ezwin I’ve Seen Celebrity P.R. Tactics at Work. Blake Lively Is Not Alone.

The actress Blake Lively is not someone I had a real opinion about before a few days ago, when the news broke that she had filed a legal complaint against Justin Baldoni, her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, for sexual harassment and retaliation. But I saw a video a while back in which she appeared to be hostile to a reporter making a seemingly innocuous reference to her pregnancy. My impression was that she seemed a little rude and needlessly antagonistic. I saw the video thanks to a Daily Mail article suggesting that she was facing a backlash — one thatezwin, unbeknown to me, was allegedly the product of a smear campaign by a public relations firm hired by Mr. Baldoni to damage Ms. Lively’s reputation in order to pre-empt her accusations about his wildly inappropriate behavior on set.

Much of what we know about celebrities’ lives is shaped by P.R. professionals who are paid handsomely to create and spread stories that are flattering to their clients and unflattering to their perceived enemies. Reputation management is big business: The time and resources spent in Hollywood and New York to buff, polish and protect a star’s image can be greater than what’s spent to protect the reputations of some chief executives or senators. It’s a ruthless business, too. Dishonesty is often tolerated, on the dubious basis that entertainment is a frivolity and the stakes are low, and things like talent and truth can be tarnished with the art of the smear.

I saw the brute force of celebrity P.R. tactics up close early in my career after I co-founded the website Gawker in 2002 — which mostly covered well-known New Yorkers in the spirit of Spy magazine, which had christened Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” — and freelanced for The New York Post’s Page Six gossip column. In the first months of Gawker, in spite of having just around 10,000 readers a day, we got a cease-and-desist letter from Marty Singer, a well-known entertainment lawyer who insisted that we take down an unflattering story about one of his clients. The threat never went anywhere because we had not published the story but had merely linked to it. These were the early days of the internet, and many people didn’t understand how hyperlinks worked. It’s unclear to me even now whether his firm understood this perfectly well but sent the cease-and-desist letter to try to intimidate us anyway.

At Page Six, the P.R. apparatus of blocking and tackling was even more apparent because the gossip industry is so intertwined with celebrities. P.R. people wouldn’t just defend their clients; they would try to plant flattering stories, derail unflattering ones or pit celebrities against each other to redirect attention.

But Mr. Westwood and his colleagues found the opposite. In the weeks after the attack, Americans’ support for partisan violence, and murder specifically, diminished — and fell most sharply among Republicans who identify with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Gray served three terms as a Democratic mayor, up through 2005. Barack Obama won the area in the 2008 presidential election, and Democrats cornered a vast majority of the county’s legislative seats. Jon Tester, the Democrat who has long represented the state in the U.S. Senate and farms in the same northern plains region, holds his election-night celebrations in Great Falls.

Most of the plants were fairly innocuous — a sighting of a celebrity at an upscale restaurant or a note about what a celebrity was wearing. Others were more strategic, and publicists would sometimes try to negotiate more flattering coverage of one client by offering a scoop about another or a tip about a client’s rival.

Sometimes publicists would use access to celebrities as leverage. On one occasion a powerful New York publicist was so angry that the head of the column wouldn’t kill a story about a friend and former love interest that she threatened to ban its staff members from all of her high-profile events. In retaliation, the columnist she threatened published a salacious blind item about her and called her parties “horrific.”

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