Blake Lively has responded powerfully to a lawsuit filed by Justin Baldoni, who is demanding $400 million from her.
Baldoni’s lawsuit targets Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, their publicist Leslie Sloane, and Sloane’s PR firm Vision PR, with several accusations.
This legal conflict follows Lively’s own lawsuit from December of the previous year, where she accused Baldoni of attempting to damage her reputation and sexually harassing her during the production of “It Ends With Us,” a film directed by Baldoni in which both starred.
Baldoni’s legal representatives have dismissed Lively’s claims as “categorically false” and are counter-suing on multiple accounts, including defamation, civil extortion, and both negligent and intentional interference with economic and contractual relations.
The comprehensive 179-page lawsuit filed on Thursday (January 16) accuses Lively and her husband of disrupting the 2024 film project.
Included in the allegations is a contention that Taylor Swift and Ryan Reynolds supposedly acted as Lively’s ‘supporters’ in endorsing her script revisions.
Speculation about a fallout between Baldoni and Lively during the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel emerged during the film’s promotion as they seemed to avoid each other.
In response, Lively’s legal team has forcefully countered Baldoni’s lawsuit.
They stated to the Daily Mail: “This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim Offender.”
The statement further accused Baldoni’s company, Wayfarer Studios, of using its resources to issue misleading media statements, launch baseless lawsuits, and threaten litigation to distract from the reality of retaliation against sexual harassment claims.
“They are trying to shift the narrative to Ms. Lively by falsely claiming that she seized creative control and alienated the cast from Mr. Baldoni. The evidence will show that the cast and others had their own negative experiences with Mr. Baldoni and Wayfarer,” her attorneys assert. “The evidence will also show that Sony asked Ms. Lively to oversee Sony’s cut of the film, which they then selected for distribution and was a resounding success.”
The team continued: “Their response to sexual harassment allegations: she wanted it, it’s her fault. Their justification for why this happened to her: look what she was wearing.
“In short, while the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy of attacking the woman is desperate, it does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and it will fail.”
Bryan Freedman, representing Baldoni, previously stated to UNILAD that the lawsuit is based on ‘an overwhelming amount of untampered evidence’ of Lively’s ‘duplicitous attempt to destroy Justin Baldoni’ and his team by spreading ‘grossly edited, unsubstantiated, new and doctored information to the media’.
He added: “Let’s not forget, Ms. Lively and her team attempted to bulldoze reputations and livelihoods for heinously selfish reasons through their own dangerous manipulation of the media before even taking any actual legal action. We know the truth, and now the public does too. Justin and his team have nothing to hide, documents do not lie.”