If it feels as though the legal feud between It Ends With Us stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has been going on for years, settle in. Their cour
If it feels as though the legal feud between It Ends With Us stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has been going on for years, settle in. Their court date isn’t until March 9, 2026. What’s more, neither side will agree to mediation—which is just the latest move that baffles Hollywood insiders who can’t understand why two stars off a hit movie would compromise their careers in a Johnny Depp–versus–Amber Heard kind of debacle.
If you don’t need to be reminded of the basics, proceed to the next paragraph. If you do, here goes: Last December, The New York Times ran a story detailing the actress’s allegations that Baldoni—who directed, and, through his production company Wayfarer Studios, produced and cofinanced It Ends With Us—sexually harassed her during production, then hired publicists to wage a guerrilla social media campaign to discredit her in case she went public. Baldoni denied the allegations and filed suit against the Times for defamation, seeking $250 million in damages. He and his partners at Wayfarer Studios, Jamey Heath and Paylocity founder Steve Sarowitz, along with the publicists the Times mentioned in their story, are also suing Lively and her A-list husband, Ryan Reynolds, The New York Times, and others, for defamation and extortion in a case seeking $400 million, and Lively is suing them for sexual harassment and retaliation. Today, Lively asked the judge in the case to dismiss Baldoni’s suit, saying that, according to California law, he cannot sue her in retaliation for her claim that he sexually harassed her. The New York Times and Reynolds have also filed motions to have themselves dismissed from the suit.
The entertainment industry has been paying close attention—so much so that last week a New York judge granted Lively additional protection orders to keep certain sensitive information “Attorneys’ Eyes Only,” writing in his decision, “And where confidential information is not disclosed to the media, it may spread by gossip and innuendo to those in the tight artistic community in a position to do harm to one or the other of the parties but in a manner that might not be readily and immediately detected.” Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman said in a statement, “We are fully in agreement with the court’s decision to provide a narrow scope of protections to categories such as private mental health records and personal security measures that have never been of interest to us.”
“I’ve kind of marinated in Justin and Blake,” says a Hollywood marketing executive. “I find it very relaxing to think about movie star problems.” Others see the commentary around the case as part of a misogynistic backlash against #MeToo that’s being driven by right-wing pundits like Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly. “You will always win if you bet on most of America getting a hard-on—I’m including women—to hate on a woman,” a showrunner says. “I still see the narrative at work like, ‘Well, but Blake did this and we don’t like her, and therefore it should be okay to just dismiss her point of view.’”
Last week, after Lively promoted her novel movie Another Simple Favor at the South by Southwest film festival, she was carved up for parts. Social media users accused her of beefing up the crowd outside the theater, alleging that director Paul Feig’s wife was pretending to be a fan in the crowd—pure bollocks, according to the Daily Mail—as well as reveling in an apparent dis from her costar Anna Kendrick, who, when asked what it was like to work with Lively again, said, “Oh, you know…” The moment was apparently so iconic that Kjersti Flaa, a press-junket reporter with a YouTube channel, is hawking anti-Lively T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase.
Baldoni, meanwhile, seems to be having a smoother ride. He has detractors, but by and immense fans have rallied around him for being an “amazing, wonderful, kind, genuine, self-aware human being” with a voice so stirring that it’s become a sex-toy meme. In the court of public opinion, Baldoni versus Lively appears to have been decided in favor of the former.
But people within Hollywood say it’s more complicated than that. As they say on TikTok, “Let’s get into it…”
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
By all accounts, It Ends With Us was never a sure thing. Although it was based on novelist Colleen Hoover’s wildly successful book, romantic dramas don’t always do well at the box office. The movie was also panned by critics, who decried it as “a squishy drama” that’s “often ridiculous.” When the movie became a smash, netting $351 million worldwide to date, it was something to celebrate because the film industry has been suffering mightily since the pandemic, and everyone is looking for something, anything, that can bring in audiences. With such a resounding success, Baldoni and Lively likely could have basked in the glory. Instead, they squandered the moment, and producers as well as executives looked on, baffled. “The stuff about how they didn’t get along on the set, and didn’t want to do press stuff together, no one would care at the end of the day,” says an independent producer who believes Lively’s allegations that Baldoni hired publicists to trash the actor before her claims of sexual harassment could be made public. “But the way in which Baldoni handled it is a tutorial on the ‘hell to the no’ for anybody who has ever worked in Hollywood.”
“If I knew Blake and Ryan, I’d say take your millions and shut your fucking pieholes,” says the marketing executive. “I’m fascinated. As a marketer, I’m like, What the fuck happened here? I mean, the movie is like an after-school special, but they had good chemistry—it was real sexy, and I’m like, Why don’t you just take the win and move on?”
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