Pro-Blake Lively Trolls Told Me To Kill Myself After Smear Campaign Claim

Kjersti Flaa, the entertainment journalist who released “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job” over the summer as the actress was being criticized for her It Ends With Us press tour behavior, insisted in a new interview with The Ankler that she was not part of the alleged “smear campaign” against Lively, as online trolls are telling her to kill herself in retaliation.

Flaa also told the site that the New York Times owes her an apology for insinuating she was part of the plot and not contacting her comment before publication.

Following Lively’s lawsuit against her co-star and the film’s director Justin Baldoni, the Times released an extensive report on her allegations against him that mentioned Flaa and the Lively interview she posted—in a way that suggested Flaa had released the video as part of the alleged smear campaign.

The Times also noted that Flaa had previously posted videos in support of actor Johnny Depp, who was then a client of Baldoni’s crisis management expert Melissa Nathan.

Flaa has been trying to clear her name ever since, taking to social media and her YouTube channel to repeatedly declare that she “had nothing to do with Justin Baldoni and his smear campaign against Blake Lively.”

“Honestly, I did not know what was going on, that [Lively] was getting backlash from domestic violence victims and that they were criticizing her for being kind of tone deaf on this whole promotion tour,” Flaa told The Ankler. “I did not know that.” Flaa said that the online hate has been relentless since the Times report.

“This is the worst thing that ever happened to me in my career, that people are saying I’m lying. It’s terrible. And I feel like the New York Times owes me an apology,” she continued, opining that she doesn’t “want to open my messages on Instagram” because, “It’s like, ‘Go kill yourself, you f---ing whore.’ It’s things like that, and then you have people like, ‘Oh, I trusted you, and now I see you’ve been a part of this.’”

The video went a long way toward solidifying negative public sentiment about Lively during the press tour, as Lively is seen shutting down a congratulatory comment from Flaa about her new pregnancy before ignoring her for the rest of the clip to talk to her costar Parker Posey.

“Is it not ok to congratulate someone on their pregnancy or to ask another woman about costumes she is wearing in a film?” Flaa wrote in the video’s description. Internet commenters were nearly unanimous that Lively had mistreated Flaa when it was first posted, with many calling Lively’s responses “mean girl” behavior.

“Then I saw all the hate that Blake was getting, and that made me feel bad. That was not my intention,” Flaa added to the Ankler. Despite the backlash she’s received following the It Ends With Us fallout, Flaa said she doesn’t regret posting the video—and stands behind its implication that “working with [Lively]” is “unpleasant.”

“Publicists, to people on the set of Gossip Girl, makeup artists, stuntwomen. There are a lot of stories,” about Lively, Flaa told the Ankler. “We have to look at the sexual harassment allegations [against Baldoni], and that’s a different topic and issue. If those things are true, that’s horrible,” she said.

She ultimately concluded that “the smear campaign going back and forth” between the two movie stars shows Lively “doing exactly the same thing to him now that she accused him of doing to her.”