After attending CPAC for the first time last year for a Q&A session with host Mercedes Schlapp, Megyn was back in Washington, D.C., on Friday to deliver a speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
During her remarks, Megyn made a connection between how the left and media has been gaslighting the American public for the last decade and the ongoing legal saga between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
You can read the transcript of Megyn’s speech (edited for length and clarity) below:
Megyn’s Remarks
“Have you heard about what’s happening with the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni case? Are you obsessed with this case? There are millions of people who are obsessed with this case. I’m going to give you a little background on it, and then you will be obsessed with it. And I’ll tell you, there is a reason why conservatives, in particular, are following this so closely. It makes sense to me.
So, you know who Blake Lively is right? Most people know her… Then, there is this guy Justin Baldoni who is not as well known. He optioned this book called It Ends With Us, and it is about domestic violence. He managed to get Blake Lively to star in his movie across from him. He played the abusive guy, and she played the woman. And this is the thrill of a lifetime for this guy. He has done another TV project, but nobody knows who he is.
He gets Blake Lively. She is married to Ryan Reynolds. These are Hollywood A-listers. She agrees to be his female co-star. Off to the races. Well, shortly into production, Blake Lively is very dissatisfied with virtually everything around her and decides to allege that Justin Baldoni – I mean, forgive me, he is a very effeminate, evolved, modern feminist man bun kind of guy – is like this virulent sexual harasser who can’t stop harassing one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in front of everybody on the set.
I’ve got questions. I am not sure why he would do that, whether he’d have the guts to do that. But whether the man bun is the most likely harasser in general, you never know. Sometimes the ones who kind of bend over backward to be as woke as possible are the most. So okay, I’ll open minded about it.
This is going someplace. Trust me. I’ll get us there.
So, she says he has been harassing her, and they bring in some team and he says, ‘Whatever you want, I will do it or not do it. You tell me.’ Well, we move forward in the story. And she’s got to go do PR for the film. She goes out this past summer, and she had about two minutes of bad PR. The problem for Blake Lively, in my opinion, is that she is not improved upon acquaintance. So, the more time we got to spend with Blake Lively, the less we liked her, the more her promotional efforts for a film about domestic violence felt off. She was full of giggles and laughter and wanted to promote her liquor brand. Nothing says domestic violence like a bottle of tequila. What?
It felt weird, and she started to get hit by some of the media for being insensitive. Then this one reporter re-upped a video in which she interviewed a then-pregnant Blake and kicked off the interview, as you would do as a journalist if there is something obviously different about somebody physically by saying, ‘Oh, you have such a cute baby bump.’ And Blake was taken aback even though it was obvious and said, ‘Oh, so do you.’ The reporter was not pregnant. It was a nasty jibe at her for no reason.
Normal people at home who don’t care about this woman at all are looking at her like, I don’t like her. She seems like a bully. She seems like somebody who punches down to somebody who is only trying to do something nice for her. Negative press swirled around her for like a month.
Later, she would describe this as though it was the pile on against Trump. Honestly, to most of us – especially in Republican politics or the news – this is called Tuesday. It’s like, grow up. You’re in the public eye. You’ve got probably hundreds of millions thanks to your husband. Just shut up. No one cares. Like you got a couple of bad articles about you in The Daily Mail.
She winds up suing Justin Baldoni. She files a complaint with Human Rights Commission out in California saying, ‘He sexual harassed me and then he retaliated me by pushing all this bad press about me. He was behind it because I found his PR agent’s nasty text saying, ‘If we have to ruin her, we will.” And those texts do exist.
Blake Lively went to The New York Times and The New York Times wrote the sympathetic, ‘poor Blake Lively story. Oh, we were all wrong about her and her weird PR. She is actually a good person and #MeToo victim.’ And then Justin Baldoni did something very smart. He hired the lawyer who represented me in my fight with NBC News, which ended well. His name is Bryan Freedman, and he is a legal genius.
