Journalist who shared ‘uncomfortable’ Blake Lively interview explains why it took her so long to release it

The reporter who called out Blake Lively for her 'mean girl' behaviour in a 2016 interview has revealed why she sat on the footage for eight years.

Journalist Kjersti Flaa, 52, found herself at the centre of the Gossip Girl star's feud with Justin Baldoni after she shared the video 12 months ago.

In August last year - hot on the heels of the drama-drenched press tour for It Ends With Us - the Norwegian writer uploaded the clip of her chat with Lively to YouTube.

Flaa was interviewing the mother-of-four and her Café Society co-star Parker Posey when the conversation went seriously sideways.

You could cut the tension with a knife when the reporter congratulated Lively on her second pregnancy with her husband, Ryan Reynolds, only for the actress to snipe back saying: "Congrats on your little bump."

Unlike The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actress, Flaa was not visibly pregnant - or up the duff at all, for that matter.

Things only went more 'downhill' from there, as Lively, 38, appeared to take the journalist's questions about her wardrobe in Cafe Society as sexist, telling Flaa: "Everyone wants to talk about the clothes, but I wonder if they would ask the men about the clothes?"

Kjersti Flaa said she sat on the footage for eight years for the sake of her career (YouTube/Flaawsometalk)

Flaa said the extremely uncomfortable exchange left her considering abandoning her career as an entertainment reporter, while Lively got a lot of flack from fans after the footage was made public.

When all this went down a year ago, a lot of people were left wondering why the journalist had bided her time for eight years before sharing it.

The timing of it was particularly controversial, given that it clashed with Lively and Baldoni's behind-the-scenes beef while filming It Ends With Us hitting the headlines.

Now, Flaa has finally revealed why she didn't speak up about her issue with Lively earlier, revealing she feared she might have been 'blacklisted' by the showbiz industry.

In the debut episode of her new podcast Flaawsome Talk, the journalist explained she would be 'diving into the wild aftermath of her viral Blake Lively interview and how that moment turned her world upside down'.

She said a 'crazy rollercoaster ride' ensued after she posted the footage of her chat with Lively and Posey, which took place at the Crosby Hotel in New York.

"I'd never met her before and I was kind of excited to meet her," Flaa said of Lively. "I didn't have a specific opinion about her at that time."

Lively gave a series of awkward responses in the 2016 interview (YouTube/kjersti_flaa)

Reflecting on the star's blunt response to her complimenting her growing baby bump, the reporter said: "I don't know what that was. People have been trying to analyse it, if she was actually trying to fat shame me or she was trying to say that, 'Oh, you're pregnant, too'. Which obviously, I wasn't. Then it went downhill from there when I started asking about what it was like wearing those costumes that were so beautiful in the movie.

"They were ignoring me for the rest of the interview and I think that's what made people react so strongly when they watch this, because [Lively] comes off as a mean girl."

Explaining why she waited so long to release the video, Flaa said she was worried that she would be shooting herself in the foot career-wise.

"The reason why I didn't share that interview back in 2016 was because I knew if I showed that side of her back then - when I was in my the middle of my career interviewing celebrities several times a week - I would probably be blacklisted by her publicist Leslie Sloan, and even maybe by the studio, because that's how it works in this industry," she claimed. "It's always the journalist's fault.

"If something is not going well or if a talent or an actor is put in a bad light, they blame it on the journalist. I've experienced that a few times before and all my colleagues have had that same experience as well."

Flaa claimed she was initially unaware about Lively's feud with Baldoni and was invited to an early screening of It Ends With Us, which she went to with her partner Magnus, who is also an entertainment reporter.

Both of them have interviewed Lively in the past and after watching her star in the movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover's book, they were both pretty unimpressed.

Describing the film as 'so cliché', she explained she and Magnus then reminisced about their previous interviews with Lively on the car journey home from the screening.

"I was like, 'Oh my god, I had this awful interview with Blake Lively in 2016'," Flaa recalled. "We talked about her, and he doesn't like her either. And I was like, 'Should I just post that on YouTube?'

"He was like, 'Yeah, why not?' At that point, I was not longer doing these kind of interviews. It'd been a year since I did my latest my last [celebrity] interview before that.

"So I was like, 'I don't care now. I can post it'. I don't care if people are cancelling me, because I kind of have a foot out of Hollywood now. I don't really care about being cancelled.

"I know people really, really wanted me to have an agenda or a hidden motive here for posting that interview, but I didn't really."

Flaa claims she was also unaware that 'there was this whole movement against [Lively] already happening' in the online sphere amid her strained working relationship with Baldoni.

"Then when I posted that interview everything exploded," she added. "It was everywhere."