s happening on social media is everyone gets judged in a second and no one knows all the facts, which is really dangerous,” says Flaa. “Of course that’s also happening to Blake Lively. When I saw how much hate she was getting [after I posted my video], I thought it was awful. I don’t want anyone to get hate, that was never my intention.”
After almost two decades in the business, Flaa has become acutely familiar with Hollywood’s dirty playbook. In August 2020, she filed a lawsuit against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) accusing the group of operating like a “cartel,” using its clout as the body that awards the Golden Globes to block non-members from getting work. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, but it helped start a debate around the inner workings of the HFPA, including the lack of diversity among its membership that eventually led to an overhaul within the organization.
But the attention she’s received hasn’t been all bad. Subscribers to Flaa’s YouTube channel more than doubled after she posted the Lively video — though at 140,000 she’s still well below the influencer level — and she has begun doing a video commentary series on the platform talking about her life as an entertainment reporter. Her most popular videos, however, are still the awkward ones, including a 2012 interview with Anne Hathaway at a press event for Les Misérables in which Flaa asked the actress if she could sing her response to a question. “I won’t be doing that,” Hathaway coolly responded. (After Flaa posted the video, Hathaway reached out to her to apologize.)
“I now have this community of people out there that really appreciate [what I’m doing],” says Flaa. “So that’s been the silver lining, I guess.”
