00:00:00.000I mean, a newspaper interviewing themselves to double down on the conspiracy theory that they came up with two years ago?
00:00:14.180Hi and welcome to Flossom Talk, I'm Sjernstief Lohr, journalist, Hollywood truth teller and your voice of reason in a town built on delusion.
00:00:22.180Okay, so now the Hollywood Reporter is calling out the New York Times for ripping off their reporting in the New York Post
00:00:33.880Yes, the Hollywood Reporter is saying that we found the untraceable underground smear machine first
00:00:42.180So the New York Times ripped off all of our sources and our findings and pretended it was their own
00:00:51.560I spoke about this article last week and I have a lot of questions about it.
00:00:56.560They called it how to destroy a reputation in Hollywood as told in five women's lawsuits.
00:01:03.260And again, they repeated the allegations Blake Lively had against Justin Baldoni and his team.
00:01:09.980And they added some more interesting stuff that I will talk about in this episode as well.
00:01:15.240So when this happened, this is the funniest part.
00:01:18.020The New York Times responded by interviewing themselves, patting themselves on their shoulder,
00:01:26.460saying that they did such a deep dive into this subject.
00:01:30.240And they spent six months researching this before they actually published the article.
00:01:36.540I mean, a newspaper interviewing themselves to double down on the conspiracy theory that
00:03:00.300Okay, so let's look into all of this.0.97
00:03:02.080So as I said, Ryan Reynolds' text messages has made it to the mainstream media and the Daily Mail did a story about this on Friday saying Ryan Reynolds' desperate attempt to save Blake Lively exposed in furious texts demanding Sony to do his bidding as studio bosses privately call his wife's behavior epic level stupid.0.98
00:03:27.820in. I love that they're putting out this story right when Blake Lively was about to become a0.69
00:03:35.680real victim again. And they're saying here that Ryan tried to bully Sony Pictures into taking
00:03:41.660Blake Lively's side over the backlash to her promo campaign for It Ends With Us. Even as
00:03:47.920executives slammed her as epic level stupid, Ryan tried to bully, they're using the word bully here,0.99
00:03:54.180Sony pictures into taking Blake Lively's side over the backlash to her promo campaign for It Ends With Us.0.94
00:04:00.760They go deeper here and say now the newly released redacted messages reveal how Ryan tried to pin the blame for the backlash on Sony's marketing efforts and hinted Baldoni was behind it.
00:04:12.160The furious Deadpool star also accused the mega studio of bullshitting him
00:04:18.600and demanded they kill a disobliging story about his actress wife.
00:04:25.020And here they have the stores commenting on this, saying,
00:04:27.540these recently unsealed messages show Reynolds pressing Sony
00:04:31.640to not only publicly blame a newly hired crisis PR team for the backlash against Blake,
00:04:38.100but also supplying the language he wanted the studio to use.
00:04:43.020He wanted a major studio to endorse his accusations of a coordinated campaign.
00:04:48.500And then they say the team had been on board for just six days.
00:04:55.880Ryan was claiming in the text message that Justin Baldoni and his team had spent $500,000 to smear Blake
00:05:04.000and they had only been hired for six days at this point and as this source is pointing out here
00:05:11.040how could it have orchestrated a backlash that predated its involvement even a movie star cannot
00:05:19.000rewrite the timeline so true not even a movie star can do that and they also said demanding
00:05:25.300that a studio repeat an accusation does not make it true no matter how famous you are and it also
00:05:32.400says here that Ryan Reynolds was the person who fired Leslie Sloan, Blake Lively's publicist of
00:05:40.64020 years. And I find it interesting that Leslie Sloan has not come out and commented on this at
00:05:47.600all. And that makes me believe that they have something on her that she doesn't want out there.
00:05:53.860I do not believe that that was a friendly divorce between them. And as it says here, Ryan Reynolds
00:05:59.840was behind that firing. So I wonder what they have on Leslie Sloan, because we know that Leslie Sloan
00:06:05.860has a lot on them. And the fact that the information came out that she had hired someone new, of course
00:06:12.140it was all coming from her side. But anyways, let's talk about this feud now between The Hollywood
00:06:17.340Reporter and The New York Times. From a journalistic perspective, I totally agree with The
00:06:23.420Hollywood Reporter here. The New York Times portrayed all this information in this article
00:06:29.020that it was something that they had discovered while the Hollywood Reporter did actually report
00:06:35.620on this about five months ago in February of this year and for the New York Times not to acknowledge
00:06:41.740that at all in their reporting just shows a lack of professional courtesy if you ask me.
00:06:48.640But anyways, I don't agree with any of the things that they're reporting on, obviously, because both of them are claiming that they found the untraceable smear machine.
