On July 1st, Perez Hilton uploaded a YouTube video with breaking news. 

“Hello everybody, it is Perez, the queen of all media, the original influencer, and allegedly, I have been subpoenaed by Blake Lively,” Hilton said, stretching out the four syllables in the word “allegedly” as far as they could go. Since the actress sued her It Ends With Us costar Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment and retaliation at the end of 2024, a certain class of content creators had been eager to weigh in. In her complaint, Lively had alleged that Baldoni’s camp was planting hit pieces about her online. TMZ had just reported that Hilton was one of three influencers Lively had set her sights on. She wanted any conversations he had with Team Baldoni.

While the threat of being pulled into a lawsuit might be anxiety-inducing for most people, it seemed to invigorate Hilton, who opened his response by cackling for six seconds. “I love this,” he squealed. He read out the TMZ headline about his alleged involvement and gasped in faux horror. “But my response,” Hilton said, switching to a syrupy sweet tone, “is thank you.” Hilton laughed again with an affect that made it sound like he stole Christmas. “Nothing would make me happier than taking the witness stand and testifying!”

There was a lot to celebrate in terms of the views and attention to come. Hilton’s name is an infamous one in celebrity gossip — and, if you ask him, journalism. His pseudonym sounds suspiciously like the hotel heiress who fascinated the tabloid media chain in the early aughts, shortly before Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. (his real name) disrupted the business by launching his own blogging empire, scrawling crude remarks over paparazzi photos, and sending rumors about A- to Z-listers into the social media stratosphere. 

He has since fallen out of the center of the viral fame zeitgeist, but not much else has changed for Hilton. If anything, the rest of the world has simply bent back toward the arc of Hilton’s now decades-long career. Open TikTok or Reddit, and there are thousands of everyday people who, like him, revel in spreading news, speculation, and hate on celebrities and influencers. The gossipmonger profit model is bigger than ever, but it’s not dominated by Hilton or any one individual. Instead, the social media platforms are the stars, with algorithms that produce an infinite number of forgettable faces, among them countless news influencers talking about everything from elections to niche hobbyist drama. Increasingly, they’ve embraced the label of journalist despite actively defying journalistic norms. 

“Ms. Lively’s opposition recycles rhetoric designed to brand me as an ‘influencer’ rather than acknowledge my well-established role as a journalist, but the law protects my reporting regardless of labels,” Hilton wrote in a filing of support for his motion to quash Lively’s subpoena. He represented himself in court pro se and argued that his reporting on Lively v. Baldoni was protected from legal discovery. Hilton also wrote on Reddit that he used ChatGPT “to help me with my filing […] And, YES, I made sure there is no ghost law / hallucination / made up cases in what I just submitted to the court in Nevada.”

Lively has sought information pertaining to dozens of content creators — reportedly, more than 100 — through subpoenas, which her counsel also issued to social media platforms like X and YouTube. These subpoenas were wide-ranging. She sought communications and information from people like Hilton and Candace Owens, a right-wing commentator with nearly 7 million followers on X, as well as identifying information regarding X accounts, some with fewer than 100 followers. Owens was also one of the three creators who TMZ first reported were being subpoenaed. The thumbnail for her reaction video on YouTube features her smiling widely, hands clasped below her chin, with the caption “Dreams come true.”

“I never understood what people meant when they referred to Christmas in July until this exact moment,” said Owens, who is also being sued for defamation by the president of France for falsely claiming that his wife is transgender. “I pleaded, I begged, I demanded that I be allowed to partake in this Justin Baldoni lawsuit.” 

The final creator of the three, YouTuber Andy Signore, initially took a more solemn tone when addressing the TMZ article and his subpoena. But a couple weeks later, he and several content creators who have sided with Baldoni made special guest appearances at a live show in Phoenix, Arizona, hosted by podcaster and frequent Lively v. Baldoni commentator Zack Peter. There, Signore pranked Peter with a fake subpoena, complete with a fake process server arriving to “serve” Peter onstage.

“It was the best prank. Andy got me so good,” Peter said in a podcast afterward. 

Not everyone is in the audience for niche influencer legal drama. But these cases have the potential to set new precedents with wider-ranging implications beyond A-listers’ allegations. A trend exemplified by Depp v. Heard has started to feel familiar. 

