Irony

- Lively and Allen

In the entertainment news, there's much ado about actress Blake Lively accusing Justin Baldoni, the director of a movie she was in, of sexual misconduct (Reevaluating Blake Lively: 'It Ends With Us' actress's legal complaint against Justin Baldoni puts misogyny in the spotlight).

I haven't seen that movie, don't know who Justin Baldoniis, but I do know who Blake Lively is, and only for one reason. I remember her from an incident years ago that makes this current news about her seem ironic.

When Dylan Farrow, daughter of Woody Allen, accused her father of raping her as a child, Lively, who was in one of Allen's movies, brushed aside the allegations, apparently because, well, Woody was making her so, you know, famous?

Blake Lively Calls Woody Allen “Very Empowering” (2016)

Last year, Blake Lively joined an elite club of actresses who can be considered Woody Allen muses—see also: Emma Stone, Kristen Stewart, and Scarlett Johansson—when she was cast to star in the director’s latest comedy, Café Society. As the actress told us at Cannes this year, she signed onto the project without knowing anything about it—not even its time period, let alone her character—because she was so eager to work with the Oscar winner. And in a new interview, Lively explains what it was like to be directed by the legendary—if beleaguered—filmmaker.

“It’s really cool to work with a director who’s done so much, because he knows exactly what he wants,” Lively tells Hamptons Magazine. “The fact that he does one shot for an entire scene—[and] this could be a scene with eight people and one to two takes—it gives you a level of confidence because when he’s got it, he knows he’s got it.” ...

This past May, Allen, Lively, and the rest of the Café Society cast made headlines when Ronan Farrow, Allen’s estranged son, called out the parties who continue to collaborate with Allen in spite of the sexual-abuse allegations made against him. In an essay published in The Hollywood Reporter the same day that Café Society opened the Cannes Film Festival, Farrow wrote:

"Amazon paid millions to work with Woody Allen, bankrolling a new series and film. Actors, including some I admire greatly, continue to line up to star in his movies. "It's not personal," one once told me. But it hurts my sister every time one of her heroes like Louis C.K., or a star her age, like Miley Cyrus, works with Woody Allen. Personal is exactly what it is — for my sister, and for women everywhere with allegations of sexual assault that have never been vindicated by a conviction."

When we asked Lively about the essay in Cannes, the actress refused to comment on it, claiming that she had not read the piece and did not want to speak about something with which she was not familiar ...

Lively also defended Woody Allen again in The Los Angeles Times against the rape allegations.

Lively now wants the benefit of the doubt for herself that she would not give to another.

See Dylan Farrow's An Open Letter From Dylan Farrow, and Ronan Farrow's My Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked .