In this episode of Flawsome Talk, I talk about my experience as an entertainment reporter in New York City, my first experience with celebrity interviews, and why I think the older a celebrity is, the nicer they are.
00:06:06.920People have been trying to analyze it.
00:06:08.580If she was actually trying to fat shame me or she was trying to say that,
00:06:11.560oh, you're pregnant too, which obviously I wasn't.
00:06:14.200And then it went downhill from there when I started talking or asking about what it was like wearing those costumes that were so beautiful in the movie.
00:06:24.660Do you guys love wearing those kind of clothes that you got to wear?
00:06:34.740Yeah, from there it went downhill and they were ignoring me for the rest of the interview.
00:06:39.580And I think that's what made people react so strongly when they watch this because she comes off as a mean girl.
00:06:47.220And the reason why I've talked about that a lot in the press as well, the reason why I didn't share that interview back in 2016 was because I knew that if I showed this side of her back then was when I was in the middle of my career interviewing celebrities several times a week,
00:07:05.440I would probably be blacklisted by her publicist, Leslie Sloan, and even maybe by the studio because that's how it works in this industry.
00:07:14.100It's always the journalist's fault if something is not going well or if a talent or an actor is put in a bad light, they blame it on the journalist.
00:07:25.860I've experienced that a few times before and all my colleagues have had that same experience as well.
00:07:32.380I think every single one of my colleagues have been in a situation where either the studio or the publicist took their tape away, took their interview away after they finished the interview for no specific reason.
00:07:47.300They don't even have to give you a reason.
00:07:48.500But the thing is, they are putting up the camera gear and everything on location there.
00:07:53.300So then they own the contents on those tapes because they taped it on their video recorders or on their cameras.
00:08:04.980I've spoken, I remember I was interviewed by BBC talking about this like six months ago in the middle of the crazy whirlwind around that viral interview and the BBC said that they always bring their own cameras so no one can censor their interviews afterwards, which is great.
00:08:23.040But, you know, most people like me or other entertainment reporters, a lot of them, especially international ones, are freelancers and we don't have the means to bring our own camera crew and they wouldn't allow us either.
00:08:35.120It's only if you have a big name, a huge publication in your back that they would allow things like that.
00:08:40.620We are just really disposable, all of us international journalists.
00:08:45.580And you also see how a lot of these people are such cases up to the people, the publicists, the studio.
00:08:52.040This whole industry is just such cases to begin with and everyone's kind of fake.
00:08:57.400And that's what I've been talking a lot about on my channel, on YouTube as well.
00:09:01.440And I will also talk about that a lot here on my podcast.
00:09:04.840So as I said, I did post that interview in August on my YouTube channel, August of last year.
00:09:12.100That was just after It Ends With Us had premiered in theatres and people had already started speculating if there was any something going on between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively,
00:09:23.800why they were never in photos together, why they weren't promoting the movie together.
00:09:28.960There were rumors and there had also been, I think at that point, there had been some articles out speculating that something was going on.
00:09:36.820I did not know about the feud that was going on on the set at that time.
00:14:15.880And then everything started kind of spinning out of control.
00:14:18.820There were all these conspiracy theories getting root on TikTok, on Instagram.
00:14:24.200And I completely lost control of the situation.
00:14:27.380And I was like, wow, now people are starting to make up their own theories about what happened.
00:14:31.480There were stories that I was told not to mention her pregnancy beforehand.
00:14:36.060There were even stories saying that I had gone up and touched her belly before the interview started.
00:14:40.560Yeah, people just love making up conspiracy theories.
00:14:43.940So I decided I'm going to go on YouTube myself and talk about what had happened so that I can clear up all misunderstandings about what happened before the camera started rolling.
00:14:55.560And before the camera started rolling, nothing had happened.
00:14:59.120And I sat down and I told my name into the camera, which you do before you start doing these interviews.
00:15:51.740And that was, of course, another reason why I didn't want to post it, because I wasn't proud of the interview in any way.