The back-and-forth between Blake Lively’s counsel and these creators may determine the boundaries between influencers and journalists and whether the former have earned the protections granted to the latter. It follows similar cases where rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have sued celebrity gossip creators for defamation, but this time, Lively is hoping to prove that content creators were part of a smear campaign launched as retaliation for her reporting workplace sexual harassment. 

Lively’s allegations stem from It Ends With Us, the 2024 film that Baldoni directed and starred in with Lively. The movie is an adaptation of the novel by Colleen Hoover, the author who has been dominating bestseller lists thanks in large part to her fandom on TikTok. (It Ends With Us sold the most physical copies of any book in 2022.) The production was a social media obsession from the beginning. The Gossip Girl alumna brought significantly more star power than Baldoni, who was previously best known for playing a love interest on the CW show Jane The Virgin. In comparison, Lively has co-chaired the Met Gala, is married to Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds, and has had a close-knit friendship with Taylor Swift, who is the godmother to Lively and Reynolds’ three daughters.

But Lively’s leading role in It Ends With Us was plagued by growing scrutiny. Some fans objected to the character being aged up from 23 to fit 35-year-old Lively (Baldoni was also roughly a decade older than his character). Set photos of Lively’s eclectic costume choices caused a stir. And soon after the film premiered in August 2024, criticism of Lively reached a fever pitch. The plot of It Ends With Us follows Lively’s character in an abusive relationship with Baldoni’s character, and some onlookers felt that Lively’s press tour — in which she encouraged viewers to “wear your florals” to the film — was insensitive to survivors. (The same critiques did not carry over to Baldoni, who posed for content with influencers at a flower shop pop-up event to promote the film.) Then, unflattering moments throughout Lively’s career started to resurface. She was combative with an interviewer who asked about her baby bump. She and Reynolds got married on a plantation. In the past, she had used a transphobic slur. The hate train against Lively overshadowed that other cast members from It Ends With Us had unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram and rumored on-set tensions between the stars that might have cast Lively in a more sympathetic light.

Despite the backlash and middling reviews, It Ends With Us still made over $350 million globally and cracked the top 20 at the box office in 2024. And then four months after the hype died down, a different kind of blockbuster dropped. Megan Twohey, one of the New York Times journalists behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, published a detailed investigation outlining allegations contained in a legal complaint filed by Lively: that Baldoni had paid for a retaliatory smear campaign aimed at destroying Lively’s reputation after she made sexual harassment allegations against him on set. Apparently, despite the difference in their star power, Baldoni had a powerful billionaire backer named Steve Sarowitz, whom he met through their shared Baha’i faith. On New Year’s Eve, supported by Sarowitz, Baldoni filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the Times. Lively followed with her official suit a few hours later, and by the end of New Year’s Day, the internet had already chosen its top celebrity legal drama of 2025.

“When the lawsuits came out, people would put them up almost like page by page and go through them on TikTok Live,” said Jessica Maddox, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia. “I was getting a lot of this on my ‘For You’ page on TikTok […] I would say it was 70-30, with the bigger number being pro-Justin Baldoni and the smaller number being pro-Blake Lively.”

Baldoni would go on to sue Lively for defamation, too. His suits were bundled together and then dismissed in June. (A final judgment was formally entered this week.) In late September, the Times sued Baldoni’s production company for legal fees. But the early defeat in court hasn’t turned the tide of opinion among those rooting for Baldoni. Perez Hilton has referred to the judge who made the decision as Lively’s “lapdog.” Among pro-Baldoni / anti-Lively communities and influencers, the narrative has taken root that the system is biased against Baldoni and that his innocence — and victimhood — are both gospel.

“The normalization of vibes, conspiracy, and fandom on social media has created a really volatile and hostile environment where, even if evidence to the contrary is presented, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not what somebody feels,” Maddox said. 

To her, it felt like a redux of TikTok during the 2022 trial in Johnny Depp’s defamation case against Amber Heard. For six weeks, every social media platform was overwhelmed with pro-Depp / anti-Heard trial content. Both cases pitted an actress against an actor over claims involving sexual misconduct. Both times, the majority of content creators sided with the actor. 

