Blake Lively subpoenas Justin Baldoni’s text messages in ongoing ‘It Ends With Us’ legal battle
Justin Baldoni’s text messages have been subpoenaed amid his ongoing legal battle with his “It Ends With Us” co-star Blake Lively.
The “Gossip Girl” alum’s legal team requested that T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, crisis PR firm consultant Jed Wallace and several other entities hand over text messages and phone records in the pursuit of more evidence of the director’s alleged smear campaign against her.
“Ms. Lively has initiated discovery that will expose the people, tactics, and methods that have worked to ‘destroy’ and ‘bury’ her reputation and family over the past year,” the actress’s attorneys, Mike Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, told Page Six in a statement.
“We will now receive all of the ‘receipts’ that, unsurprisingly, are nowhere to be found on Mr. Freedman’s website, and like Ms. Lively, those ‘receipts’ will have their day in court,” they added, referring to the site that Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, created to share evidence, including texts, about their lawsuit with the public.
Lively’s subpoenas come a week after her legal team requested to depose Wallace in Texas so he and others could be added to their New York lawsuit against Baldoni. (Wallace filed a defamation suit against Lively earlier this month.)
A spokesperson for Lively said of Wallace’s subpoena: “In their internal private messages that Baldoni’s team never expected anyone would see, they bragged that thanks to Jed’s work they saw a shift in the narrative to putting a spotlight on Blake and laughed at how sad it was that people so easily want to hate on a woman.”
Baldoni’s lawyer told Page Six that subpoenas were “an ordinary part of the litigation process.”
“What is extraordinary is what the Lively parties are seeking. They are asking for every single call, text, data log, and even real-time location information for the past 2.5 years, regardless of the sender, recipient, or subject matter,” Freedman added.
“This massive fishing expedition demonstrates that they are desperately seeking any factual basis for their provably false claims. They will find none.”
Page Six has reached out to reps for Lively but did not immediately hear back.
Baldoni’s attorney Mitchell Schuster added in a Feb. 14 memo to Judge Lewis J. Liman that Lively and Reynolds’ subpoena requests “flagrantly overbroad.”
“It is hard to overstate how broad, invasive, and atypical these Subpoenas truly are,” he also wrote in the letter, obtained by Page Six. “This is civil litigation, not a criminal prosecution, and the Lively parties are not the FBI.”
Schuster added that the subpoena request was “wildly disproportionate to the needs of the case and unnecessarily invades the privacy of untold numbers of third parties,” including family, friends, business partners and anyone else whom his clients may have “communicated with over a period of years.”
He also claimed that Baldoni’s legal team is concerned that Lively’s attorneys are “intimidating third
parties into providing information.”
In December 2024, Lively, 37, filed a lawsuit against the “Jane the Virgin” alum, 41, alleging that he sexually harassed her on the set of their 2024 film, “It Ends With Us.”
The “A Simple Favor” star also accused Baldoni and his publicists of orchestrating a campaign to smear her.
Baldoni has denied all claims made against him.
A few weeks later, the “Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity” author filed a $400 million defamation and extortion lawsuit against Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the actress’s publicist, Leslie Sloane.
Baldoni is also suing the New York Times in a $250 million libel lawsuit after the outlet published a story about Lively’s sexual harassment allegations. The outlet is standing firm on its reporting.
Lively and the director’s case is set for a March 2026 trial date.