00:15:58.480But anyway, so I started this new series on YouTube where I talked a lot about this interview at first.
00:16:04.860And then I started talking about my other experiences with other celebrities.
00:16:09.040So if you go back to my videos from October, November, there's a lot of my, you know, inside scoops from what it's like to interview celebrities.
00:16:18.640I also did some videos about my favorite actors to interview and the ones that I'm not so found of.
00:16:44.820And he's like, I'm going to read this story for you.
00:16:47.520And he wrote the article and he read the article from the New York Times called We Can Bury Anyone.
00:16:55.420It was about how Blake Lively had been S-H'd on the set of It Ends With Us and how Justin Baldoni and Wayfair and his team had created a smear campaign against her as retaliation.
00:17:11.980And in the article, I was mentioned there was a picture of me as well saying that Kersti Flo, the Norwegian reporter, it's not the first time that she has been linked to Melissa Nathan, who was the crisis PR manager that Justin Baldoni had hired.
00:17:31.880They mentioned that I also had posted an interview with Johnny Depp back in 2020 or something like that.
00:17:40.300I don't remember exactly, but it was when Johnny Depp was in the lawsuit with Amber Heard.
00:17:45.440And I had posted an old interview I had done with Johnny Depp with no context, really.
00:17:51.380I just hashtagged it justice for Johnny Depp.
00:17:54.360And that was the reason why they said that I had been working or they insinuated very strongly that I had been working with Justin Baldoni's team and the Wayfairer team.
00:18:07.820So at that point, I went from being the reporter who exposed a bully to being a corrupt journalist who is willing to do anything for money.
00:18:19.500And I had no ethics and it was horrible.
00:18:22.560I received so many hate mails from people.
00:20:25.680They already did an article about me a couple of months earlier.
00:20:28.780Actually, they did a little profile on me in New York Times saying that she's the one calling out the bullies in Hollywood, which was a nice article, by the way.
00:20:37.140New York Times responded to me and said that, oh, we can't correct this.
00:20:51.380And the fact that they didn't want to correct it says a lot to me.
00:20:55.280They didn't want to take responsibility for spreading misinformation about me and about, you know, it's damaging for not only my career, but also for me personally, that people don't trust me.
00:21:10.120And being accused of lying is horrible.
00:21:14.620And for me, I always try to be as transparent as possible.
00:21:17.260And when you're being accused of something like that and you can't really come out and defend yourself, except going on my YouTube channel and say, hey, I didn't do it.
00:21:42.740It was such a wonderful day for me because I feel like, OK, finally, if they see his receipts, they understand that I did not take part in this alleged smear campaign.
00:21:57.760And yeah, I was so happy that day when I started reading everything.
00:22:01.740And the thing is, for me, because I knew what they said about me in that New York Times article wasn't true.
00:22:08.100I doubted a lot of the other stuff, too, in that article, because I was like, why?
00:22:13.140If they're trying to lie about me, what else is a lie in here?
00:22:17.120And now that we've seen the evidence, we understand that a lot of these text messages, all of them, were taken out of context.
00:22:26.380And they were cherry picked to create a narrative that was pro-Blake Lively.
00:22:32.040And as we know, New York Times never really reached out to Baldoni's team until like, I don't think, even 24 hours before they were actually publishing the article.
00:22:40.820And they ended up publishing the article before they actually said they were going to.
00:22:45.080Anyways, the narrative started to shift.
00:22:47.780But the traditional media did not shift the narrative.
00:22:50.400They kept pushing for Blake Lively's side, saying that, you know, she was a victim.
00:22:56.380And even though Justin Baldoni's team kept coming out with more information, they even created this website where they published so many text messages and emails.
00:23:07.480And everyone who digged into it was more and more shocked.
00:23:10.860And we started understanding that Blake Lively's real motivation and goal here was to take over the entire movie with the help from Ryan Reynolds, her husband.
