Blake Lively reveals in a surprising speech that her mother survived an assassination attempt

"I have a lot to say about the last two years of my life , but tonight is not the time," Blake Lively began at the TIME magazine gala, where she reappeared in the midst of her media storm, to which she made a veiled allusion with those words. This is, of course, about the legal battle she's engaged in with her director and co-star in the film Close the Circle ,Justin Baldoni , whom she accused of workplace and sexual harassment.

The 37-year-old actress and model, who has in fact been named one of the 100 most influential people of 2025 by the aforementioned publication not only thanks to her career on the small and big screen but also due to her social and philanthropic activism, thus began a speech in which she pointed out what it means to be named an "influential" person and how it impacts society to continuously have, from the moment she gets up until she goes to bed, "the feeling of being a woman who has a loudspeaker" in the media.

Powerful words that became even more surprising when, looking at everyone present at the ceremony held at Lincoln Center in New York, including her husband,Ryan Reynolds , she chose to focus her speech on Willie Elaine McAlpin, her mother. An already applauded and celebrated speech in which, emotionally, she revealed a never-before-told story about her mother, revealing that she had survived an assassination attempt some time before she was born.

Pointing at her and introducing her after also dedicating a few seconds to the "men who are by the side" of women in need, directing a glance at the Deadpool actor, Lively, wearing a strapless pink dress, a color surely not chosen at random, explained that her mother has been "the one who has influenced me the most" in her life. "She's an eternal optimist who is constantly leaving me messages, shouting in my ear: 'Life is just a bowl of cherries,'" she said, using a popular Anglo-Saxon expression about the virtues and graces that can be found in everyday life.

What almost no one in the audience expected was for the Gossip Girl actress to immediately share a reality that had been silenced even within her own family: "My mother never got justice against a co-worker who tried to take her life when she was already the mother of three young children, years before I was born." And immediately, to the astonishment of the audience, Lively explained the story, the "trauma," and how Willie Elaine McAlpin was able to overcome it.

"She's always said that her heart is still beating because of the story she heard from another woman who was going through similar circumstances," Lively revealed, crediting her mother's presence at the ceremony to "this woman who shared [her experience] on the radio while my mom was driving home one day."

The honoree, who took advantage of the opportunity in her speech to praise other brave women whose determination has changed our perspective on the present, such as Gisèle Pelico —also on TIME 's list of the 100 most influential women of the year—, celebrated the fact that the anonymous woman shared "painfully and graphically how she escaped [from that situation]" at the time because "thanks to listening to this woman talk about her experience instead of locking herself away in fear and unjust shame," her mother was still alive by her side.

A female sorority to which Lively gave double value, for its anonymity and for the necessary courage: "It was saved by a woman whose name I will never know. I am alive, and, honestly, here, today, I am with all of you only thanks to a woman whose name I will never know. I am here, but my mother is here too, because that woman not only survived, but she told other women how to do it."

For the performer, sisterhood is "a silent torch within the femininity we are capable of knowing, an unspoken pact by which we must privately show others how to survive , whether literally or spiritually." "Maybe we don't tell our daughters this, but one day we end up breaking their hearts by telling them a secret we've been keeping from them since the days when we were juggling to dress them up as princesses," she reflected.

"[Our daughters] are not safe, and they probably never will be—not at work, not at home, not in a parking lot, not at a doctor's office, not on the internet, not in any space they inhabit. Not physically, not emotionally, not professionally." Perhaps discouraging words, but then followed with a rebuttal: "However, I do know the superpower of female triumph."

"I've been able to touch him, I've held his hand. I'm seeing him in this room right now. Now. These should be the happy endings we see as girls and as grown women. To be able to make it to the end alive, physically or emotionally, because we will. And we thrive. Even when it doesn't seem possible. Even when we feel the most acute pain. May a woman's capacity to endure pain never be underestimated again," the actress concluded.