During Depp v. Heard, the testimony of Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman got far less attention online than when Depp referred to drinking a “mega-pint” of alcohol or when Heard recounted the time her dog stepped on a bee. But Waldman’s deposition revealed a hint of the inner workings of influencer crisis PR for public figures.

“I’ve provided information episodically to what I would call ‘internet journalists,’” Waldman said in the deposition. “I’ll define that as journalists who are not affiliated with, you mentioned NBC a moment ago, or a mainstream media outlet.” Waldman then confirmed three of the creators he had communicated with. Of those creators, some of their videos containing leaked audio recordings of Depp and Heard fighting were viewed millions of times, influencing some to believe that Heard’s domestic abuse allegations against Depp were lies and that she had abused him, actually. Before the trial started, Waldman was kicked off the case after Heard’s team accused him of disseminating evidence to social media users. Depp’s apparent strategy of trying to sway public opinion through social media leaks received little coverage. 

Crisis publicist Melissa Nathan was retained by Depp during the 2022 trial, and she represented Baldoni after Lively complained about his on-set behavior while filming It Ends With Us. Lively’s lawsuit accuses Nathan of coordinating a retaliatory smear campaign on Baldoni’s behalf, which Nathan denies. Nathan’s texts with other PR professionals have been at the center of Lively’s defense, and in an exhibit filed in August, a transcript of a group chat from late January included the names of several content creators, including Hilton and Signore. 

“How do we get to Perez?” reads one of the messages. “He’s been supportive and getting traction on his coverage.” Another person says the group could try reaching out to “Bryan, as he is also his lawyer.” Bryan Freedman is the lawyer representing Baldoni and the other defendants against Lively. He has also represented multiple creators who have made anti-Lively content, including Hilton, who said in his initial response that he had not received any information from Freedman about the case or talked to him about Lively’s subpoena.

In the same group chat, Nathan wrote, “Popcorn planet my new Bestie.” The rest of her text mentioned other content creators and “sending” something “wide.” Signore’s YouTube channel is called Popcorned Planet. In his motion to quash Lively’s subpoena, Signore invoked reporter’s privilege, writing, “The content published by Popcorned Planet clearly satisfies the statutory definition of ‘news,’ as it constitutes ‘information of public concern relating to local, statewide, national, or worldwide issues or events’—namely, in the categories of entertainment, culture and current events.”

Like Hilton, Signore was once close enough to touch Hollywood royalty, but has since retreated to the sidelines to heckle them. In 2008, he created the YouTube channel Screen Junkies and its viral series of satirical trailers for popular movies and TV shows called Honest Trailers. The fourth most-watched video in the channel’s history is a parody trailer for Deadpool that actually features Reynolds. “Cool dude who just gets it,” is how Signore described Reynolds to CNET in 2016. “He’s polite enough that he’s reached out.”

The way Signore talks about Reynolds a decade later on Popcorned Planet is unrecognizable in comparison. “Ryan Reynolds is losing it over this latest Taylor Swift news,” Signore said at the start of a video from August that has over 100,000 views. Onscreen, there is an AI-generated picture of Reynolds wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt with an expression like he is about to cry. 

“He’s very egocentric,” Signore continued. “And I just found this move to be so desperate and petty.” Signore was describing Reynolds posting a Marvel teaser on Instagram.

In the same video, Signore promoted a Taylor Swift-inspired AI-generated song he created and distributed on YouTube and music streaming services. “I’m Not Your Dragon” is a reference to a text message Lively allegedly sent Baldoni, where she seemed to compare Swift and Reynolds to the loyal dragons in Game of Thrones.

“Blake is trying to declare that it’s an ongoing smear campaign. They’re coming after creators like myself and others to try and prove this,” Signore said in a different video with a thumbnail containing AI-generated images of Reynolds looking furious and Lively looking upset in a courtroom. The visuals are eerily reminiscent of the real photos of Heard crying in 2022 that Signore used in previous thumbnails when he made videos about Depp v. Heard.

In the years between working with Reynolds and prompting AI image generators to create visuals resembling him, Signore was one of the earliest dominoes to fall after Weinstein in the early days of the #MeToo movement. Back in October 2017, three days after The New York Times published its Weinstein exposé, Signore was ousted from Screen Junkies. Several women had been inspired by the allegations against Weinstein and publicly detailed their own allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Signore. He acknowledged cheating on his wife and “flirting with fans” but denied anything nonconsensual. 