00:06:59.640and of course as I've spoken about so many times they're alleging that because some of the same
00:07:06.380people were involved or hired by some of the celebrities or professionals there had to be
00:07:14.020a smear machine involved in all of these incidents. This feud also shows that there is some egos
00:07:21.920involved here, egos in journalism. It says here that top editors at the Hollywood Reporter were
00:07:27.780fuming this week after New York Times published an investigation by reporter Deborah Kamen into
00:07:32.700proliferation of secret anonymous smear websites in Hollywood without crediting or mentioning the
00:07:38.520nearly dozen stories that the industry trade publication had previously published on the
00:07:43.220exact same topic. That is very true. And the Hollywood Reporter is saying their reporter
00:07:48.220Gary Baum spent about nine months working on the story for them of this series of stories for them
00:07:54.160where they're mentioning the same people as the New York Times is mentioning.
00:07:58.700And instead of the New York Times saying,
00:08:00.500hey, we actually did read these articles in the Hollywood Reporter
00:08:04.100and that's how we came up with this story.
00:08:06.740Instead, they're responding with a statement like this.
00:08:09.700Deborah Kammin's article was an original piece of journalism
00:08:13.420that she reported independently over months,
00:08:16.800interviewing more than 60 people and reviewing court documents,
00:08:20.480chat transcripts and hundreds of websites and social media profiles a time spokesperson said
00:08:26.440in a statement here we go again I spoke about these 60 people they interviewed last week and
00:08:32.160it's so interesting that you can just throw out a number like that we interviewed 60 people without
00:08:36.740saying who these 60 people are are they Ryan Reynolds Blake Lively their moms their publicists
00:08:43.720their lawyers are they amongst the 60 people they interviewed for this story well they're not saying
00:09:36.800Is it because they didn't want to make money of their own movie?
00:09:41.200And of course, the timing of when Justin Baldoni hired this crisis PR team.
00:09:46.760Months before he hired them, it was discussed that Blake Lively did not want to promote the movie with him
00:09:53.680and did not want to appear next to him on the red carpet.
00:09:57.440And this information was starting to leak out and people started asking questions.
00:10:02.480And there were a lot of speculations online about this.
00:10:05.640So all of that backlash and the backlash that Blake received while she was photographed by paparazzis in some of the outfits that people thought were hideous that she was wearing as our character and it ends with us, that backlash happened way before he hired any crisis team to help him survive the attacks from Blake Lively because that was basically what he was doing.
00:10:29.760He was just trying to defend himself in the public against all these rumors that came out that Blake Lively's publicist Leslie Sloan planted in the media.
00:10:39.960I remember when the New York Times published the initial hit piece on Justin Baldoni.
00:10:44.980They mentioned in that article that they could not really pinpoint what backlash was organic and what backlash was actually fabricated according to them.
00:10:55.900They could not establish that, but in this article, they don't mention that at all.
00:11:01.640They're just asking the reader to just accept the fact that all of this backlash against Blake Lively and Stephanie Jones
00:11:09.740was fabricated and was planted by a crisis team.
00:11:14.620So to respond to the Hollywood Reporter, I think that's why they did this, by the way.
00:15:28.020Every allegation was parsed for accuracy.
00:15:31.260at one point we have a line in the story that the times talked to 60 people my editor nikita
00:15:38.400stewart said i want to see your list of 60 people i do too want to see this list of 60 people and
00:15:44.960then they just stopped talking about that in this interview with themselves they're just saying that
00:15:50.520there is a list of 60 people when you choose to leave out information that makes your main
00:15:57.460character's narrative collapse, that is called biased and that is extremely unethical. We know
00:16:05.700that the reason why Blake Lively settled the lawsuit is because she had no evidence of what
00:16:11.700she was accusing Justin Baldonio. And in the article, New York Times made it look like Blake
00:16:16.880Lively received $400,000 in attorney's fees because some of her claims had any truth to it.
00:16:24.320Also, interestingly enough, they reached out to The Rock here, who got a chance to respond.
00:16:30.560They did not reach out to Boldoni, because in this article, they're basically claiming that there were smear websites against Blake Lively.
00:16:40.880She is a part of this map with other women, amongst them Stephanie Jones.
00:16:46.500And it says that these women became the subject of websites and posts with fabricated, disparaging narratives after their adversaries connected with at least one of the three.
00:17:00.440They are stating here that these women, including Blake Lively and Stephanie Jones, were victims of smear websites and fabricated narratives.
00:17:11.920without mentioning any of these fabricated narratives.
00:17:16.840In this interview, Deborah keeps saying that every fact in the story,
00:17:20.500every accusation, my editor would say, how do you know this?
00:17:24.280When I would tell her how I knew it, she would go, okay, how do you know that?
00:17:29.140I was pushed as a reporter in a way I don't think I've ever been pushed.
00:17:33.840This investigation wasn't the hardest I've done, but it was definitely the heaviest.