Blake Lively addresses the backlash over her wedding plantation during her 2025 deposition, discussing accountability
Blake Lively addressed the controversy surrounding her 2012 wedding venue during her It Ends With Us legal deposition. “I'm used to it after this many years in the industry,” Lively, 38, said during her July 2025 deposition, according to a transcript viewed by Us Weekly.
“It's not something I've had to deal with often.”“It's true that you dealt with negative press with respect to being married on a plantation during, kind of, the height of Black Lives Matter; is that right?” Freedman further asked Lively during her testimony, referring to the Gossip Girl alum’s wedding to Ryan Reynolds. “I feel like that negative press was deserved,” Lively acknowledged at the time. “It’s a mistake we have publicly acknowledged and done a lot of work to reconcile for ourselves and others.” She continued, “I take full accountability for that decision, as does my husband, but I don't know what weaponization of the past has been a part of campaign.” Lively and Reynolds, 49, tied the knot at Boone Hall in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, which was also where 2004’s The Notebook was filmed. The ceremony venue soon garnered widespread backlash due to the site’s former association as a plantation. The pair, who started dating in 2011, later publicly apologized for the oversight. “It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for,” Reynolds told Fast Company in a 2020 profile. “It’s impossible to reconcile.” According to the Deadpool star, he and Lively found Boone Hall while searching for “a wedding venue on Pinterest” without looking into its history before putting a deposit down. “What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy,” Reynolds recalled to the outlet. “Years ago we got married again at home — but shame works in weird ways. A giant f***ing mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action. It doesn’t mean you won’t f*** up again, but repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.” Reynolds and Lively have since made a conscious effort to support diverse initiatives. They donated $2 million to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights in 2019 and another $200,000 in 2020. Reynolds also prioritized diverse hiring initiatives at his Maximum Effort production company. “Representation and diversity need to be completely immersive,” he stressed to Fast Company. “It needs to be embedded at the root of storytelling, and that’s in both marketing and Hollywood. When you add perspective and insight that isn’t your own, you grow — and you grow your company too.” Reynolds and Lively later welcomed four children together: James, 11, Inez, 9, Betty, 6, and Olin, 2.
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