Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds Aim To Have Justin Baldoni’s $400M Defamation Suit Tossed Out
With the first actual hearing in the multi-million dollar lawsuits between It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni coming up early next week, the Gossip Girl alum and spouse Ryan Reynolds have finally said the quiet part out loud.
“The Lively-Reynolds Parties intend to move to dismiss Plaintiffs’ complaint,” said a letter Thursday from attorney Michael Gottlieb Judge Lewis Liman.
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past month, you’d know that Baldoni sued Lively, the Deadpool star and their PR chief Leslie Sloane for $400 million in a January 16 defamation and extortion case.
Amidst other lawsuits, an evidence preservation letter, and other accusations, that $400 million action followed Baldoni’s New Year’s Eve filing against The New York Times for $250 million and Lively’s unspecified damages lawsuit against Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, its CEO, its main financier and the Jane the Virgin’s primary PR team of Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel on the last day of 2024. With rumors of discord between the co-stars on the set of the August released IEWU in the air and online for months and afterwards, this all went full public when Lively filed her sexual harassment and retaliation complaint on December 20 with California’s Civil Rights Department, alleging inappropriate conduct by her director/co-star and a subsequent social media smear campaign.
With this plays out in the media as much as the courts and a consolidation of some of the suits seems evident, a February 12 pretrial conference was moved up by Judge Lewis to February 3 as Lively and Reynolds legal team have been seeking sanctions or a so-called “gag order” over “extrajudicial statements” by Baldoni main attorney Bryan Freedman. “Requiring counsel to heed the ethical rules that bind them is not a gag order; it is a mechanism that would ensure the proceedings in this Court are are not prejudiced by counsel’s conduct outside of the courtroom,” attorney Esra Hudson wrote on January 24 in a previous letter to Judge Liman
Appearing in recent weeks talking about the case(s) on shows by clients Megyn Kelly and Chris Cuomo, as well as the just released IMPACT x Nightline: Blake vs. Justin on Hulu, (full disclosure: I am in the Hulu docu too) bare knuckles litigator Freedman certainly wasn’t silent today about the latest move by Lively and Reynolds.
“All these motions to dismiss are just yet another attempt by Ms. Lively, Ryan Reynolds and Leslie Sloan to hide and delay the discovery of the hundreds of pages of true facts and well-documented information that we remain dedicated to providing publicly, with full transparency,” the lawyer told Deadline Thursday, with reference to material he and others on Team Baldoni have made public so far and a threatened website Freedman as said he will put up online. “We expect such motions to be denied and, in the meantime, stand ready to oppose each and every one of them.”
Representatives for Lively and Reynolds did not respond to request for comment on Gottlieb’s letter of January 30. If they do respond, we will update this post.
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