00:23:23.520There was so much evidence proving that she had taken over every single department of the movie from costume to music to even rewriting the script or Ryan Reynolds rewriting the script to the editing process.
00:23:41.380We learned that she that her version of the movie was the one that hit theaters and Justin Baldoni, who was the director of the movie and the producer, he had not even seen the final product before the premiere.
00:23:53.760We also learned that Justin Baldoni was being sent into the basement with his family and friends at the premiere because Blake Lively did not allow him to appear at the same time as her on the red carpet.
00:24:07.620So he was shushed away as soon as she arrived and put in the basement and they had to watch the movie in another theater.
00:24:13.800More and more and more of this information kept seeping out and people started really turning against Blake Lively for a reason.
00:24:22.960And that's also when I started doing daily updates about this drama on my YouTube channel.
00:24:29.660As I said many times, there's so many layers to this drama that I find interesting.
00:24:34.600The whole media aspect of it and how traditional media is still portraying Blake Lively as the victim here.
00:24:41.460And also the publicist world, the PR world and how dirty everything is.
00:24:47.440And also the big egos, the narcissism and how all this power play behind the scenes is playing out.
00:24:55.420Not only from the actors themselves like Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, but also their management teams, you know, WME, which was representing Justin Baldoni as well, who fired him like two hours after this article was published.
00:25:11.460And as the days and weeks and gone by, there's a new story almost every single day.
00:25:16.520And everyone's been really kind of shocked by how Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have been out in public so many times.
00:25:25.020And just showing off on red carpets and pretending everything's fine in contradiction to everything she was saying in the lawsuit against Justin Baldoni.
00:25:33.380That she was, you know, mortified and she couldn't leave the house.
00:25:37.260She had anxiety and sleeping issues and all that.
00:25:39.420And, you know, and she comes off as the complete opposite when you look at her and the way she behaves in public.
00:25:45.880At the same time, Justin Baldoni has kept quiet and just like been with his family and close friends around him in Hawaii.
00:25:53.400He has done one public post on Instagram since this happened, which was to say happy Mother's Day to his wife and his mother.
00:26:01.600And while Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds keep pushing products every day, Blake Lively just released a new product from her hair care line, Blake Brown, which is a mist that you can buy on Target.
00:26:14.320And talk about irony, especially when she sued Justin Baldoni for one of the things she sued him for was that he smelled her and said she smelled nice.
00:26:24.940And she said that that was very uncomfortable for her in her lawsuit while he said what really happened, which we saw on video evidence, that she said, oh, I smell bad for myself, Tan.
00:26:37.200So, yeah, anyways, now she's selling a mist because smell and scent is so important to her.
00:26:43.620But don't you dare tell anyone that she smells good.
00:26:47.640Another reason incident that happened, as you all know, probably, is that Taylor Swift was dragged into this.
00:26:54.260She was dragged into this from the beginning when Blake Lively was bragging about her being with her the entire time of this shoot of the It Ends With Us.
00:27:02.740She was such a support to her and she called her a dragon in an email threatening Justin Baldoni that if he didn't do what she said, she had dragons to back her up, pointing at Taylor Swift.
00:27:16.220And it's been a little over a week now since we learned the news that Blake Lively had been blackmailing Taylor Swift.
00:27:24.340She had received no public support from her and apparently, according to Justin Baldoni's lawyer, Brian Friedman, he had spoken to Taylor Swift's father, Scott Swift, who could tell him that Blake Lively had sent an email or Blake Lively's lawyers had sent an email to Taylor Swift's lawyers saying that if she didn't support her publicly,
00:27:48.740she would leak 10 years of text messages and communication between them to the public or to the press, she had also allegedly asked Taylor or demanded that Taylor delete the text messages between them.
00:28:06.180It's quite funny because I'm thinking she was going to leak all the text messages, but before that, she was going to delete all the text messages between them.
00:28:13.800So I'm thinking she's probably going to leak all the text messages where Taylor Swift was talking about her exes or her current boyfriend, Travis Kelsey, while Blake would, of course, cherry pick the text that she wanted to leak.
