Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's feud has tanked online sentiment toward both stars, new data suggests
Nicole Rivelli/Sony Pictures Ent.
- Social-media sentiment around Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has soured amid their feud.
- Lively has accused Baldoni of harassment, and he claims she tried to smear him.
- Negative posts around the stars have ballooned since Lively filed her complaint.
The feud between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni seems to have tanked public perception of both stars.
That's the key takeaway from a new analysis of social-media sentiment shared exclusively with Business Insider. The data comes from the social-monitoring firm Sprout Social, which tracks posts on X, YouTube, Reddit, and Tumblr and categorizes them as negative, neutral, or positive.
Lively's 80-page complaint, filed December 21, impressed some public-relations pros, who, in interviews with BI, called it well-timed and detailed. They said at the time it would be hard for Baldoni to come back from it. Lively accused her "It Ends With Us" costar Baldoni of sexually harassing her and engaging in a smear campaign against her. Her allegations were detailed in a The New York Times article published the same day the complaint was filed.
Baldoni hit back in a lawsuit filed against the Times, which accused the paper of libeling him and said Lively embarked on a negative PR campaign against him.
Sprout Social data showed that the volume of social-media mentions of both stars soared after Lively's complaint was filed and the Times story was published. Most of the commentary was negative, the firm's analysis found.
Lively saw negative sentiment jump 29 percentage points to 61% in the immediate aftermath of her complaint (from December 21 to 26), the data showed, compared with the period just before (December 15 to 20).
Baldoni's largely positive sentiment flipped to mostly negative, increasing 41 percentage points to 63% negative during that time.
Baldoni's lawsuit brought a fresh round of negative sentiment on social media for both stars.
Negative sentiment around Lively jumped from 39% right before Baldoni's suit (from December 26 to 31) to 52% right after (from January 1 to Monday). Baldoni saw a similar jump, from 42% just before his lawsuit to 52% after.
The positive sentiment around both stars languished at 6% for Lively and 7% for Baldoni during the period following his suit.
In their legal filings, Lively and Baldoni accused each other of using PR pros to plant negative stories about them, supported by screenshots of conversations.
Lively's complaint alleges Baldoni's camp engaged in "astroturfing," a controversial PR tactic that involves planting online comments while making them look as if they're occurring organically.
The new data suggests that negative sentiment reached its highest point, however, after the stars went to war in legal filings and in the press.