← Intentionally Disturbing
Intentionally Disturbing
Blake Lively expert psychologist report on ENTIRE case explained- no media bs or false narratives.
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Hey, guys. Welcome back. Dr. Leslie here, forensic psychologist. What I want to do is bring up the expert psychology report that was produced in the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni case. And I think it is an incredibly important report for everyone to hear and for everyone to understand. And it's very lengthy. Is Jennifer freed. She's a PhD now. She got her PhD the year I was born. I think she's been instrumental in teaching the world about coercive control and darvo. She coined the term darvo. This file is 115 pages. So let's go through this report. So this expert is going to introduce herself and as a psychologist and then give her summary of opinions and then tell you how she got there. And for anyone who's been in a domestic violence relationship, anyone who's been in a difficult relationship where there's been narcissism or psychopathy, antisocial behavior or domestic violence, gaslighting, love bombing, you know, all those trending words, because finally we have words for them. I think it's really important that you take a minute to hear the woman who actually invented them and brought them to us. So she introduces herself. I have been retained by Blake Lively's counsel to provide expert testimony concerning psychological theory and research as it pertains to the response of victims of betrayal, trauma, institutional betrayal, and darvo, particularly when the perpetrator of that mistreatment is someone or some institution that the victim trusts or that has power over the victim. Now, this abuse of authority we see all the time, especially with school districts and religious entities. And so she's really honing in here on these bigger areas of life that control you like people who employ you. She says my opinions relate to both the general theories of betrayal, trauma, which is excellent for all of us to understand, institutional betrayal, and darvo theories with substantial empirical research support that I originally proposed and named. Yeah, this is a badass bitch right here. As well as the potential relevance of these theories and research to this specific case. I have reviewed the case documents listed. There's a lot. You have to just go look that up or I can send it to you. But she does actually add a ton of scientific. Dozens of scientific articles that are really, really interesting. In the remainder of this report, I will provide an analysis of what I have reviewed and researched based on my knowledge as a researcher and schol of betrayal, trauma, institutional betrayal, and darvo. I will begin with information about my professional background that's, you know, voir. That's very normal. And then she will go into her opinions, ideally. Okay, so we'll do the summary of opinions just so you guys know what exactly she is stating. And then we'll dive into this a little bit more. Based on the information presented to me, it is my opinion that Ms. Lively has experienced and continues to experience betrayal, trauma, institutional betrayal and Darvo perpetrated by Justin Baldoni, Jamie Heath, Steve Surowitz. It ends with US Movie LLC and Wayfair Studios. I would add Sony, but with and through Melissa Nathan, the Agency Group PR LLC, Jennifer Abel, Jed Wallace and Street Relations. Second defendants actions put Ms. Lively at increased risk of symptom of distress consistent with research on the mental and physical impact and physical health impact of betrayal, trauma, institutional betrayal and Darvo. Now I know everyone right away is going to be like, oh, you know, it's a hired gun. They she's just basically talking about what she's studied and blah, blah, blah. No, this is a senior objective, incredible psychologist who has worked for plaintiffs and defendants and at the university level. And she is extremely respected in our field. And despite what people have to say, I don't care how much experts get paid. I don't care how many, how many times they've testified. We have an ethical code of conduct when we act as forensic psychologists. We have ethical standards. We have guidelines that we are obliged to follow. And she is not being biased. She reviewed everything in this case, things that you have not seen, things you are not going to see until trial and then they still may not be available for you to see. She has seen it all and she has come to the conclusion that v. That. So she goes through her experience and that's what you need to do in order for the lawyer to say, you know, please make this person consider them an expert in the court. So she's done a lot of education research, so much experience. She says she charges $800 an hour and a thousand dollars an hour for deposition and trial testimony, which is fairly normal, I would say actually probably low end for something like this because of the length of work and the depth of it all and all of the hate that she's probably going to get from the Baldani cult people. Okay, so she goes into betrayal trauma. Research that my students and collaborators and I have conducted over two decades has identified the unique harm caused by severe betrayal. We call this betrayal trauma. Betrayal trauma is a term I introduced in conference presentations beginning in 1991 and then in a publication following, followed by a Harvard Press book. It has become a term used by many other researchers and