Bryan Freedman knows how to fight back against a bully, trust me. And he started telling everybody Justin Baldoni denied those claims of sexual harassment and only tried to appease Blake Lively because she was such a high maintenance diva, bully brat. He had to bend over backwards just to get her to shut up and complete the film. He told us that Justin Baldoni claims she tried to take over his movie because she has a history of saying, ‘Okay, I’ll be the star, but what I secretly want to do is direct it and edit it and produce it. I want all the roles for me and only me. I want full control because I am a controlling bully.’ That Justin Baldoni ultimately, by the time they got to the premiere, was mandated by Blake Lively to spend the night in the basement away from his co-stars and didn’t even get to see the final cut of his own movie – because Lively insisted that she be the one to approve it – until he watched it on the screen with his editors, who also hadn’t seen it because her editors finished it up.
That’s the situation he says he was in. So, it is a real he said, she said. Who is telling the truth? Is he some creep harasser who took a shot at somebody like Blake jeopardizing his movie and his future career, or is she just extremely high maintenance and someone who plays the victim when she doesn’t get her way? Well, I’ve got my opinion. I think you can guess what it is based on our little discussion here…
And where do things stand now… Blake Lively, who I believe thought she would be received or perceived as an Alyssa Milano or Ashley Judd #MeToo victim, is instead looking a lot more like Amber Heard. How did that work out?
To me, the lesson is: (A) be a good person, but (B) if you are a Hollywood star or any sort of a public figure, would you just please take your licks in the press and shut up about it? People have real problems. They don’t give two craps that you had a couple of negative articles written about you in The Daily Mail. In her complaint, the thing she is bitching about is that this terrible PR campaign that was opened up against her hurt sales of her liquor brand and her hair care products. Oh my god. As all this is going on inflation is like 9 percent. Get a grip.
Okay, so it was a terrible idea. They shouldn’t have done any of this. But I think the reason that conservatives are so interested in this is a couple of fold. Number one, you seem to be watching the unwrapping of a public figure, like the unspooling. You’ve caught someone in what you believe is a lie. That’s how I feel… You wind up kind of feeling a little bitter.
This is where we come in because everyone in this room – because you’re here, I know this about you – you have been gaslit to high heaven every time you picked up a newspaper in the United States, every time you’ve turned on CNN. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been bullied or seen others with lesser power bullied by the media and the leftist Democrats. You have been the victim of overbearing and controlling leftists who think they are the final arbiters of what is best for you and your life, and it’s wonderful to see someone fighting back.
She has become like an avatar for leftist overreach in a different, special way. I really believe this is why so many people on the right are kind of into this story and just kind of want to see how it ends. Will it end as it ended for us on November 5 because we were pretty happy with how that went, right? Or is it going to be something else? Only time will tell, but it is bringing up room to explore the past 10 years that we’ve all been through, and how Trump put a period at the end of it – we hope – or at least the beginnings of the end by winning.
So, the bully thing. What was one of the biggest stories this past year? Daniel Penny… Daniel Penny stood up for others on the New York City subway when there was a crazed man who was out of his mind on drugs threatening to kill people and got him in a choke hold. And the man ultimately later passed and he got charged by that insane crank, Alvin Bragg and had to defend himself against criminal charges… Daniel Penny got bullied by Alvin Bragg and the media, which did not stand up for him either.
There was Nick Sandman. Remember him… Nick Sandman goes out there in front of the Supreme Court to stand up for life and CNN portrays him as this villain, as this smirking, crappy, arrogant villain. Look at him, and he is sneering at a Native American who is just there minding his own business. Totally the opposite. Totally opposite. Nick Sandman was standing there respectfully while he was being antagonized by the Native American who was dancing aggressively in his face and getting up on him and mocking him. That’s why CNN had to pay him in the defamation case.
Kyle Rittenhouse: Kyle Rittenhouse tried to do what the Biden administration would not and go to Wisconsin and actually protect the neighboring town. It did not go well. He wound up shooting three guys. He was acquitted on all charges, ultimately. But before we knew much at all about that case, Joe Biden got out there as he was running for president… and called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist. There was zero evidence of this. The kid was 18 years old. He’s got the – at that point – possible next president of the United States telling everyone he is a white supremacist, something for which he never apologized. There was no evidence of that. None… There is something wrong with that. Something is off about a guy and a party that does it and supports it.
