Justin Baldoni is finally breaking his silence after filing a $400 million defamation lawsuit against his It Ends With Us costar Blake Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds.
The 40-year-old actor chatted briefly with videographers when he was spotted walking into Los Angeles’ LAX airport early on Friday morning in a clip obtained by TMZ.
Baldoni was joined at the airport by his family, including his wife Emily, his daughter Maiya, nine, and his son Maxwell, seven.
The actor is suing Lively and Reynolds, as well as Lively’s publicist Leslie Soane, for alleged defamation, as well as civil extortion, and false light invasion of privacy, among other claims.
It follows an earlier lawsuit seeking $250 million that he filed against the New York Times over its reporting on Lively’s own federal lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment and orchestrating a smear campaign against her.
Baldoni, who was dressed casually in a black hoodie and matching New York Yankees cap, said he was ‘grateful to be with the family’ after he ascended an escalator.
When asked how he would make it past the ‘tough time’ he was dealing with, Baldoni said he would lean on his ‘amazing friends and family.’
He concluded by adding that his ‘faith’ was essential to making it through his ongoing conflict with Lively and Reynolds.
On Thursday, Baldoni escalated their legal war of words when he filed a $400 million against Lively, Reynolds and her publicist, accusing them conspiring to trash his reputation with sexual harassment allegations that Lively previously made.
In court papers obtained by DailyMail.com, Baldoni accused Lively of hijacking the filming of their romantic drama It Ends With Us — which he directed.
He also accused her and her Deadpool star husband of ruining his experience of the film’s premiere by forcing him and his family to wait in a basement holding area surrounded by overstocked concession stand offerings and security guards to ensure that she wouldn’t see him in the theater.
In response to Baldoni’s new lawsuit, Lively’s attorneys issued a fiery statement to DailyMail.com, declaring: ‘This latest lawsuit from Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, and its associates is another chapter in the abuser playbook.’
They added: ‘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 claimed Baldoni’s production company Wayfarer Studios ‘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.’
Lively’s attorneys added: ‘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.’
They 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.’
The statement concluded: ‘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.’
Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman explained the Jane The Virgin star’s decision to sue in a statement to DailyMail.com.
‘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,’ he said.
‘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,’ the statement continued. ‘Blake Lively was either severely misled by her team or intentionally and knowingly misrepresented the truth.
‘Ms. Lively will never again be allowed to continue to exploit actual victims of real harassment solely for her personal reputation gain at the expense of those without power,’ Freedman said. ‘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.’
Among the allegations in the lawsuit, Baldoni claims that Lively used her husband and a ‘megacelebrity friend’ — which fans have suggested is her good pal Taylor Swift — to pressure him into adopting changes Lively had written for a scene, despite him expressing only ‘extremely mild resistance’ to her changes.
He said he was summoned to her New York City penthouse to discuss the changes, where he was greeted by Reynolds, who praised Lively’s rewritten version of the scene.
Later, the ‘megacelebrity friend’ allegedly showed up and also praised Lively’s rewrite.
‘Baldoni understood the subtext: he needed to comply with Lively’s direction for the script,’ his lawsuit alleges.
After the actor and director sent her a Lively a text message saying he ‘liked her pages and hadn’t needed Reynolds and her megacelebrity friend to pressure him,’ she alleged responded that the two were her ‘dragons.’
Baldoni’s suit asserted: ‘The message could not have been clearer. Baldoni was not just dealing with Lively. He was also facing Lively’s “dragons,” two of the most influential and wealthy celebrities in the world, who were not afraid to make things very difficult for him.’
The actor also claims that he and other defendants in Lively’s lawsuit were served with legal papers as they prepared to potentially evacuate amid fires raging in parts of Los Angeles.
Baldoni went on to accuse Lively having never read the novel by Colleen Hoover that served as the basis for It Ends With Us, which he said explained she she allegedly suffered from a ‘fundamental lack of understanding’ of the source material.
Among the Gossip Girl star’s complaints was that Baldoni had allegedly engaged in ‘improvised physical intimacy’ while they were filming, particularly during kissing scenes.
But in his own lawsuit he accused her of ‘engag[ing] in unchoreographed kissing scenes,’ and he claimed that any ‘variations’ he made in scenes were merely because he was following her lead an improvising in character.
In the film, Baldoni plays Lively’s husband, and the movie focuses on his character’s abusive actions, which ultimately doom their relationship.
But Baldoni claimed it was his leading lady who failed to take domestic violence seriously during production and the subsequent publicity campaign for It Ends With Us.
His lawsuit alleges that she refused to meet with a domestic violence charity that he had consulted with in the making of the film — and which producers pledged to donate one percent of the film’s proceeds to.
Lively has alleged in her own lawsuit that Baldoni and his crisis PR team aggressively tried to smear her in public by weaponizing her upbeat interview appearances to make her seem unserious or uncaring about It Ends With Us’ dark subject matter.
However, Baldoni’s suit claims that it was largely Lively’s own actions that were responsible for the public’s perception of her.
He claimed she created her own public relations issues by promoting her alcohol brand — which is named after one of her daughters — during the campaign ahead of the film’s release, despite the ‘link between drinking and domestic violence.’
He also said it was an unforced error to name a cocktail at her premiere party after his character, a domestic abuser.
Baldoni, who claimed he and Lively were initially friends when they began working on the film, accused her of ‘induc[ing]’ their costars to publicly shun him by unfollowing him on Instagram and by refusing to pose for photos with him.
He claimed the lack of support from other actors was designed to give the ‘impression that Baldoni had committed an egregious sin, something so egregious that no one wanted to even take photos with him or have him around.’
The legal documents propound the theory that she ‘was leaving what she had earlier referred to as “crumbs,” a social media strategy she had learned from a close celebrity friend: to give fans just enough to allow them to come to their own conclusions, thereby launching an army of detectives that, on information and belief, Lively hoped would turn against Baldoni.’
Baldoni also claimed Lively and Reynolds had drafted a public apology that they wanted him to deliver, which was sent via their talent agency, William Morris Endeavor (WME), which also represented him until he was dropped in the wake of her sexual harassment complaints.
Although WME executives allegedly urged him to make the public apology — despite their apparent conflict of interest — he refused, because ‘admitting to false, vague, and unspecified “mistakes”‘ would allow the public to take those additional ‘crumbs’ and use them to assume the worst about him.