psychologists. Yes, it is a very common term Betrayal trauma is primarily a function of the nature of the victim perpetrator relationship with certain predictable consequences. When a victim depends upon or trusts the perpetrator or interpersonal trauma, that trauma is significantly more toxic on average than when individuals are harmed in other ways, such as trauma committed by strangers or non interpersonal traumas such as severe accidents. Severity of trauma is thus not primarily about the severity of the behaviors of the perpetrator, but rather the relational betrayal inherent in the perpetrator's behaviors. In peer reviewed research conducted over the past three decades, we have shown that this toxic quality of betrayal impacts individuals and their ability to have healthy relationships with others. Individuals who experience betrayal trauma are more likely to suffer from symptoms of depression, anxiety, dissociation, personality disorders, substance abuse, and even physical health problems. When those individuals attempt to find new relationships, they are more likely to have difficulty trusting others, leading to instability and difficulty with intimacy, or due to continued betrayal blindness, more likely to be overly trusting of dangerousness, to be overly trusting of dangerous others, leading to victimization. We hear that a lot, that if you've been a victim of sexual abuse, you're more likely to be a victim again. The way I like to describe it to a jury is, you know, if you've been punched once, what's the big deal about getting punched again? It's a lot more different than anticipating the initial punch, right? So people often minimize how much it's going to hurt until later when the psychological trauma starts to kick in. So she writes. In addition to demonstrating the harm of betrayal trauma, we have also found evidence for betrayal blindness, whereby victims frequently do not fully perceive, remember or comprehend the betrayal. The function of betrayal blindness is to preserve relationships that feel necessary in some way due to the amount of trust, power dependence or closeness. Without betrayal blindness, victims might respond to the betrayal with confrontation or withdrawal that might threaten a necessary or apparently necessary relationship. Betrayal blindness can thus cause victims to fail to recognize or fully recognize that they are being mistreated by someone. Research indicates that betrayal blindness can lead to full or partial forgetting of the event, minimization of the significance of the event, and delays in disclosure or even failure to disclose the event. Now, this is what we see in a lot of sexual abuse cases, in a lot of trafficking cases as well. People don't fully remember it's fragmented memory, but sometimes it starts to come back clearly, and that's where therapy can help. It's a very complex topic and process and a lot of lawyers don't understand. And so they try to minimize it and dramatize it using the trial and the court for theater for a jury to watch. And hopefully the jury links onto those emotions rather than the victims. You have to be very careful and prepared. Research on betrayal trauma has become increasingly prevalent and now entirely completed by researchers outside of Dr. Fried's lab. So she's just like building an army of people, understanding, and I think it's incredible. Okay. And then she goes into institutional betrayal. Betrayal trauma theory has been extended to the concept of institutional betrayal. The term institutional betrayal was one I first introduced in presentations in 2007 and has since become a highly used concept. She's a badass, so she offers a brief definition. Institutional betrayal, developed from betrayal trauma theory, occurs when the institution an individual trusts or depends on, mistreats that individual. It can be overt, such as when an employer creates harmful policies, such as demoting or otherwise punishing employees who become pregnant or give birth. It can also be less obvious, such as a failure to protect when there is a reasonable expectation to be protected. Like when you're in school and somebody sexually assaults you like a teacher, and the school doesn't do anything or doesn't stop the person from being around you, or when you're Blake Lively and you've got these guys running around sexually harassing you and Sony is refusing to do anything about it, and they themselves are gaslighting her and minimizing her experience. Such as when an employee who reports being sexually harassed continues to be victimized after their employer fails to take action. Bingo. Research shows that institutional betrayal is related to measurable harm, both psychological and physical. She includes a ton more research and explanation. But then we jump into Darvo, and she says, darvo is a term I coined, and it stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. Perpetrators and their defenders may deny the behavior, attack the victim, confronting them, and reverse the roles of victim and defender. In this way, a perpetrator can adopt the victim role and accuse the true victim of being the offender. I know that's hard to understand, and I will break it down even more. This can occur when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of falsely accused, attacks the victim's credibility, and accuses the victim of perpetrating a false accusation. So as soon as Justin Baldoni knew that you Blake was going to get legal and was going to call him out for all of his sexual harassment, he posted an