How to Smear a Woman, Starring Blake Lively, Amber Heard, Megan thee Stallion, and Angelina Jolie

According to the world, all women are liars. In the post-#MeToo age of Trump rule, online conspiracies, and endless misinformation, it has become terrifyingly easy to strengthen this patently absurd assertion and position it as the societal default. Reinforcing it is a profitable field of business. Just how profitable may never be fully revealed, although recent events have truly shown that many men with axes to grind and vendettas to play out will pay through the nose for such privileges.

The news of Blake Lively’s suit against Justin Baldoni proved to be a surprising one, to say the least. The actress alleged sexual harassment against her co-star and director of It Ends With Us as well as a concerted smear campaign that involved publicists and well-paid experts to create the image in the press that Lively was the real problem, not Baldoni. The sheer extent of the campaign detailed in Lively’s case was staggering. For those of us who saw it all unfold only a few months ago, taking sides and participating in the idea of Lively as some grand diva trying to destroy a good man’s career, it was a much-needed slap in the face. It was a reminder that nobody is immune to conspiracy.

It surprised practically nobody who was paying attention to hear that Baldoni was allegedly paying for the services of someone who had worked for accused wife-beater Johnny Depp. Following the abhorrent miscarriage of justice that was the Virginia trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard, the modern landscape of victim-blaming and DARVO became more powerful than ever. The Tortoise Media podcast Who Trolled Amber? further revealed the true extent of the exceedingly monied and ruthlessly efficient hate campaign created to stir up doubts about her accusations against Depp. Here was a woman who had done everything ‘right’, who had done all the things that sexist sceptics demands of abuse victims before they’re believed, and she was ruined for it. after the Lively and Baldoni news, Heard offered her own brief but damning comment on the subject. Speaking from hard-earned experience, she told NBC News, ‘Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying ‘A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on.’ I saw this firsthand and up close. It’s as horrifying as it is destructive.’ Another woman is watching it unfold online too.

Daystar Peterson, also known as the rapper Tory Lanez, is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for shooting Megan thee Stallion in the foot. He did it. He was found guilty. Unfortunately, because Megan is a queer Black woman in the public eye, a hell of a lot of people didn’t believe or, or at least pretended not to because it got them more page views to perpetuate the cruel falsehood that women lie about their abuse all the time. The barrage of abuse hasn’t stopped since Peterson went to jail. Megan is currently suing one blogger who she has accused of helping to spread smears about her with the help of Peterson. In the suit, Megan’s team claims that YouTube gossiper Milagro Gramz is spreading lies about her regarding the Peterson case. Megan has now levied another charge in a recently amended complaint, alleging that Peterson is directly working with Gramz to attack Megan through her videos.

Courtroom reporter Meghann Cuniff, who covered the Peterson trial extensively, shared that Megan’s lawyers had reportedly obtained the logs of the prison phone calls made by Peterson and his father. The filing reads, “Peterson has repeatedly discussed [Gramz] with his father.” The report also added that “the two confidently asserted that [Megan] would never be able to prove that Peterson pays or paid [Gramz] for attacking [Megan]. [Gramz’s] false statements regarding the Trial are part and parcel of a conspiratorial relationship with Peterson in which [Gramz] acts as a paid surrogate used to spread Peterson’s lies about [Megan].”

Following this, Megan filed a request for a restraining order against Peterson. Her lawyers are asking a judge to prevent Peterson from harassing her via third parties like bloggers such as Milagro Gramz. During the initial trial, Megan said in court she had not known ‘a single day of peace’ since the attack due to online speculation and harassment. Bloggers repeatedly claimed she was a liar who was trying to get an innocent man thrown in jail. They called her a slut, a harpy, a murderer. Even many of her industry contemporaries, like 50 Cent, got in on the action and suggested she was lying (that loser later apologised but the damage was done.)

In 2016, Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from her husband Brad Pitt. The pair spent over eight years embroiled in courtroom drama, with Jolie’s lawyers accusing her ex’s team of needlessly dragging out the process to further hurt her. Their divorce was finally settled as I was writing this piece. In the interim years, Pitt worked overtime to shield his image. There were the sad man cover stories about him fighting his demons but emerging stronger than ever. He leapt around on red carpets. The same tabloids who had hated him for leaving Jennifer Aniston were suddenly heralding him as a wonderful man and father, even as the years passed and it became increasingly clear that none of his kids wanted anything to do with him publicly.

Pitt’s bad man spin mostly involved painting himself as a penitent and tortured genius who everyone in Hollywood loved. George Clooney talked up his wonderful BFF to all who would listen. The Academy gave him a standing ovation when he won his Oscar. Stories of his lost lawsuits, dodgy businesses in France, and screwing over of hurricane victims in New Orleans barely made a dent in the mainstream media. But it sure was easy to find the same old sexist screeds about Angelina, only this time she’d evolved from ‘homewrecker’ to ‘bad mother.’ It was practically nostalgic.

