Justin Baldoni Files $400 Million Countersuit Against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds: ‘We Know the Truth’
“It Ends With Us” director and star Justin Baldoni has filed a countersuit demanding $400 million in damages against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds after the actress late last month hit Baldoni with a bombshell legal complaint accusing him of sexual harassment and a smear campaign to damage her reputation.
Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman kicked off 2025 with a suit filed against The New York Times for libel, but he has now followed that up with another lawsuit filed in New York. In it, Baldoni denies the accusations in Lively’s 80-page complaint (later turned into a formal lawsuit) and accuses Lively, her husband Reynolds, and her PR team, VisionPR and boss Leslie Sloane, of being responsible for a smear campaign against Baldoni, not the other way around.
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The suit, a 179-page document filed by Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer Studios, further claims that the messages presented in Lively’s complaint were taken out of context, that Sloane planted negative news stories about Baldoni, and that the legal move was designed to help rebuild Lively’s own reputation after it was damaged during the PR campaign for “It Ends With Us.”
“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,” Freedman said in a statement to IndieWire.
He continued: “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. 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. 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.”
Lively’s legal team filed its own lawsuit against Baldoni and Wayfarer on Dec. 31 and at the time blasted Baldoni’s lawsuit against the New York Times.
“This lawsuit is based on the obviously false premise that Ms. Lively’s administrative complaint against Wayfarer and others was a ruse based on a choice ‘not to file a lawsuit against Baldoni, Wayfarer,’ and that ‘litigation was never her ultimate goal,” the statement from Dec. 31 reads. “As demonstrated by the federal complaint filed by Ms. Lively earlier today, that frame of reference for the Wayfarer lawsuit is false. While we will not litigate this matter in the press, we do encourage people to read Ms. Lively’s complaint in its entirety. We look forward to addressing each and every one of Wayfarer’s allegations in court.”
Plaintiffs to Baldoni’s suit also include several publicists, including crisis PR reps Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, who were each named in Lively’s original complaint with the accusation that they orchestrated the smear campaign. Nathan and Abel in a statement called Lively’s attacks “viciously selfish.”
“It is devastating that we are forced to answer this viciously selfish ongoing litigation littered with documented and provable lies in the midst of the tragedy impacting California where we reside,” the publicists said in a statement. “Five months ago Ms. Lively chose to promote a film about domestic violence in a way that caused instant negative and organic backlash due to her own highly publicized actions. Instead of accepting responsibility, she decided to cruelly blame us. This malicious attack on private individuals by Ms. Lively and her team in which they chose to spoon feed The New York Times with doctored, out of context and edited text messages in an effort to paint herself as a victim set off a chain of events that has been harmful beyond measure. To be clear, Ms. Lively and her team initiated this smear campaign in the media for the sole intention of gaining undeserved public sympathy for her own missteps. Over the last month we have received death threats, abhorrent abuse and vile anti-semitic slurs hurled at us due to her decision to use us as scapegoats for her own choices promoting her film in which she made millions of dollars. With this filing, we lift our own curtain of what happens when the entitled weaponize power, fear and money to destroy, intimidate and bully those who get in their way.”
Baldoni’s countersuit is the latest in one of the ugliest entertainment media stories of 2024. On December 20, Lively issued a legal complaint (not a formal lawsuit) accusing Baldoni of retaliation, negligence, breach of contract, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, as well as Baldoni hiring a crisis PR firm to flood social media with negative comments about Lively in order to damage her reputation after issues of sexual harassment and misconduct allegedly took place on the “It Ends With Us” set. Baldoni has denied all the claims.
Among other claims, Lively’s complaint said Baldoni discussed his sex life with her and improvised unwanted kissing without her consent, that he repeatedly entered her trailer while she was undressed, and that producer Jamey Heath engaged in similar inappropriate activity, including showing her a video of his wife naked. Baldoni also allegedly sought to add sex scenes beyond what was featured in the script, and that as retaliation for her complaints to the studio, Baldoni hired a crisis PR firm to launch a “social combat plan” to harm Lively.
Since the complaint was released, Baldoni was dropped by his agents at WME (who also represent Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds), he had an award for women’s solidarity revoked from him, and he was hit with another lawsuit by his former publicist.
“It Ends With Us” was hounded with drama and Internet speculation about the on set friction between Baldoni and Lively, who never appeared in interviews together in support of the film. The attention helped buoy the box office performance for the Colleen Hoover adaptation to $350.9 million against a $25 million production budget.
At the time, Lively and Hoover in press interviews avoided discussions of the film’s frank themes of domestic violence and focused on it being a story of women’s uplift, a move that provoked strong criticism. But that too was allegedly a product of the ugly smear campaign as outlined in Lively’s suit.
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