article saying that he was the victim of sexual harassment by an ex girlfriend. So he did exactly this. He was the perpetrator. And then he found a way to look like he was the victim. Now she's suing him, this poor victim. Now he's the victim, she's the perpetrator. That's Darvo, commonly seen in narcissistic personality disorder. So I'll reread her short Victim, Victim of Darvo. Darvo stands for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. Perpetrators and their defenders may deny the behavior, attack the victim, confronting them, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. In this way, a perpetrator can adopt the victim role and accuse the true victim of being an offender. Pair that with the institutional Darvo and the relational betrayal. So you just have all of these fucking things that are happening to Blake Lively, to Isabella Ferrer, to Jenny Slate, to all these people on set. And it's not clear enough to be like the straight up allegation. It's not clear yet, but it becomes clear. And when it becomes clear and they start speaking out, the institutional gaslighting and minimization gets even worse. Worse, because they won't, Sony won't take it. Of course Sony's taking notes, right? They're. They're keeping all of these allegations to themselves, but they will not produce it or do anything about it. They won't take it seriously. So here's an example of Darvo, deny. Whatever you're saying happened isn't my fault. Then the attack. You're just trying to make me look bad. Then the reverse. I can't believe you're trying to make this my fault. And that is the smear campaign and exactly what they have been doing and what the world has been seeing. She further goes in to describe polyvictimization. Polyvictimization is a term used to refer to a person's exposure to multiple types of victimization. Research in this literature and related literature indicates that the more mistreatment a person experiences, the more likely they are to be suffering from physical and mental health symptoms. Furthermore, research indicates that the negative impact of polyvictimization is more powerful than the impact of a similar number of events of a single type of victimization. Now, I actually think that this part is kind of key because this is where I think Blake Lively should have had a forensic assessment to show her level of trauma. There are so many psychological assessments that are objective and just the highest gold standard quality, and they can pinpoint when and where these traumas occurred and how they are affecting her. And I think that that's one scary piece for me is that they didn't. This woman is talking about theoretically, right? She's looking at all the Evidence. But she didn't actually sit down and meet with Blake. I would've fought tooth and nail to have my client have a report and a full assessment by a forensic psychologist retained by both sides. Okay, so then she goes and she applies her research to the Lively case, and she states, when an individual must trust someone with power over her, and that powerful person betrays the individual. This is betrayal trauma. When an individual is betrayed by an institution, including an employer that has power over her, she must depend upon or trust through acts of commission, retaliation, or failure to protect, that constitutes institutional betrayal. And we even saw so much stuff in the docket. Ryan Reynolds begging the agents, begging people in charge to do something to help Blake, to not let this continue. Then, as the movie comes out, to do something to help her reputation because they are smearing her so badly, and no one would even help him. No one took him seriously. It was all false promises. So this is lengthy. We're gonna. We're getting into it early. Interactions. In December 2022, when Ms. Lively received an initial phone working on the film, It Ends with Us, she was aware of Mr. Baldoni because she and Mr. Baldoni shared a mutual friend with whom Mr. Baldoni co hosted a podcast. Now, that's Liz Plank, right? Who has previously said, I tried to warn you about his warning signs, and then quit the podcast because he's not a feminist. He's cosplaying as one. Ms. Lively was also aware of Mr. Baldoni through a social media account that she followed called the Celebrity. Kind of. The premise of It Ends With Us is that the main character, Lily Bloom, suffers from domestic violence at the hands of her trusted husband and eventually overcomes the cycle of domestic violence. It is my opinion that the film also involves betrayal blindness in the marital relationship. At the time Ms. Lively signed on to film to portray Lily Bloom as overcoming the cycle of domestic violence, Mr. Baldoni had previously portrayed himself as a leader of the male feminist movement by, for example, writing books, hosting podcasts, and holding TED talks on the topic. And in particular, with respect to listening to women. Yeah, well, we all know that that's bullshit. Now, furthermore, Mr. Baldoni, Mr. Heath had positioned Wayfair Studios as a male feminist platform. Yeah, doesn't really sound that way now, right? A male feminist platform that explored gender roles, dismantled toxic masculinity, which maybe we should just call fatal masculinity, and created a safer and judgment free society for women. Right? So asking about all of this sexual stuff and making these sexual comments and all of this horrible crap, he Did. And yes, it was pervasive. Yeah. Fake. It is my opinion that Ms. Lively suffered significant betrayal trauma