Having lost his biggest platform, Signore retreated to Popcorned Planet, where he first tried posting movie trailer reactions and audience reviews at local movie theaters. Nearly a year went by and his views continued to hover in the low thousands. Then he released a video called “The Truth About Andy Signore: A #MeToo Misfire,” in which he stood in front of a wall of nerdy memorabilia and denounced the most serious allegations against him, including sexual assault. That video has been viewed over 600,000 times, and Popcorned Planet is approaching 1 million subscribers. 

After positioning himself as a #MeToo martyr, Signore began making more videos with thumbnails and titles that seem designed to appeal to anti-woke audiences: “Thor is Only 1 Gender | Change My Mind | Nerd Edition,” “The Office Is Now Too Offensive?! – Top 10 Moments Destroyed,” and eventually the jackpot: videos about “Justice for Johnny Depp,” the growing movement to relitigate Heard’s domestic abuse allegations against Depp in his favor. During the 2022 trial, after periodically covering the case for years, Signore made nearly 100 YouTube videos slamming Heard. He has made more than 150 since the trial ended. Signore made a video comparing himself to Depp and his own accuser to Heard. Afterward, he met Depp backstage at a concert alongside one of the women Depp’s lawyer said he had communicated with. 

Many of the creators who have joined the anti-Lively hate train previously made anti-Heard content, too, which was lucrative enough to net some of those creators hundreds of thousands of dollars during the trial alone. Many are hoping for a repeat with Lively v. Baldoni, which is supposed to go to trial in New York City in spring 2026. 

In text messages, Hilton told me that he thinks talking about how much money he’s making off this case is “tacky,” but “there’s def money to be made. That’s def why some creators have made it their sole beat.” He then sent three cry-laughing emoji. 

In 2022, Hilton said he was inclined to believe Heard over Depp. That stance earned him more dislikes than likes and hundreds of angry comments on YouTube — something he shared with The Verge as evidence that he “won’t pretend to like or support someone just for clicks and views.” Hilton covers other celebrity news, too, but more than half of his YouTube videos in August were about the It Ends With Us stars, and those are the videos that got the most views. Some of his videos about other celebrities like Zayn Malik, mgk (formerly Machine Gun Kelly), and Pete Davidson have received around 5,000 views each, while his updates about Lively and Baldoni average around 50,000 views. Hilton’s viewership spikes in particular whenever he gives updates about his role in the case. Like many influencers, he is remarkably transparent about how his followers motivate him.

“They are dictating the priority I give this mess,” he wrote. “For example, I committed to covering the Diddy trial daily. By the end of it, my videos and posts were barely getting any traction. Folks were sick of it all. The same is not true of Baldoni vs Lively. People are still riveted. For many reasons. I think this is a real life David vs Goliath for people. They see themselves in Justin.”

Throughout his career, Hilton has doted on some celebrities and despised others. His coverage back in the aughts could boost or belittle people in the entertainment industry, especially women. Initially, Hilton said he posted about being on Lively’s side and believing her allegations. But after Baldoni filed his countersuit, Hilton flipped. He has since given Lively a string of evocative nicknames: “Subpoena Serena” and “Serena van der Crooksen” (her Gossip Girl character’s name was Serena van der Woodsen); “Plantation Princess” and “Ku Klux Khaleesi” call back to the plantation wedding and the Game of Thrones texts. Hilton has also posted edited images of him and Lively in a courtroom together, which never happened in real life.

“I truly believe it was organic,” Hilton wrote in an email to The Verge about the hate Lively receives. “I believe it’s wholly wrong to think people were hoodwinked into being against her.”

A lot of the amateur videos about Lively v. Baldoni are filmed and edited with a style popularized on TikTok, which has a built-in green-screen effect that is as easy to use as pressing a button. It can replace a video’s background with any image from the user’s camera roll, whether it’s a PDF of a legal document or a picture saved from Google Images. The resulting video is filmed vertically, like a selfie, with the creator’s face superimposed over the background. Maddox, the media studies professor, says this kind of TikTok is colloquially understood as presenting evidence. She calls the people who make them the “greenscreeners.”

