Yes, it’s probably annoying, but for Hollywood stars like Blake Lively, it comes with the territory.
A multi-millionaire A-lister adored by young women due to her popular teen series, Gossip Girl, being spotted by a fan who whips out her phone to record a clip to show off to her friends. Surely that’s just par for the course.
Only when ‘big Blake fan’ Kaitlyn Cooper, from Houston, Texas, did exactly that earlier this month, she was in for a shock.
Kaitlyn, 27, had been delighted to discover that she was staying in the same luxury hotel, in Waco, as Blake and her entourage on March 8, and when she spotted her in the lobby, couldn’t resist recording a few seconds on her phone.
Stars react differently to intrusion: some smile and wave, others hide their face or send security to intervene. On a few occasions, there have been scuffles and angry words.
Only what Blake allegedly did, left Kaitlyn deeply shaken and upset.
As she described to the Mail, when Kaitlyn encountered Blake in the lobby again the following morning, the star, she claims, followed her out to her car and started recording her on her phone.
She then handed the phone to a security guard, who circled her car menacingly, taking note of the licence plate.
Emily Baldoni and Justin Baldoni at the It Ends With Us premiere in New York last summer
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds at The Adam Project’s world premiere
It’s becoming something of a continuing narrative – that Golden Girl Blake, wife of Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds and mother of four, is not quite so golden after all.
It started in August last year when reports of difficulties between her and co-star Justin Baldoni, during the filming of their hit movie, It Ends With Us, first emerged.
The argument was turbo-charged three months later when she filed law suits against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment on set and of mounting a global smear campaign against her. Baldoni promptly countersued, accusing Blake and her husband of effectively shutting him out of his own film and ruining his career. A court date has been set for next March.
Since then, the ‘smearing’ of Blake (and counter smearing of Baldoni) has continued online with TikTok videos, discussing the minutiae of the case.
And alongside the armchair experts, are a number of ordinary people who’ve come forward to offer direct personal testimony of allegedly being treated badly by Blake. One commentator on YouTube called it a ‘#MeToo movement for Hollywood’s little people’.
The ill-feeling comes as little surprise to Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa, who felt so intimidated by the star when she interviewed her in 2016, she later said the encounter made her consider quitting her job.
Speaking exclusively to the Mail this week, Kjersti said: ‘I would say that Blake has a passive aggressive way about her. The fact that she can never own her mistakes and apologise to people makes me believe that she has a big ego. She has a snarky sense of humour that often comes off as mean.’
Kjersti was tasked with interviewing Blake to promote the 2016 film Cafe Society, in which she starred alongside Parker Posey, now on screen in The White Lotus. The excruciating encounter – in which Blake and Parker talk over each other, answer none of Kjersti’s questions and barely look at her – lasted four minutes and 18 seconds.
Journalist Kjersti Flaa says she was humiliated by an interview with Ms Lively
Kaitlyn Cooper says she’s a spurned fan of the actress
A clearly uncomfortable Kjersti managed to keep her composure throughout.
But not all of it was broadcast.
What was edited from the final cut was Kjersti’s opening exchange with Blake, then pregnant with her second child, when the journalist says: ‘Congratulations on your little bump.’ Blake shoots back nastily: ‘Congratulations on your little bump.’
Not only was Kjersti not pregnant at the time, she is also unable to have children due to fertility issues, and so the remark, she tells me, was ‘like a bullet’. Kjersti posted a clip of the interview on YouTube last summer around the time of the release of It Ends With Us, calling it ‘The Blake Lively Interview that made me want to Quit My Job’. It has been viewed 6.9 million times.
Talking to me this week, Kjersti says she’s not only astonished by the response the video got but by the sheer number of people – mostly lowly toilers on film sets – who’ve come forward since to say how they, too, have felt the wrath of this talented and beautiful woman.
‘I was prepared to get a lot of backlash after I posted, that’s kind of how it works, but actually so many people came out and were really supportive of me,’ she says. ‘I had people saying that watching the video had helped their children who were at school and were being bullied. I had not expected that reaction at all.
‘I also had 20 or 25 people contact me to share their stories about Blake. Mostly they were just saying that she had been rude. They were extras or interns, people who didn’t have a high status on set.
‘I also had some journalist friends who had experiences with her which were not happy either.’
One of that number was Jamie Lee Lardner, who was working as an intern on a US TV station, when she encountered Blake Lively on a press day to promote the 2005 film Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
Although the encounter was almost 20 years ago – long before Blake hit the big time – Jamie Lee says at the end of the day she was hauled over the coals by the film’s PR team and accused of ‘behaving like a fan’ towards Blake.
A number of ordinary people have come forward to offer direct personal testimony of allegedly being treated badly by Blake
Jamie Lee, who claims she never dared to speak to the actress, feared she would lose her job and wept all the way home.
Natalie Knepp, who in 2008 had a small part on Gossip Girl, the show which made Blake famous, also has unhappy memories of her time with the actress.
‘For a long time I thought I had done something wrong,’ she has said on TikTok. ‘Seeing all this stuff now, all I can think is that she is just like that. She made me want to quit acting. I was in Blake’s storyline and it was awful. It was the only time I have ever cried on set.’
Film producer Barbara Szeman was the fourth assistant director on the 2018 film, A Simple Favor. She wrote on Instagram earlier this year in a since-deleted post: ‘[Blake] was not only the worst actor I have ever worked with, but the worst human being, capable of anything to get her way.’
