Solidarity award rescinded amid Blake Lively claims

The women’s contract honor recently awarded to Justin Baldoni has been revoked after the actor was accused by his friend Blake Lively of being part of a group of abusers and promoting a campaign to “damage” his reputation.

Baldoni was honored by Vital Voices, a global non-profit organization focused on empowering women, with the award earlier this month.

The organization announced Monday evening that it would withdraw the award after Lively filed a legal complaint against the actor, his studio and the crisis’s public relations team, which it said was “contrary to the policy” of the non-profit organization. .

Baldoni’s legal team told the BBC that the claims were “absolutely false” and said they had hired a crisis manager because Lively had threatened to disrupt the film unless she got what she wanted.

In the romantic drama, Lively plays a woman who finds herself in a relationship with a handsome but abusive boyfriend, played by Baldoni.

The Voices of Solidarity Award was presented to Baldoni on December 9 at an awards ceremony in New York, Vital Voices said in a statement. The award was presented by actor Hasan Minhaj and celebrates “amazing men who have shown courage and compassion in empowering women and girls”.

He wrote about the award in his head Instagram pagesaying that he was “honored and humbled” and felt that the ongoing work needed to be done to help future generations of people.

“My hope is that we can teach our boys at a young age, that vulnerability is strength, passion is superpower, and compassion makes them stronger,” he says in the post.

In a statement on Monday, Vital Voices explained that it had withdrawn the award and informed Baldoni of the decision.

Less than two weeks after the awards ceremony, Lively, best known for her role on TV’s Gossip Girl, released a statement. legal complaint He accuses Baldoni and his group of attacking him in public. The complaint alleges that they followed a meeting to deal with “repeated harassment and other harassment” by Baldoni and the video producer.

According to a filing with the California Civil Rights Department, a list of 30 issues concerning the pair’s guilt was created at the meeting to convince them to continue making the film. The list included requests such as not to mention Baldoni’s “porn addiction”, no description of the naked body and no intimate scenes that were not approved by him when he read the script.

Lively also accused Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios of leading a “multiple strategy” to destroy her reputation on television and online, including hiring a crisis manager who led a “professional, coordinated, and well-funded retaliation program” against her and using it. “digital army” to post social media content that appears to be authentic.

In response to the legal complaint, Mr Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, said on Saturday that the allegations were “absolutely false”.

Freedman accused Lively of making numerous threats, including “threats not to appear, threats not to promote the film”, which could “cause her to lose on release, if her demands don’t happen”.

He added that Lively’s claims were “intentionally false with the intention of publicly harming and repeating a media narrative”.