In addition to the green-screen effect, Maddox said she sees a lot of TikToks that fall into the categories of “hot takes” and “curators.” The hot takes are the people who “came out guns-a-blazing,” she said. “You know, ‘He always seemed skeezy,’ ‘She always seemed weird because of her plantation wedding.’ These people knew they had their opinion about either one of them and what happened, and there was nothing that was going to change that opinion.” 

In the “curators” bucket, there can be room for more nuance. Some TikTok creators can appear much more similar to mainstream media journalists, who are increasingly joining these platforms to promote their reporting to audiences who have drifted away from traditional sources. But even when creators resemble journalists — or even if they are journalists — the ones who post independently do so outside the traditional structures of accountability that come from working for an institution. Instead, they are beholden to the whims of social media platforms. Hilton had over 1.6 million TikTok followers before he was permanently banned in December 2020. (TikTok said he violated community guidelines for hate speech, sexual content, and bullying. At the time, Hilton had been posting TikToks criticizing the parents of 15-year-old Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s then-biggest star, for allowing her to do sexually suggestive dances in a bikini.)

These genres have become standard across TikTok and other short-form video platforms as an easy formula to pump out consistent content, which is one of the only ways to stay afloat as a creator or journalist in the sea of competition these platforms have created. The intuitive editing features have turned ordinary people into producers, filming from their kitchens, bathrooms, couches, cars, or bedroom floors. People with no background in law or communications can broadcast their analysis of esoteric legal documents and six-figure crisis PR strategies to millions of viewers. 

Kjersti Flaa — the Norwegian press junket reporter whose contentious 2016 interview with Lively about her “bump” went viral shortly after the It Ends With Us premiere — has since made over 200 anti-Lively videos with millions of combined views. A 25-year-old Canadian artisanal honey seller on TikTok made a series of videos about Baldoni, Lively, and Reynolds that combined have a whopping 109 million views. He briefly inserted the word “journalist” into his TikTok bio at the advice of a lawyer, he told The Verge, until people criticized him for saying so.

A November 2024 Pew Research report found that one in five Americans, including 37 percent of adults under 30, say they “regularly get news from influencers on social media.” Pew research associate Luxuan Wang told The Verge that both Republicans and Democrats regularly get news this way, but of the creators Pew examined who shared a political leaning, they tended to lean conservative “slightly more.” Of those speaking out about Lively and Baldoni, there are a number of explicitly right-wing personalities like Owens, as well as less explicitly political and even left-leaning creators.

“TikTok actually stands out as the only social media site that has a quite balanced gender distribution,” Wang said, as well as a dominant strain of pop culture news. 

Kayla Rosa is a YouTube creator who has seen both sides of the video medium for news. She’s a 27-year-old who went to journalism school for broadcast and worked her way up from local news to an associate producer at NBC News. All the while, her side project, a YouTube pop culture channel, was growing. Now, she has over 150,000 subscribers, and YouTube became a “second life” in her career, she told The Verge. Rosa made videos about the backlash against Lively and the public perception of the lawsuits on her channel. And she can see the gap between the traditional and new media worlds clearer than most.

“YouTube is full of this stuff where they’re commenting over different political events, cultural events, and they’re kind of just doing more of like an observational commentary thing,” Rosa said. “The way I distinguish it is somebody who is doing an element of newsgathering themselves, in the sense that they’re doing interviews, they’re consulting sources, they’re doing a higher level of research.” She is describing the fundamentals of journalism.

But regardless if it’s journalism or not — and whether it’s protected by the same legal principles that shield journalists — Rosa knows that young people are getting their news from influencers now. While cable news belatedly chases streaming and the elusive target demographic of suburban moms in middle America, “there’s no real, traditional media outlet right now that has figured out how to actually cater to young people,” she said. 

Rosa said that young people prioritize getting news from creators they like, often leaving legacy outlets in the dust. “By the time traditional media gets around to these big trending topics, they’re going to be less viewed than the TikTokers and the YouTubers who have already covered it,” she said.

A lot of those middle-aged moms are also being algorithmically fed TikToks about hating Lively. Some of them are making them, too, or even getting named in a subpoena.