She added: ‘She made me cry several times when I worked with her.’
Hair stylist Emanuel Millar worked with Blake on the 2011 film Hick. He said in posts on Instagram, which again have been deleted, that the actress was ‘mindless’ and ‘self-centred.’
He added that she didn’t speak to ‘anyone she feels is beneath her’ which accounted for ‘pretty much everyone’. Footage of Blake apparently teasing Gossip Girl co-star Leighton Meester over her life beginning ‘in a cage’ has also circulated.
She made the odd remark on a panel in 2007, and seemed to be a reference to Leighton’s mother, Constance, who was jailed on drugs charges when she was born.
After making the remark, followed by another about how blondes are better than brunettes, Blake says: ‘Come on, it was a joke! Lord have mercy.’
Perhaps it is not surprising that reports have long circulated that Leighton and Blake were not exactly best of friends during the making of the show.
Journalist Kjersti Flaa meanwhile says that she thinks that Blake’s insecurities may explain some of her conflicts on the set of It Ends With Us.
Kjersti says that she was contacted recently by a fashion magazine stylist who shot Blake for a cover during her Gossip Girl era. Blake’s representatives apparently said that she was a size zero (UK size 4) with a 25-inch waist band and advised the stylist to cut the labels out of any larger sized clothes ‘or she would not wear them’.
Indeed, one of the bones of contention between Blake and Baldoni on the set of It Ends With Us centred around her weight. Court documents have been made public showing how he’d asked about how much she weighed, as he was due to lift her in a scene, and was worried about hurting his back.
Blake had given birth to her fourth baby just months earlier, in February 2023, and had spoken about feeling ’20lbs’ too heavy. Yet she interpreted Baldoni’s enquiry as her being ‘fat shamed’.
In legal papers, Baldoni alleged Ryan Reynolds took issue with the comment, too, and shouted at him about it.
Kjersti Flaa says that she thinks some of the offence the actress has caused is unintentional and admits that before her encounter, she’d not heard anything untoward. ‘I went into it, just like I do with every interview, which was being positive.
‘You hope for the best and 99 per cent of the time that’s what you get. It is a collaboration. They want to sell the film and you are there to help them do it.
‘It’s a simple transaction and it is very controlled. If something happens that the PR or the interviewee doesn’t like, then they will just take the tape from you.
‘On that day I was recording for two TV shows. That ‘Congratulations’ was the first thing I said. There was no bad feeling behind it. Everyone knew she was pregnant, it had been reported everywhere.
‘I thought that it was a nice thing to say… I was very taken aback by her reaction. I didn’t know how to react.
‘I thought, ‘What? Did she just say that?’ I couldn’t really digest it. I was so shocked. Did she just say I was fat? All these things go through your mind. She was so passive aggressive from the off.
‘I wasn’t pregnant myself, I wasn’t trying to get pregnant. At that point I knew I could never get pregnant – although I know that she didn’t know that.
‘She could not have known about the infertility and I don’t blame her for that. She was just being mean and snarky and had no idea what it could mean to me personally.
‘I asked about the costumes. I never usually ask about the costumes, but I thought I would try it because the interview wasn’t going well, and I thought it might be an easy question to recentre it. And that didn’t go well either.’
‘It was over really fast. I had like five minutes and I was supposed to have a longer slot but they said no, that’s it.
‘To be honest I wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to argue.
‘Initially I put it all on myself. I was thinking what did I do wrong here? What did I do to trigger this behaviour? As a journalist you always blame yourself. You wonder if there is something that you did wrong.’
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She put the unpleasant experience behind her and actually interviewed Blake again in 2018 for A Simple Favor with Anna Kendrick. She says Blake didn’t remember her.
Then Kjersti was invited to a press screening of It Ends With Us last summer, when rumours were already beginning to circulate about problems on set between Blake and Baldoni.
‘I didn’t like the movie. It wasn’t for me. And then I thought, ‘Oh God that interview with Blake – I should just post it. That interview was so horrible!’
From the point of posting it, Kjersti’s life changed. She now reflects: ‘I completely lost control of it at that point. People just posted the video everywhere.’
Kjersti and the ‘little bump’ encounter was mentioned in a New York Times article, headed: ‘We can Bury Anyone’ – Inside a Hollywood Smear machine,’ which was published December.
It was that article that spelled out the allegations made by Blake against Baldoni for the first time, and led to him suing the paper for libel.
The NYT did not go to Kjersti for a right of reply before publication, and has since added in a statement from her denying any involvement in a campaign to smear Blake.
Kjersti says: ‘There have been some tough moments and I have been disappointed. I’ve found that my Wikipedia page has been edited multiple times. You do start to wonder if people are moving against you. But I’ve no regrets. I was just doing my job.’
Blake’s spokesman said any negative coverage ‘only serves to assist in sending a very sad message to all women out there that if you speak up against sexual harassment this is what you can expect to happen’.
It has brought Kjersti, until now an obscure freelance film journalist, a measure of fame herself.
Her YouTube channel, for instance, has 233,000 subscribers, and she has been leaning into her newfound fame.
She now sells T-shirts on her Etsy shop online which read: ‘Congratulations on your little bump’.
A snarky sense of humour which maybe, in a different world, Blake might appreciate.
A spokesman for Ms Lively today said: ‘The Daily Mail’s continued attacks on Ms Lively only serve to assist in sending a very sad message to all women out there that if you speak up against sexual harassment this is what you can expect to happen.’