Justin Baldoni has sued Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, the actress’s publicist Leslie Sloan and the couple’s publicity firm Vision PR for $400 million. The move comes after his $250 million lawsuit against the New York Times and two weeks after Lively sued Baldoni for alleged sexual harassment, retaliation and more.
Attorney Bryan Freedman filed the lawsuit on Jan. 16 in New York on behalf of Baldoni, his company Wayfarer Studios, It Ends With Us co-producer Jamey Heath, publicist Jennifer Abel and crisis publicist Melissa Nathan. All parties were named in Lively’s lawsuit, in which she accused Baldoni and Heath of misconduct on the set of the film and alleged his publicists launched a smear campaign that ruined her reputation. They have denied all allegations, and Freedman has been alluding to Thursday’s lawsuit for weeks.
Lively’s legal team fired back in a statement on Thursday evening and accused Baldoni of victim-blaming.
According to the lawsuit obtained by Yahoo Entertainment, Lively “stole” the Baldoni-directed film It Ends With Us, and if it weren’t for her “self-inflicted press catastrophe she faced in August 2024, the public would likely have moved on and never known the truth about her.”
Some of the anecdotes included in the 179-page document will likely grab headlines — including one A-list name. Baldoni alleged he felt pressured into letting Lively rewrite a scene because of Taylor Swift and Reynolds. (Swift’s rep did not return Yahoo’s request for comment.)
The lawsuit claimed that Lively never read Colleen Hoover’s bestselling book It Ends With Us and that she Googled the hair color of her character Lily. Lively allegedly would not meet with the film’s domestic violence partner organization and embarked on a “tone-deaf” press tour. The lawsuit claimed Lively served the Los Angeles-based defendants “as they evacuated their homes in the midst of devastating fires engulfing their city.”
Baldoni also responded to Lively’s claim in her complaint that he initiated “unchoreographed kissing scenes” and alleged she initiated it.
“While Lively now takes issue with any innocuous improvisation Baldoni, as Ryle, may have allegedly initiated while in character, Baldoni treated their relationship on camera as professional; each playing their part, each doing their job,” the lawsuit read. “If no one was supposed to improvise, Baldoni would have no way of knowing based on Lively’s own actions. Lively demonstrated, again and again, that this was a normal and acceptable part of filming romantic scenes.”
This appears to be something Lively’s legal team directly hit back at when they issued the following statement to Yahoo on Thursday evening:
This latest lawsuit from Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, and its associates is another chapter in the abuser playbook. 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.
Wayfarer has opted to use the resources of its billionaire co-founder to issue media statements, launch meritless lawsuits, and threaten litigation to overwhelm the public’s ability to understand that what they are doing is retaliation against sexual harassment allegations.
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. 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.
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.
Freedman issued a statement on behalf of his clients after filing the lawsuit.
“This lawsuit is a legal action based on an overwhelming amount of untampered evidence detailing Blake Lively and her team’s duplicitous attempt to destroy Justin Baldoni, his team and their respective companies by disseminating grossly edited, unsubstantiated, new and doctored information to the media,” the attorney told Yahoo on Thursday. “It is clear based on our own all-out willingness to provide all complete text messages, emails, video footage and other documentary evidence that was shared between the parties in real time, that this is a battle she will not win and will certainly regret.”