A stay-at-home mom from Kansas with one YouTube subscriber wrote in an op-ed for The Sunday Times that she received an email from Google on July 10th notifying her that Lively had requested her personal information in a subpoena. At first, the woman wrote, she thought it was a phishing scam.

“I have never talked to anybody in the movie business, or had any contact with Baldoni or his representatives,” she wrote in her op-ed. “I usually post about pop culture, the CIA and big business. My TikToks typically get a few thousand views each.”

In addition to the subpoenas served to Hilton, Owens, and Signore, Lively cast a wide net with subpoenas that named many more smaller accounts. Some of them had followings that were so miniscule, it was unclear why they were being dragged in at all.

The Verge reviewed a subpoena Lively’s counsel served to X Corp, the company behind X, which ordered the company to turn over first and last names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, credit card and bank account numbers, and IP addresses for 20 X accounts. Some of the accounts have since been deactivated or suspended. One of them, an account with just 24 followers and 240 posts, regularly uses their account to reply to sexually explicit posts of women promoting their OnlyFans accounts. The account mentioned Lively once, in a post from August 2024 that says in part: “Blake Lively is not too bright. In fact she is actually pretty stupid. DUMB.” The post has zero likes and fewer than 100 views. 

The X subpoenas even hit two accounts that have been vocally supportive of Heard but criticized Lively for getting married on a plantation. These subpoenas caused some strife in the fan community for Heard on X, which overwhelmingly leans pro-Lively, with one user writing, “It is 100% wrong. I don’t know why they chose you, it makes no sense. I’m so sorry you were targeted.” Another X account identified in the subpoena posted: “Someone tell blake and justin i was just putting my nose in white people business EYE DONT ACTUALLY CARE AND I NEVER GOT PAID TO TWEET THIS. Please don’t sue me i already have college tuition to pay.” That post has zero likes and just over 200 views.

“I understand pursuing the big ones. That makes total sense. Subpoenaing smaller ones feels like punching down,” said Maddox. “For people who already wanted to dislike her, they now have a reason to dislike her even more.”

But according to Lively’s counsel, the reason these accounts were being named in the subpoenas “is based in part on the fact that” Baldoni’s PR agency, The Agency Group, “identified them.” That was from a July 18th letter to the judge, where Team Lively wrote that Baldoni’s side was making it impossible for Lively to explain the subpoenas by deeming relevant information confidential.

“Content creators who have been the subject of discovery have already painted Ms. Lively as the aggressor in this lawsuit and have drawn a false equivalency between her discovery efforts and the […] alleged smear campaign,” the letter continued. It also pointed out that “one subpoenaed content creator,” Signore, in an apparent attempt to verify the authenticity of the subpoenas, had recorded a call with a receptionist at Lively’s attorney’s office that he later uploaded to YouTube, allegedly without the receptionist’s consent. “Ms. Lively is yet again being forced to battle an ‘untraceable’ campaign, unable to defend herself against misinformation online.”

So far, Lively’s counsel has appeared responsive to creators filing motions to quash. She has withdrawn the names of at least three YouTubers from the subpoenas. Some of those creators described Lively’s investigation as a “witch hunt” designed to “intimidate” and “harass” them. Lively’s representatives have in turn defended them as tools to find evidence and “not accusations of wrongdoing.”

While there are noticeably more creators and public figures speaking out in Lively’s defense than there were for Heard in 2022, there are very few posting about the nitty-gritty details of each filing with the frequency and forcefulness of opinion that pro-Baldoni creators are. But there is at least one, a creator who mainly goes by “Expatriarch” and avoids using his real name because he says he has been doxxed in the past. He also says he is a survivor of domestic violence. He posts daily updates about the case from a pro-Lively standpoint and told The Verge that pro-Baldoni creators have “done a great job at creating an environment in which there’s a lot of confusion and doubt.”

“They take very spurious rumors or little tidbits and essentially what are blind items and create a lot of content reporting on them as though they are factual information,” he said. “It helps to create this sense of being overwhelmed and like ‘they’re both terrible and I’m tired of hearing about this’ […] She has a ton of evidence we would not normally see in a case like this.”

