Hours after Donald Trump claimed victory in the presidential race, “Family Ties” actress Justine Bateman shocked Hollywood by revealing her relief — tweeting that she was “decompressing from walking on eggshells” after an “almost intolerable” and “un-American” four years.
Now she tells The Post that her battle cry came at a cost, as she was told by people: “Oh Justine, I didn’t know you were a Nazi.
“I did have friends say, ‘I love you, call me anytime, but I have to unfollow you’ or ‘I have to distance myself from you online, publicly,” Bateman added.
She said she has been warned that she is aligning herself with “anti-woman, anti-gay, anti, anti, anti, anti.
“I have been quoted publicly since 1982. You want a collection of quotes to try and support your argument that I am any of those things? Go for it, man,” the filmmaker and actress, 58, said. “There’s so much material you can look through. And you will find nothing.
“So the fact that people have to distance themselves from me … Look, I still love them, that’s fine. But every time they do that, and I’m also talking about strangers now, they absolutely prove my point.”
Bateman’s point is that, during the Biden administration and even before, America has been living under a “cloud that has been pressing down on society.” She’s referring to, as she tweeted, the concept of mob rule on social media and how “any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes ” — be it about hot-button topics from Gaza to trans athletes in women’s sports or any form of social justice — “were held up to a very limited list of ‘permitted positions’ in order to assess acceptability.”
“Man, we just went ‘1984’ on ourselves,” she told The Post with an exasperated sigh. “Reporting the surveillance, surveilling each other. Come on. Why? Don’t you want to relax? Do you always want to feel like you are testifying? Do you always want to feel like somebody is recording evidence that’s going to be brought into a court of law? Why do you want to live like that?”
Bateman — whose brother, “Ozark” actor Jason Bateman, stumped for Kamala Harris — was in Washington, DC, on the night of November 5 , watching as state by state flashed red.
“I was surprised to feel, physically feel, a relief in my body,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize how uncomfortable the last four years had felt until I felt that balloon deflate.”
It’s not about one party or one person being the hero, she makes clear — but having the ability to speak your own thoughts.
“First time I felt a little air go out of that [so-called balloon] was when Elon Musk bought Twitter,” Bateman added. “And I’m just saying how it felt. I’m not saying what was the consequence of that or anything. I just felt it deflate a little bit. And then I felt it really deflate when Trump was elected.”
Bateman was 16 when she came into American homes each week as Mallory Keaton on the popular sitcom “Family Ties.” The show, which won five Emmys, centered on a pair of ex-hippie parents (Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross) raising their three kids — trendy Mallory, tomboy Jennifer (Tina Yothers) and Reaganomics-mad son Alex (Michael J. Fox) in the 1980s. (Bateman said she is still in touch with the cast, and “Mike Fox pretty regularly.”)
The family had wildly different points of view about the world — and sometimes butted heads about it. But they were all able to express their thoughts without worrying about being treated harshly or excommunicated. Bateman said the irony is not lost on her, and she is eager for America to get back to that place.
“There’s room for everyone to feel exactly how they want to feel. But you don’t get to come at me and start accusing me of certain things …” she said. “Go live your life and feel your feelings, but get out of my face.”
Bateman has been married to financier Mark Fluent since 2021 and, as a mother of two — son Duke and daughter Gianetta are both in their early 20s — she “really feels” for younger people who have never known a time where they were able to express their own opinions.
“Their parents need to tell them, ‘Freely live your life the way you want to, but never infringe on somebody else’s ability to also live their life as freely as they want to.’”
It’s a lesson she’s taught her own kids.
“Especially when people are younger, you’re exploring,” Bateman said. “You’re going to have some ideas right now about life, and in two years maybe you grow out of them. Maybe you don’t feel like that anymore.”
“People are complex, they have varying ideas … [we] aren’t a brand that stays the same.”
Bateman has certainly been through evolutions in her own life. After “Family Ties,” she continued acting, with memorable roles in shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Arrested Development,” alongside her brother, Jason, and movies like “Satisfaction” with Julia Roberts. She launched a clothing line and co-hosted the podcast “Wake Up and Get Real” with her fashion publicist BFF Kelly Cutrone.
In 2016, Bateman got a degree in computer science and digital media management from UCLA. Five years later, she directed her first feature film, “Violet,” starring Olivia Munn, and late last year she wrapped her second and third films, “Look” and “Feel.” Both are avant-garde productions that will premiere at the CREDO 23 Film Festival, of which Bateman is the director.
She wrote about her life as a “formerly famous” woman in her 2018 book, “Fame: The Hijacking of Reality.” And Bateman has been candid about the beauty in growing older, in both her book “Face: One Square Foot of Skin” and its subsequent film as well as on talk shows.
“To me, there are two ages: alive or dead … ” she recently told a student group at USC. “Until you die, it’s your time, and you can get anything you want done.”
But it’s not about being a feminist — a label, like most others, that she rejects. She is not into the “whole women versus men patriarchy,” especially in the film business.
“It’s not my jam,” Bateman said. “For me, as far as helping other people in the business and stuff, that is a big component of the business. You help other people, you are helped by other people…
“I just don’t do it by gender … When you introduce somebody to your contacts in the business, you’re vouching for them. So for me, making sure it’s somebody I can vouch for is far more important than which gender they are.”
Having been in Hollywood since she was a kid, she knows its liberal side — complete with Democrats like George Clooney, who played a big part in kicking Joe Biden out of the presidential election — well and wishes politics didn’t have such a big role.
“I love the entertainment business. I love everybody in the entertainment business. I don’t care how they voted,” she said. “My love for them and for this business and for the art of filmmaking is so beyond any election. That’s not what’s important. What’s important to me is the art and judging people by their character, not by their color, not by their weight, not by their age, and not by who they voted for. I just don’t care.”
Fittingly, Bateman will absolutely not reveal who she voted for in the presidential election. But she will say one thing — voters are tired of celebrity endorsements, be it from Oprah Winfrey or Katy Perry.
“People really don’t want to be told what to think,” Bateman said.
In fact, she doesn’t see her own recent comments as political as much as simply human: “Politics is not interesting to me… it’s more of a spiritual shift that I felt, that’s it.
“All I’m saying is that everybody should be free to live their lives … Over the last four years or more, there’ve just been a lot of situations where you look around and you go, “Huh, that person’s been being strung up by their heels for questioning this. And that person over there is having their head chopped off because they questioned this.”
Now, Bateman said, the “woke era” is over. “I’m not even presenting a conflicting opinion about a specific topic. I’m saying right now, that era of not being able to question things is over … That woke police —basically a version of Stasi police, emotionally, physically, socially — that’s over.
“The only way you can rip people down and ruin their careers, ruin them socially, all of that is if you have a mob mentality momentum. And it’s happened many times in history; witch burning, the HUAC trials, the Red Scare, the McCarthy hearings … And when Trump won, it popped the momentum.”
