What’s Behind Right-Wing Support for “Male Feminist” Justin Baldoni
Justin Baldoni would seem to be a bogeyman for America’s right wing. He broke out as a heartthrob on the satirical telenovela Jane the Virgin, known for its progressive themes, and then branded himself as one of the country’s foremost male feminists on his Man Enough podcast, the tagline for which was “undefining masculinity.”
But after Blake Lively, who starred opposite him in his directorial hit It Ends With Us, alleged workplace mistreatment including sexual harassment, he’s been unyoked from “woke.” In fact, he’s become an unexpected new conservative cause célèbre as a growing contingent of commentators take his side.
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Part of this is the fundamentals. For those on the right, he’s that most sympathetic of figures in contemporary American life: the canceled man. Meanwhile, Lively is a liberal who has received publicity for repeatedly donating to left-coded Indigenous causes and is perhaps best known for her close friendship with Taylor Swift, an enemy of President Donald Trump.
However, a key driver fueling Baldoni’s support may be that his powerful attorney Bryan Freedman has also represented several influential supporters in the media who, whether or not explicitly on the right, have positioned themselves to their audiences as truth-tellers about Hollywood’s moral foibles. Freedman client Megyn Kelly, observing that Baldoni’s public profile has been “kind of ridiculous with his toxic masculinity lamentations,” nevertheless has said, of Lively’s claims: “Time and time again, she accuses him of doing something, which then when you hear the full context, is an absolute nothing burger!” She’s also provided a friendly forum for Freedman to counterattack on her SiriusXM show, including by discussing his $250 million defamation suit on behalf of Baldoni against The New York Times, an inexhaustible conservative punching bag.
Another Freedman client, Perez Hilton, may not be strongly identified with a specific political ideology. But the Hollywood gossip personality is a fierce partisan of the attorney, who defended him in a $25 million suit. Hilton’s commentary on his YouTube channel (which has 475,000 subscribers) is rabid in its anti-Lively tilt. On Jan. 22, he posted a typical video, berating the “B-list actress and Taylor Swift bestie” for her legal team having asked a judge in the case to impose a gag order against Freedman for his media campaign, replete with purported leaks to favored media outlets, which could “materially prejudice” an eventual jury pool. “What [Freedman] is doing is not any different than what any other attorney does,” Hilton argued. “This is standard practice!”
While Hilton didn’t disclose his Freedman relationship, a different client, Sage Steele, the broadcaster who lost her job after controversial comments about vaccine mandates and Barack Obama’s Blackness, has been clear about the connection and why it matters: “He was my attorney for my [wrongful termination] fight against Disney and ESPN, so I trust him with my life and pay very close attention to everything he does and everybody he chooses to represent.” On her popular podcast she decried Lively as herself an abuser of power (“It’s so disappointing because it ends up hurting other women who are true victims of harassment”) before segueing into a point-by-point critique of her claims.
Freedman’s amplifying fan base extends beyond his star-studded clientele. (Baldoni’s Man Enough podcast has gone dark since the onset of his legal and PR crisis, except for a “special episode” about domestic violence with Freedman client FKA twigs.) On her own eponymous livestream show, the far-right commentator Candace Owens introduced a clip of Freedman defending Baldoni on NBC by noting: “Now, I like Bryan Freedman. He seems like a tiger. And I can just tell he’s telling the truth. Mommy intuition.” She added, of Lively: “The vibes are not vibing here for her.” Most recently, following the Lively legal team’s request for a communications ban against Freedman, the conservative pundit Brett Cooper posted on X (formerly Twitter) to her 450,000 followers that “you employ gag orders when you have something to hide.”
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