Journalist Kjersti Flaa may have resurfaced her 2016 interview with Blake Lively amid the drama surrounding It Ends With Us, but the timing was not intentional.
“After I posted the interview with Blake Lively that a lot of people have been watching, I got so many questions from people asking why I decided to post that interview now, eight years later,” Flaa said in a Monday, August 19, YouTube video. “And the reason for that is, I got contacted by another reporter that told me a story that was a little similar to this one that he experienced.”
Flaa noted that she and the other journalist began “comparing notes.” She added, “I just felt like, ‘You know what? It’s not OK to behave like that and I think it needs to be called out.’ And so that’s the reason why I did that now, so much later.”
Flaa added it “took me a while” to “actually get over” her experience with Lively, 36. “It affected me for a while because it made me nervous when I was interviewing other people after that,” she said. “I blamed myself for it for a long time because I felt like I did [or] said something wrong. And that’s the reason why I waited so long.”
Flaa admitted that she “hadn’t read up about all the other controversy that was going on with Blake Lively and her new movie, It Ends With Us.” She added, “It was kind of a coincidence, I have to say, that this ended up being posted right now.”
Earlier this month, Flaa released a clip of Lively and actress Parker Posey from the 2016 Café Society press tour titled: “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.”
In the four-minute video, Flaa congratulated Lively on her “little bump.” (Lively had recently announced at the time that she was pregnant with her and Ryan Reynolds’ second baby.)
In response, Lively said, “Congrats on your little bump.”
Reflecting back on the experience, Flaa told the Daily Mail that Lively’s response was painful because she cannot conceive.
“[Her comment] left me almost paralyzed. To be honest, it hurts because I obviously wasn’t pregnant and I could never get pregnant, so to me that comment was like a bullet,” she said. “I didn’t know how to react. I felt very uncomfortable throughout the interview and all I wanted to do was leave and get out of there as fast as I could.”
As the interview continued, tensions grew between Flaa and the actresses after she inquired about the film’s period costumes.
“Everyone wants to talk about the clothes, but I wonder if they would ask the men about the clothes?” Lively said, talking to Posey and avoiding eye contact with Flaa. “It’s not just the women that have the clothes, but I feel like the women get the conversation.”
Amid Flaa’s interview resurfacing, Lively and her It Ends With Us costars have been making headlines for their alleged rift. Us Weekly learned earlier this month that Baldoni, 40, hired crisis PR veteran Melissa Nathan.
A source exclusively told Us earlier this month that Lively and costar Justin Baldoni had “creative differences” while making the movie based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 book of the same name.
“There were two camps on the film — team Blake and team Justin,” the insider said. “This creative struggle set the tone for the negative experience behind the scenes and grew into them not speaking anymore.”
Flaa, for her part, has denied that her rerelease of the 2016 video has anything to do with Baldoni, who starred and directed in the film. “No, not at all,” she told the Daily Mail on Friday, August 16. “I don’t know him.”