The bully nature of the left has been on full display, as has its controlling nature. They want to tell us what we can eat. They want to tell us what we can drink. They want to tell us how fast the water can come out of our showers, what we can drive, what we can put in the tank, what we can turn on our stove with… what we can think, what we can feel, where we can pray, what we can have to put in our arms, or we have to put in our children’s arms, our baby’s arms. It’s a lot.
They seem to be really drunk on their power, and we have to encounter this at every turn. And then we see that same camel’s nose thing under the tent. You give them a little and then they start exploiting it and taking it too far. May I remind you of a little thing called USAID?
You guys are gonna talk to Karoline Leavitt in a bit. I interviewed her for my show today, and we were talking about the CNN poll that shows Trump’s approval numbers fell a a couple points since he took office because he is doing things that the left may or may not like, and those numbers were kind of down on the closure of USAID.
Well, let’s look at the cross tab. How did they ask it? It was like, ‘Do you support Trump’s decision to close the agency that is helping those suffering abroad in humanitarian crises?’ Like, ‘Would you like the children to die as a result of what Trump did? Yes or No.’
It doesn’t say, ‘Do you support helping African people prevent HIV AIDS… and also then we will take that money and we will divert it for trans operas in Colombia?’ Who the hell said yes to that? We literally spent $70,000 on DEI dance in Ireland… It is ridiculous. It is too much. It is overreach.
And then inevitably, when you call them out on the nonsense, you send Elon in there with DOGE and they start kicking the tires, they play the victim just like Blake Lively. ‘How dare you. I am subjected to all these stories.’ You are subject to the stories because you did something wrong, and that is the way the media and the world works and because you deserve it.
We are tired of their games. The games are outdated, the tactics are outdated. They’re old, and they’re tired. And speaking of the Associated Press. The media’s days of pretending they are holier than thou are over. President Trump kicked them out – not of the White House press briefing room – but of the Oval Office and out of the Air Force seat they had because they refused to call it Gulf of America.
Now, this is interesting because AP is an American company. They say we have to do it because we report in international countries. What like the people of Ghana are going to be upset if you start reporting on it as Gulf of America? The folks of Somalia are really going to get upset? You are American company. You are incorporated here. You are headquartered in New York. This is a stick in the eye of the president. Nothing more. It’s obvious. Trump knows it, and so do we.
And the thing about the AP is they love word changes, name changes. They live for this crap. Just as soon as they were told they have to call girls who transition to boys ‘boys’ and boys who transition to girls ‘girls,’ they did it. They went with the pronouns, the whole thing. You can’t even read an AP story about some trans thing without leaving utterly confused. Now there’s no more ‘somebody born male’ or ‘somebody born female.’ It is ‘assigned male at birth,’ ‘assigned female at birth’ like it was a sin committed by the doctor and it’s still very ambiguous. They love that name change, they did it right away.
‘Illegal immigrants,’ we don’t have those anymore. If you read the AP, they got rid of that term. It’s too offensive. Now you have to say ‘undocumented immigrant.’ What does that mean? ‘Illegal immigrant’ makes sense to everybody. Now ‘undocumented’?
They got rid of the term ‘crisis at the southern border’ when Joe Biden was president. You could no longer say ‘crisis.’ As soon as the numbers hit 100,000 a month, the word ‘crisis’ kept appearing – not in the AP, we don’t do that. That’s not okay, even though Jeh Johnson, Obama’s homeland security secretary, said it’s a crisis if you have 30,000 in a month.
All of these word changes, they are totally in favor of. But Gulf of America is a bridge too far?
Look, I’ll leave you with this. Blake Lively had a point on one thing: Her time as the Hollywood ‘It girl,’ the days of the left bullying and controlling us without much pushback, the days of the media pretending to be objective and independent and demanding to be left behind, it really does end with us and not a moment too soon.”