Amber Heard Compares Blake Lively’s Alleged Smear Campaign to Her Own ‘Horrifying’ and ‘Destructive’ Struggles With Depp

After a rough summer in the public eye, actor Blake Lively has filed a lawsuit against It Ends With Us director and co-star Justin Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath, who Lively has accused of sexual harassment and more on the set of the film. Actor Amber Heard, having experienced similar backlash “firsthand,” released a statement with NBC News to voice her solidarity with Lively.

Heard told NBC News:

Social media is the absolute personification of the saying ‘A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on.’ I saw this firsthand and up close. It’s as horrifying as it is destructive.

The actor saw herself the target of the public’s ridicule during actor Johnny Depp’s now-infamous 2022 defamation suit against her, throughout which Depp retained the same PR crisis manager used by Baldoni following complaints filed by Lively on the set of It Ends With Us.

Much of the backlash Heard endured throughout the course of the trial took place across social media platforms. Countless users voiced their distaste, posting hateful comments about Heard and furthering a narrative carefully constructed by Depp’s PR team, of which Melissa Nathan, who has now allegedly worked with Baldoni in a “smear campaign” against Lively, was a key player.

RELATED: The ‘Premeditated and Vindictive Effort’ Against Blake Lively Forces Her Trusted Allies To Break Their Silence

Because the backlash Heard faced was deeply rooted in the public’s response on social media, this made it difficult to pinpoint exactly who might be puppeteering the campaign behind the scenes. However, alleged text exchanges between Nathan and Jennifer Abel published by The New York Times suggest PR teams do, indeed, hold the power to “bury anyone” in this regard, despite what Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, has stated in the aftermath of Lively’s lawsuit and the investigative NYT piece that kickstarted the conversation.

As reported by Deadline, Freedman initially called Lively’s claims “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt and rehash a narrative in the media.” He’s since released another statement to Deadline in an attempt to further discredit both Lively and Heard’s claims of smear campaigns fabricated against them:

TAG PR must be the most powerful group of publicists the world has ever seen for it to be able to completely change the perception of both Amber Heard and Blake Lively. The only correlation between both individuals was that for decades every move they have made has been out there for everyone to see, widely filmed and documented for the public to make up their own minds — which they did, organically. All you have to do is watch the interviews that still remain if they have not already been scrubbed by their crisis PR Teams (which is apparently their crisis teams next move since that’s what crisis teams do, they protect their clients).

But Freedman’s statement doesn’t seem to hold up. As reported in the NYT piece detailing Lively’s case, Nathan allegedly told Baldoni via text, “You know we can bury anyone,” and pulled strings to have The Daily Mail run an August 16 article with the intention to further the narrative and tarnish Lively’s suffering reputation. This is just one example that proves it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that similar action was taken against Heard, and history has repeated itself in Lively’s case.

Both Heard and Lively have been heavily scrutinized and dubbed “mean girls” in certain social media circles. It’s important to hold celebrities and others accountable for problematic statements and actions, as both actors have been in the past, but it’s also necessary to take pause during situations in which those who have done wrong have also been victimized and to consider who or what machines might be working to harm them.