Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa is speaking out about why her 2016 interview with Blake Lively was particularly traumatizing after resurfacing the video on YouTube.
On Saturday, August 10, Flaa posted an interview clip of Lively, now 36, 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 congratulates Lively — who had recently announced at the time that she was pregnant with her second child — on her “little bump,” to which Lively replies, “Congrats on your little bump.”
Flaa told Daily Mail that Lively’s response was hurtful because the reporter 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.”
Tensions continued to rise in the interview clip when Flaa asked the actresses if they enjoyed 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 with 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.”
In the clip, Flaa was visibly uncomfortable after being completely ignored by the two actresses, who went on to discuss the men’s costumes at length.
“I felt belittled and ignored and it made me question if I ever wanted to do these types of interviews again,” she told Daily Mail. “It took me a while to get over it and build up my confidence again.”
Flaa’s comments come in the midst of the press tour for It Ends With Us, the highly anticipated adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s book of the same name in which Lively stars and produced.
When Lively’s costar and the director of the film, Justin Baldoni, was absent from interviews with the rest of the cast, suspicions began to arise that there was tension between the two actors. Fans also pointed out that Lively, nor Hoover, 44, or the rest of the cast follow Baldoni on Instagram, though he follows them.
Earlier this week, Us Weekly learned that Baldoni, 40, hired crisis PR veteran Melissa Nathan — who previously worked with Johnny Depp during his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard — amid the film’s drama-filled rollout.
After Flaa’s resurfaced “uncomfortable” interview hit YouTube and sparked fierce backlash against Lively, social media users questioned if the journalist was part of a PR campaign against the actress, given that she has previously voiced her support for Depp, 61.
“Johnny Depp is the most polite and sweet actor I have ever interviewed,” Flaa wrote in 2022 alongside a video of her interview with the actor in 2014.
Yet, the journalist insisted that she uploaded the interview with Lively after being contacted by another reporter if she had ever had a “horrible” interview experience. Flaa denied that her sharing of the interview had anything to do with Baldoni: “No, not at all. I don’t know him.”
