Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Van Vive podcast. I'm Kate Kennedy, your host. Welcome to 2025.

I mean, we're closing out Q1, the 2000s. What a thrill. If you're new here,

I'm a Chicago-based podcaster slash pop culture commentator, a bestselling author of my book,

one in a millennial, comes out in paperback in a couple weeks, exciting. And one of the things

we've done over the years is kind of these detailed multi-part deep dives when there's a

pop culture

story that comes out that has a lot of layers, a lot of intricacies. And while sometimes

major pop culture stories like this have such saturation, I don't really feel like competing

with the noise or like I can add value. Sometimes I feel like I can at least help you make sense

of it. And I've spent days, hours reading through legal documents so you don't

have to. And today we're going to do a classic BTI-5 deep dive about the Blake lively, Justin Baldoni.

It ends with us. Saga that is now involved their PR people, crisis PR. This is one of the most complicated things that

has come across my desk in years. That quite frankly intimidates me a little bit, but we're going to

give it our best shot. I hope everybody had a happy new year. Uh, 2025's off to, a weird start,

if I'm being honest. A couple things surprising me today. One, I am wearing a denim vest in my frigid basement. I am doing my laundry from being gone for like two weeks.

But it's what I had available in my basement. And I needed to get started in there are worse things than starting your year off like Lorelai Gilmore's first day at Chilton.

The other thing I didn't see for myself this year is starting the year with it ends with us, that I thought that conversation ended with us in the summer being kind of fatigued by it being such a prominent part of the news cycle.

When we didn't really have a lot of answers, it was clear something was off, but we didn't know what.

And meanwhile, a couple of things were going on with Blake lively, a lot of things resurfacing in terms of like past videos and cringy interviews.

And also in real time, she was not giving the best interviews related to a movie about such a serious topic that I think people were hopeful would take the opportunity to have an impactful cultural conversation given the

platform the movie had and the eyes that were on the campaign to talk about domestic violence,

to share victims' experiences. I think people even thought maybe there could be an opportunity

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