In today’s celebrity news and gossip battles, Reddit has become a campground for forces to assemble. There, the uneven divide between the pro-Lively and pro-Baldoni camps is measurable. The largest community for Lively’s camp has a little over 6,000 members. It’s surpassed in both membership and post frequency by the pro-Baldoni subreddits, one of which has 27,000 members.

The pro-Baldoni subreddits have been known to house vaguely threatening material toward Lively supporters. For example, both Lively and Baldoni made attempts to pull the 24-year-old actress Isabela Ferrer, who plays the younger version of Lively’s It Ends With Us character in flashbacks, into their defense. In August, she filed a motion accusing Baldoni and his counsel of using their subpoena as a form of harassment, putting a target for online harassment on her back, and citing at least one fake, AI-generated case in legal arguments. (The following month, a man was arrested for allegedly jumping Travis Kelce’s fence in the middle of the night to try and serve Swift deposition papers from Baldoni.)

The top post on the largest pro-Baldoni subreddit about Ferrer the day she filed her motion was a screenshot of alleged texts between her and Baldoni that he had included in his original complaint against Lively. The texts show Ferrer thanking and praising Baldoni before and after shooting wrapped. The Reddit post mocked Ferrer’s texts and, dripping with contempt, said to “believe women.”

“She will be reading her text messages to a jury and re-watching the videos where she praises Justin Baldoni,” the post continued. “See you soon, Isabela! 🙂 x (I added a smiley face and kiss because Isabela Ferrer likes adding smiley faces and kisses to her messages 😙😁).”

At the beginning of the summer, Hilton created a new Reddit account and began posting regularly in at least six pro-Baldoni and anti-Lively subreddits, including the largest one as well as a subreddit with only 60 members described as a “less regulated” group in support of Baldoni. Apart from Hilton, the only other user who has posted in it is one who wrote, “This might sound unrelated, but if the CIA really is controlling Wikipedia, it would explain a lot.”

Hilton has posted regular megathreads across different one-sided Lively v. Baldoni subreddits to promote his latest filings, video updates, and more; his Reddit posts would be cited almost immediately in a filing from Lively’s counsel. He used the platform to encourage his supporters and members of the media to come to his court hearings to see him face off against Lively’s lawyers. “I am feeling cautiously optimistic,” he ended one round of Reddit posts. “I truly do believe the law is on my side here!”

For about two months, Hilton represented himself in court. His YouTube titles reflected a rollercoaster of emotions with each new filing: “Blake Lively Effed Up Against Me! Mistake In Her Nevada Response!” “I Poked The Bear! Daring Blake Lively’s Judge In New York To Come For Me!” “OMFG!!!!! I Just Scored a HUGE Victory In Court Against Blake Lively!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” “I Am Very Unwell! This Blake Lively Drama Just Took A Bad Turn For Me!!” “Blake Lively Has Pushed Me Past The Breaking Point!” “I Need A Lawyer To Fight Blake Lively! Can U Help?”

Then in September, Hilton appeared victorious in a green-screen video. The thumbnail contained yet another edited picture of him and Lively in court — a dramatic meeting that never occurred because Lively withdrew her subpoena for Hilton’s communications. He opened the update by shrieking with glee for nearly ten seconds straight. A local lawyer had connected Hilton with the ACLU of Nevada, where he lives, and the group had offered to represent him. According to Hilton, after his new lawyer reached out to Lively’s, she backed off the next day. In the motion to withdraw, Lively’s lawyers stated that they had received the information they needed from Baldoni’s production company itself. 

“I’m also a journalist, a world-renowned celebrity reporter, a podcaster, and somebody who can now say they took on some of the biggest, most expensive lawyers in law firms across the country,” Hilton said, punctuated with screams. “And I beat them, and her.” His video cleared 129,000 views, a top performer for the summer. Hilton thanked his lawyers, his viewers, and ChatGPT.

The question of whether Hilton could have used reporter’s privilege to shield his communications was left unanswered, but only for the time being. Later that month, Hilton posted another YouTube video with the title “Kim Kardashian And Kris Jenner Threatened Me With Legal Action!” In it, he read a letter from their high-powered attorney, Alex Spiro. 

“On behalf of the Kardashian-Jenners, Alex Spiro is threatening the media. Trying to scare them. Intimidate them,” Hilton said. “Will it work with me? I mean, I’m making this video.”