Amid Blake Lively’s sordid legal battle with Justin Baldoni, the embattled “It Ends With Us” star has opened herself to yet more criticism after a TikToker resurfaced a controversial L’Oreal ad she did in 2017, in which she allegedly falsely claimed to be part Cherokee.
The ad for L’Oreal Paris’ “True Match” line of facial foundations featured Lively proclaiming, “I’m English, Irish, German and Cherokee. So my family’s sort of from all over.”
After TikToker Stephanie Tleiji reposted the clip on Sunday, it racked up more than 430,000 likes, with people accusing the “Gossip Girl” star of “cultural appropriation,” or citing the ad as another reason to question her credibility in her Baldoni dispute.
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The L’Oreal campaign was launched during the Jan. 8, 2017 Golden Globe Awards and was supposed to show the cosmetics company embracing racial and cultural diversity in its line of products, according to cosmetics industry trade publication. As a celebrity and a global L’Oreal Paris ambassador, Lively was a star of the campaign.
But her proclamation about being part Cherokee immediately stirred controversy, as people online questioned how an actress with blond hair and blue eyes could be part Native American, according to a 2017 Yahoo Life report.
It didn’t help that Lively provided no information to verify her claim to Native American ancestry, according to Yahoo Life. At the time, Adrienne Keene, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, author and former assistant professor of ethnic studies at Brown University, wrote on X, then Twitter, that Lively is “not actually Cherokee,” based on other scholars researching her genealogy going back 15 generations.
Keene, who campaigns against Native American misrepresentation on her blog, Native Appropriations, explained to Yahoo Life that some Indigenous have lost connections to their tribes because they or their ancestors were assimilated by force and raised in white families, even experiencing “white privilege” as a result. But Keene said this situation of forced assimilation doesn’t appear to apply to Lively.
“When settlers lay claim to native identity as a ‘neat’ ethnic add-on and not as connection to a real, living, contemporary nation, it’s a dangerous affront to tribal sovereignty and Indigenous rights,” Keene told Yahoo Live.
Even if Lively had some distant Cherokee ancestry, allowing her to blonde-haired and blue-eyed, that doesn’t mean she should be able to claim to be Cherokee, someone wrote on Tleiji’s TikTok video.
“My dad’s great grandmother was Cherokee, and I still would never claim to be Native,” the person said. “I have such a small percentage that I cannot even imagine talking like Blake did.”
Johnnie Jae, an Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw journalist, podcaster and entrepreneur, agreed that Lively’s proclamation for her L’Oreal ad showed a “deep-seated ignorance” about the complex nature of Native American identity.
“From what I’ve experienced, most people (who) claim Mative identities only do so for what they think they can gain from it,” Jae told Yahoo Life. “I think it’s more about being trendy and exotic. I mean, this is the girl who also claimed to have an L.A. face but an Oakland booty.”
Jae was referring to another of Lively’s infamous cultural offenses, when she tried to use a Sir Mix-a-Lot lyric to joke about her curvaceous behind on the red carpet at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Lively also has been called out over the years for glamorizing the choice she and husband Ryan Reynolds made in 2012 to get married on a Southern plantation with a history of slavery. Two years later, Lively continued her so-called “Southern Belle fixation” by launching a failed lifestyle and e-commerce site that sold pricey clothing and home decor items that were inspired by “the allure” of the antebellum South.
Such choices made her the target of fierce online backlash — long before the end of 2024, when she went to the New York Times and filed a lawsuit to allege that Baldoni, her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, helped orchestrate a digital media smear campaign against her in order to retaliate after she spoke up against him for allegedly harassing her sexually during the movie’s production.
Baldoni has filed a counter-lawsuit, denying the allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation, and accusing Lively and Reynolds of trying to steal his movie from him and to damage his reputation by portraying him as a predator.
In 2017, Lively’s L’Oreal 2017 ad prompted Jae to write on X: “I hate that as indigenous people we constantly have to address the misappropriation & misrepresentation of our identities.
It’s likely that Lively’s claims of being part Cherokee would be even more controversial — and unthinkable — in 2025. Such a claim would probably run afoul of the growing awareness in recent years about the harm caused by “Pretendians” — people in entertainment, publishing, academia or other professions who falsely claim to be Native American, usually in order to gain prestige, lucrative work benefits or other professional opportunities.
The issue of Pretendians has burst into the public consciousness after the sisters of the late Bay Area activist and actor Sacheen Littlefeather claimed that she spent 50 years lying about being White Mountain Apache and Yaqui after she became famous for rejecting Marlon Brando’s best actor Oscar at the 1973 Academy Awards. Other prominent people, who also have been accused of being Pretendians, include Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, celebrated singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie and UC Berkeley anthropologist and author Elizabeth Hoover.
