“I F*cked Up”: Justin Baldoni Tells Blake Lively In Late-Night 2023 VM; Judge Aims For March 2026 ‘It Ends With Us’ Trial Start
“I’m really sorry, I f*cked up,” Justin Baldoni admitted to his It Ends With Us co-star Blake Lively in a 2 a.m. voice message in April 2023 after delivering a less-than-enthusiastic response to a scene rewrite from the deflated Gossip Girl vet.
“I will admit and apologize when I fail,” the Jane the Virgin alum added in the six-minute missive about the rooftop sequence from the Sony-distributed hit. “I’m a very flawed man, as my wife will attest.”
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Far from the first piece of private correspondence or communication between the co-stars and their various publicists unveiled since Lively filed a sexual harassment and retaliation complaint on December 20 with California’s Civil Rights Department, the rambling, nearly two-year-old voice message comes released by Baldoni’s team as a federal judge has penciled in a March 9, 2026, trial start date for the thespians’ bitter dispute.
“By Thursday, January 30, 2025, the parties shall submit a case management plan with deadlines which would enable trial to occur on that date,” Judge Lewis J. Liman ordered today of the trial start. The dispute has spilled over a variety of lawsuits, including Lively suing Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, his PR bosses and others on New Year’s Eve, and the WME-dumped Baldoni, who sued The New York Times for $250 million on NYE, suing Lively, Ryan Reynolds and their PR chief Leslie Sloane for $400 million in a January 16 defamation and extortion case.
All of which makes Baldoni’s very early-morning words of 21 months ago almost prophetic — almost: “I’m gonna piss you off, probably, but I will always apologize and find my way back to center. I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I will, for sure, do better.”
In the zone-flooding that this seemingly never ending assortment of filings and statements is, Liman on Monday also sought to fast-track a boil on the almost certain-to-be-consolidated cases. The judge moved up a planned February 12 hearing on Lively’s January 22 move to have a protective order put on Baldoni’s main attorney Bryan Freedman to essentially muzzle him in the media for “in further unlawful retaliation against Ms. Lively, and demanded that he immediately cease and desist from making further defamatory, and retaliatory, statements relating to Ms. Lively.”
Today, Lively lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb wrote another letter to the judge over Freedman’s alleged “endless stream of defamatory and extrajudicial media statements” and seeking a halt to such.
The attorney at Willkie Farr & Gallagher — the mega-firm whose L.A. office ex-Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is joining — added of the combative Freedman, “There already is a serious risk that his misconduct is tainting the jury pool.” While it was Lively’s CRD filing that first brought a slew of text messages and emails by Baldoni’s PR soldiers Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel to everyone’s attention, Gottlieb said Monday that Freedman was exacerbating “an arms race of selective public disclosures of text messages to the media.”
“The Wayfarer Defendants’ efforts are being financed by a billionaire who has pledged to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family,” Gottlieb went on to say of Wayfarer co-founder Steve Sarowitz, who is a defendant in Lively’s filings, in the third such letter to the judge in just over as many days. “Mr. Freedman is using that money, his roster of current and former clients, and a blatant media and social media strategy to assassinate Ms. Lively’s character in advance of trial.”
Shifting from New York to the Lone Star State, Lively and Reynolds — whose blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine has been dragged directly into this with a January 7 evidence-preservation letter sent to Disney and Marvel over the hypocritical Nicepool character — opened up a likely new legal front in Hays County, Texas. That is where lawyers for Lively and Reynold put a filing in the docket last week desiring that Jed Wallace, the online subcontractor supposedly hired by Baldoni’s Crisis PR to turn social media against Lively, be ordered to sit for a deposition.
Wallace and his Street Relations company “weaponized a digital army around the country, including in New York and Los Angeles, to create, seed, manipulate, and advance disparaging content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums,” the Texas filing proclaims.
Hard to tell if that voice message dropped by Baldoni’s team did their client any favors or confirmed Lively’s telling of events — with Reynolds and buddy Taylor Swift praising her rewrites to Baldoni’s displeasure and alleged intimidation. What isn’t hard to tell is that attorney Gottlieb and others on Team Blake are very concerned about the optics and impressions of their client and her Merc with a Mouth spouse from a website Freedman has promised to create. Baldoni’s lawyer has insisted for weeks thaty he woudl put up a site full of more recordings like what we heard today, more IEWU BTS footage and more text messages and private communications to counter Lively’s version of what happened on the IEWU set and who was really conducting a “smear campaign” against who.
“Neither the media nor public will have any way of knowing which communications Mr. Freedman has selectively omitted from disclosure,” Gottlieb wrote today. “Moreover, what Mr. Freedman’s communications ignore—and likely are designed to obscure—is that Ms. Lively is in possession of numerous additional communications relating to her claims against the Wayfarer Parties.”
Neither side responded to Deadline’s request for comment on the 2023 voicemail, the Texas filing, the moved-up NYC hearing and next year’s likely trial date. If either Lively’s team or Baldoni’s team get back to us, this post will be updated.
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