00:28:28.360And she would obviously not leak the text between her and Taylor where they talked about things that could contradict things that she's been saying in her lawsuit.
00:28:38.880I mean, there's a reason why she wanted Taylor Swift to delete conversations between them.
00:28:46.000There's something in there that Justin Baldoni's team can use.
00:28:49.400Another bomb that we learned about recently is that Blake Lively's team filed a so-called sham lawsuit to get a subpoena to get hold of a phone that was owned by Jennifer Abel,
00:29:04.480who had left Jones' work, which was the company that represented Justin Baldoni.
00:29:10.520And her former boss, Stephanie Jones, had her phone that she took from her when she left the company.
00:29:17.120And it's been quite obvious so far that Stephanie Jones had a little peek at that phone to see what she could find on her former employee because she did not want her to leave her company and start her own.
00:29:29.760And she was afraid that she was going to take clients with her.
00:29:32.400So she wanted to punish her ex-employee.
00:29:35.900So she found some text messages that she thought Blake Lively's team could find interesting.
00:29:40.820So she made a phone call to Leslie Sloan and told her about these text messages that ended up in the New York Times.
00:29:48.920And Leslie Sloan was thinking, oh, how can we get these text messages legally?
00:29:53.080Let's file a sham lawsuit so we can get a subpoena and get the phone legally.
00:29:58.900And that was the only phone that they subpoena.
00:30:02.520They didn't subpoena Stephanie Jones' phone or anyone else who'd been working with Justin Baldoni on the Wayfair or the Wayfair.
00:30:11.180It was the only phone that they wanted to get a hold of, which is so obvious that Stephanie Jones had made that phone call
00:30:18.360or contacted Leslie Sloan to ask her or to tell her that she had this evidence.
00:30:23.280Also, before that subpoena was actually given to Stephanie Jones, Leslie Sloan had called Melissa Nathan to tell her that she had seen the text messages.
00:30:37.900Melissa Nathan was working for TAG, which was the PR crisis management team that Justin Baldoni had hired when things started looking bad for him.
00:30:47.960And he started learning that Blake Lively was after him.
00:30:51.620When this news broke, it was clear that Justin Baldoni's lawyer didn't even know about this.
00:30:57.660And Blake Lively's team responded that this is normal procedure, that these things are happening all the time,
00:31:05.220that people file a sham lawsuits against 10 anonymous people, because that's what they did.
00:31:11.000They filed a lawsuit against 10 unknown people because they didn't know what they were actually looking for.
00:31:16.600They just knew that people had been creating a smear campaign against Blake Lively,
00:31:22.520and they were trying to find out who and what was involved, who was involved.
00:31:27.240So they filed it against unknown people.
00:31:29.700And the day before that article was published in The New York Times, that lawsuit was just like canceled.
00:31:40.560So it was clear that the only reason why they had filed that through their company called Van Zand,
00:31:46.960which was this really shady company owned by Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively,
00:31:51.600that the only reason why they did that was to get hold of that phone.
00:31:55.460And it's been recent discovery now that Stephanie Jones had actually had access to Jennifer Abel's iCloud until recently and been snooping around there.
00:32:06.340So there's so much development in this story all the time.
00:32:11.340OK, so I'm going to round this up now.
00:32:12.620Thank you, everyone, for listening to my first episode of Flawsome Talk.
00:32:17.060I'm going to do this podcast every week, every Friday, and I'm going to do a little recap of the week so you know what's going on with this case and also other things happening in Hollywood.
00:32:28.460And sometimes I'll throw in some personal experiences I had with these people.
00:32:33.340And of course, please contact me, flawsometalk at gmail.com.
00:32:37.340If you have anything you want to share with me or you want me to talk about, I am also, as I said, on YouTube.
00:32:43.240So you can also comment there or send me a DM on my Instagram at KerstiFlaw.
00:32:49.800And yeah, thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend.