Kate Beckinsale is feeling “grateful” towards Blake Lively in the wake of her bombshell lawsuit against Justin Baldoni. In a lengthy Instagram video posted on December 29, the 51-year-old actor praised Lively for “highlighting” what happens to women in Hollywood that speak out about abuse.
On December 21, Blake Lively filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against her It Ends With Us co-star and director, accusing Baldoni and another Wayfarer Studios executive of launching a smear campaign to “destroy” her reputation after she complained about sexual misconduct and other inappropriate behavior during filming.
Though Baldoni’s lawyer has denied these allegations, Lively’s full complaint cites a number of alleged email and text exchanges between Baldoni’s PR team as evidence. In one alleged text exchange with crisis PR expert Melissa Nathan (who previously represented Johnny Depp), another publicist said Baldoni “wants to feel like [Lively] can be buried.”
“If you’re a woman and you have a legitimate complaint—not, ‘I don’t have enough baby llamas in my trailer, and I’d like more of a lion’—but, ‘somebody’s touching my boobs’ or ‘calling me a c-nt,’ or ‘calling me a bitch,’ or whatever, you’re fucked,” Beckinsale said in her video. “If you mention it, you’re fucked…that has to stop.”
The Serendipity star, who previously spoke out against Harvey Weinstein in 2020, went on to share some other harrowing experiences in Hollywood, claiming she was repeatedly referred to as “that c-nt” on the set of a film for complaining that her “drunk” costar’s behavior was holding up production and keeping her from getting home to her daughter.
On two separate films, Beckinsale said she was put in “very unsafe” fight sequences with co-stars that caused her physical harm. As soon as she mentioned there was a problem, the actor said she “was gaslit and made to feel like I was the problem, blamed and ostracized, left out of cast dinners, not spoken to.”
While discussing her own relationship with Hollywood’s PR “machine,” she recalled being “forced by a publicist, that I was employing, to do a photo shoot the day after I’d had a miscarriage.” She continued, “I said, ‘I can’t. I’m bleeding. I don’t want to go and change my clothes in front of people I don’t know and do a photo shoot. I’m bleeding out a miscarriage.’”
According to Beckinsale, the publicist responded, “You’ll have to, or you’ll be sued.”
While Kate Beckinsale says she doesn’t know Blake Lively or Justin Baldoni, she’s all too familiar with the backlash women face for advocating for themselves on set. “I’m grateful to Blake Lively for highlighting the fact that this is not an archaic problem that no one’s facing,” she said. “This is continuing. And then when it does happen, a machine goes into place to absolutely destroy you. And I’m sure that’s the case in other industries as well. And it’s just got to stop.”