and institutional betrayal at the hands of Mr. Baldoni. Mr. Heath Wayfarer, amplified by Sony, the distributor of the film, and the fact that such actions occurred on a film meant to raise awareness on related issues, including betrayal, blindness. Prior to accepting the leading role in the film, Ms. Lively met Mr. Baldoni once in her apartment. Ms. Lively described Mr. Baldoni in that meeting as. He is very good at talking about disturbances of the past as being in the past. He's very good at talking about the way things are now, which are incredibly reassuring. Ms. Lively noted that Mr. Baldoni was complimentary of her in that initial meeting. The love bombing, right? Positive impression management. However, Ms. Lively also stated that during her first meeting with Mr. Baldoni, he stated that he was circumcised. Okay, so you're going to a superstar's house. You're a nothing. And yes, say that okay to a woman, a married woman at the time. Ms. Lively found the comment disturbing. But given that it was one comment and he seemed nice, she wrote it off as him taking a benign conversation too far and hoped and assumed it would be an isolated incident. Maybe she was being naive. Maybe she was being manipulated. It is my opinion that Ms. Lively's willingness to overlook this inappropriate comment reflected both a maturity in understanding that sometimes good people say inappropriate things, but also planted the seeds for a kind of low level betrayal blindness whereby Ms. Lively continued to give Mr. Baldoni the benefit of the doubt as he continued to make inappropriate remarks and violate Ms. Lively's boundaries in a sexually inappropriate way. Perfectly stated. Let's talk about the film development and the behavior on set and then maybe we'll make another video after that. Once Ms. Lively started working on the film, Wayfarer and Mr. Baldoni in particular became extremely important to her work life due to their near complete control of the working conditions of the film as her employer. Now again, this is an objective psychologist reading all this that was given to her. Mr. Baldoni is the co chairman and co founder of Wayfair Studios and served as director, executive producer and actor in the lead role of Ryle in the film alongside Ms. Lively playing the lead role of Lily Bloom. Throughout the production, editing and promotion of the film. Ms. Lively was Wayfarer's employee along with all the other cast and crew. Sony was the co financer and distributor of the film. It is my opinion that this institutional hierarchy allowed Wayfarer to engage in unchecked misconduct facilitated by Sony leaving Ms. Lively with little to no recourse. For example, after Ms. Lively reviewed the original script and signed on to play the role of Lily Bloom, Mr. Baldoni led the process into making significant changes to the script without her consent, adding nudity and other graphic sexual content that would have required Ms. Lively to depict an on screen orgasm, perform simulated oral sex and perform a birth scene. The addition of such scenes to a script would have been a material change requiring an actor's consent. He just likes. Well, he said he has a porn addiction, right? All he wants to do is just sex up everything. And then he told everyone that she'd never seen porn, which wasn't true. But he also just wanted to kind of harm her in another way again. So on set, Mr. Baldoni spoke to Ms. Lively about his prior pornography addiction, divulged information about his sex life, and made unwanted sexual comments about Ms. Lively's and others appearance. Mr. Heath entered Ms. Lively's trailer while she was nude from the waist up and her breasts were exposed while she was having body makeup removed, despite Ms. Lively's request that Mr. Heath remain outside or refrain from looking at her while she was undressed and the requests of two other makeup artists who were screaming at him to leave. Mr. Baldoni also improvised intimacy in scenes with Ms. Lively that had not been rehearsed, choreographed or discussed with Ms. Lively in any advance. For example, nuzzling into Ms. Lively's neck in a scene that did not indicate this type of intimacy or intimate touching in the script. Wayfair also failed to take precautions to ensure Ms. Lively's physical and emotional safety. For example, Ms. Lively alleged alleges that Mr. Baldoni and or Wayfair did not implement closed set protocols for filming of a scene in which Ms. Lively was port was to portray giving birth, pressured Ms. Lively to simulate nudity, and instructed Mr. Heath to show Ms. Lively a graphic video of his own naked wife in the context of giving birth without seeking Ms. Lively's consent in advance. Despite complaints by Ms. Lively and others about Wayfair's behavior on set, Wayfair decided not to conduct an internal investigation or make any human resources support available to Ms. Lively or others, thus confirming that the institutional structure would not protect her. This is even. This is true even after Wayfair agreed to Ms. Lively's November 9, 2023 protections for return to production in January 2024, a set of 17 protections she negotiated with Wayfair to ensure a safe set for all cast and crew and cease certain onset behavior by Mr. Baldoni and Mr. Heath like Wyatt. Why the fuck does she even need to do that? Why can't they just fucking control themselves? Give me a fucking break. Okay, so then we go into Ms. Lively's response, which we're gonna have to make a separate video because I have a client coming in, so catch in a little bit.