For too many women, Jolie is seen as deserving of all the pain she’s endured. At the very least, they’ll claim magnanimity on the topic with a wishy-washy declaration that they never liked her but oh well, she must have had some hard times. For others, she’s the perennial enemy, the biggest Jezebel in Hollywood (such people are often extremely racist and TERFy towards her children too.) It didn’t take much for Pitt PR spin to reinforce the old narratives of Jolie being untrustworthy, of not being a girl’s girl, and of somehow facing karma for her past. When Pitt publicly cozied up to his first ex-wife Jennifer Aniston, who once infamously described him as having a sensitivity chip missing, it sent the message that Jolie was the problem, not him. Look at Ben and Jen bringing back the fairy-tale. Just don’t look at the reports on what he allegedly did to Jolie and his kid on that private jet.

Men are never seen as unlikeable, not in the same way that women are. Depp, with his rotten teeth and documented history of unprofessional behaviour, gets to be a Southern gentleman while Heard’s love of reading on sets is viewed as aloof and snobbish. Megan’s sexual confidence is another way to dismiss her as unserious about her craft, even in a genre where bragging about treating strippers like dirt is more commonplace than gin and juice. It’s easy to weaponize that because the words forever on the tip of our tongues to describe women are seldom kind. ‘Bitch’.’ ‘Diva.’ ‘Bad mother.’ ‘Slut.’ ‘Liar.’ ‘I just don’t like her. There’s something about her. The vibes are off.’ It’s practically prehistoric, a damning indictment of how little things change. Women are always hated in the same ways.

Sexual harassment and assault allegations remain overwhelmed by the provably false narrative that these are issues that people (read: women) lie about all the time. We know the statistics on how few victims actually come forward, and how even fewer get to face justice in the courts. This systematic undermining of reality has been moulded into a smarmy brand of ‘pragmatism’, of claiming that it’s actually very sensible and balanced to bolster smears and garden-variety hatred as ‘hearing out the other side.’ It almost became noble for people to look at the scores of evidence that Heard had, in the midst of an obviously cruel campaign against her, and say you were on the fence. It’s the Joe Rogan line, the idea that your wilful ignorance and refusal to actually interrogate a subject can be sold as a sign that you’re ‘open-minded.’ It’s more satisfying to pretend that your dismissal of women is a sign of your intellect and not your stupidity.

The conspiratorial frenzy of it all cannot be overlooked either. People like the idea of solving a riddle. They want to believe they are journalists of integrity working through the weeds that the lamestream sheeple refuse to acknowledge. In her wonderful book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein talks about how genuine issues of corporate control and abuses of power tend to be ignored in favour of wilder and more politically satisfying mirror-world alternatives. Conspiracy theorists ignore the obvious issues of big pharma making money out of the COVID-19 vaccine because it’s easier and more thrilling to imagine that said vaccine is full of Bill Gates’ microchips instead. It’s the same with all of these women and their troubles. It makes for a more dramatic story to pretend that they are all malicious Medea-esque manipulators of poor beleaguered men than to look at the evidence and note that misogyny is omnipresent and seldom overruled.

Yet, for all of our theorizing and analysis, I think there’s a dishearteningly mundane answer at the heart of this. We hate women because it’s fun. People made Etsy merch of Amber Heard’s trauma. After she testified that her ex-husband raped her with a bottle, a sex toy company made a silicone bottle for sale to his fans. For vast swaths of the populace, there is sport in the systemic degradation of an entire gender, and it’s not a battle divided along those lines. It’s easy to make women hate women, if only because the smothering fog of patriarchy is something we’re all forced to breathe in. A few millennia’s worth of battles that reduced us all to victims, examples, pick-mes, and scapegoats has left behind no kind of immunity to the harsh sickness of misogyny. For many, it’s just easier to go with the flow and laugh along. There’s a thrill to be found in instigating the mockery, in proving that you’re not like those women. Never underestimate the potency of being The Only Woman who the guys like.

A lot of people are still on Baldoni’s side, which suggests to me that they either didn’t read the suit or just don’t care. The same thing happened to Heard and Megan and Jolie. Never let the truth get in the way of a good callout. But there were glimmers of hope. The industry rallied around Lively and Baldoni was dropped by his representatives. Still, I think it’d be naïve of me to hope that this leads to a reassessment of how Heard was treated and how her own industry has abandoned her. There are differences between having your A-Lister husband be on your side versus you divorcing him. Heard is living in Spain with her daughter and awaiting the birth of her second child. I hope she has peace in her life.

How do we learn the right lessons from this? It’s evident that even the most staunchly minded of us can be taken in by a good story and the speedy narrativizing of the internet. I was, and that’ll haunt me, but it is a reminder to me and hopefully others that we never get complacent. There are no winners in situations like this because they prove that it takes so damn little to make even sceptics become tinhatters. Are we so eager for reasons to hate ourselves, to let me get away with this? Yeah. That’s my answer. We are. And we should do everything in our power to change that.