Blake Lively Declares Other Women Justin Baldoni Made 'Uncomfortable' On ‘It Ends With Us' Will Testify At Trial; Defamation Claim Added To Suit

Yahoo

19-02-2025

With minutes to spare before a court imposed deadline of midnight ET, lawyers for Blake Lively have just filed an amended complaint against Justin Baldoni in the Gossip Girl vet's sexual harassment and smear campaign action on her It Ends With Us co-star and director.
On a legal and cultural landscape where the blast radius from this battle was already pretty large, things just got a whole lot bigger
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Also, with a settlement nowhere in sight, mediation rejected by all sides, and contested telecomm subpoenas, this saga of alleged misconduct, money, astroturfing and career crash and burning now finds Lively adding a defamation claim and civil conspiracy in her 141-page FAC (First Amended Complaint) There are also two new, but not unexpected defendants, in Crisis PR firm Street Relations and its founder Jed Wallace.
Perhaps more importantly, this time, in a complaint 48 pages longer than the New Year's Eve complaint Lively first filed, there are other women cited. Other women that supposedly suffered at the hands and actions of Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios CEO Jamey Heath. Individuals whose names are left out of the document now, but intend to be witnesses in the trial starting next year in federal court in NYC.
Seeking to see Baldoni's own amended complaint tossed out, Lively's amended complaint puts new emphasis on the harassment and the retaliation that she detailed in previous filings. It states:
The dangerous climate of threats, harassment, and intimidation fueled by the Defendants' retaliation campaign has required Ms. Lively to alter her personal and professional life, and to take steps to protect innocent bystanders rather than exposing them to further harm. Thus, this Amended Complaint does not refer to certain witnesses by name, nor does it provide screen shots of their text messages. Importantly, however, these witnesses have given Ms. Lively permission to share the substance of their communications in this Amended Complaint as contained herein, and they will testify and produce responsive documents in the discovery process.
Naming distributor Sony's Ange Gianetti as being aware of the uneasy she and other potentially corroborating women allegedly felt on IEWU, Livley's new filing goes on to say:
More importantly, the Defendants' false narrative crumbles under the indisputable truth that Ms. Lively was not alone in complaining about Mr. Baldoni and raised her concerns contemporaneously as they arose in 2023, not in connection with some imagined power play for control of the Film in 2024. The experiences of Ms. Lively and others were documented at the time they occurred starting in May of 2023. Importantly, and contrary to the entire narrative Defendants have invented, Mr. Baldoni acknowledged the complaints in writing at the time. He knew that women other than Ms. Lively also were uncomfortable and had complained about his behavior.
Also, with many meetings, instances and reproduced text messages repeated from Lively's first court filing at the end of last year (such as the apparent derailment of 'the long-planned launch of her haircare line, Blake Brown' because of the alleged online smear campaign) today's amended complaint seeks to illustrate the stakes in some very real and potentially frightening ways:
The Defendants' actions have created such a toxic climate of online vitriol against Ms. Lively, her family, other members of the cast, and various fact witnesses, that all of the above have received disturbing threats. One fact witness known to publicly support Ms. Lively recently received a written threat indicating that the witness's family would be sexually assaulted and killed unless the witness agreed to 'make a statement and give the truth.' This type of climate was the predictable, if not inevitable, result of the retaliatory campaign launched by the Baldoni-Wayfarer parties, both before and after the litigation began.Like the January 31 FAC that Baldoni and crew filed against Lively and Ryan Reynolds for defamation and extortion, replacing their initial $400 million complaint of January 16, Tuesday's paperwork from Lively supplants her NYE suit that followed the December 20 filing in California's Civil Rights department. In both Baldoni's FAC and Lively's FAC new defendants were added. It was the New York Times in the move by the Jane the Virgin actor, after suing them individually on December 31 for $250 million. Tonight, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actress brought onboard Street Relations chief and alleged social media manipulator Wallace along with previous defendants Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, its CEO and its moneyman, plus publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, and Nathan's The Agency Group.
The inclusion of Wallace and Street Relations was anticipated over the past few weeks.
However, with a desired protective order against lead Team Baldoni lawyer Bryan Freedman coming up short with Judge Lewis J. Liman in the case's first actual hearing earlier this month, the defamation claim now takes on an even more pointed role – with the former Megyn Kelly lawyer named very specifically. 'The statements Wayfarer, Baldoni, and Heath, through their agents, including Bryan Freedman, published about Ms. Lively are reasonably understood to state and imply that Ms. Lively fabricated claims of harassment and filed false claims of harassment with the Civil Rights Department of the State of California and with this Court,' the section on the defamation claim says.
After the FAC was put in the court docket just before Wednesday ET, Lively's main attorneys Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb outlined for Deadline where things, are and where they see this all going:
Ms. Lively has filed an amended complaint today that provides significant additional evidence and corroboration of her original claims. That evidence includes previously undisclosed communications involving Ms. Lively, representatives of Sony and Wayfarer, and numerous other witnesses. The complaint includes significant contemporaneous evidence that Ms. Lively was not alone in raising allegations of on-set misconduct more than a year before the Film was edited; as well as evidence detailing the threats, harassment, and intimidation of not just Ms. Lively, but numerous innocent bystanders that have followed defendants' retaliatory campaign.
The amended complaint has also added a new claim for defamation based on the repeated false statements the defendants have made about Ms. Lively since she filed her original complaint, and adds Jed Wallace and his company as defendants.
Over the next several weeks, we will move to dismiss the utterly meritless lawsuits brought against Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds, and we will move full speed ahead with discovery that we expect will reveal shocking details about the depth to which the Defendants have sunk in their unending efforts to 'bury,' 'ruin,' and 'destroy' Ms. Lively and her family.
Representatives for Baldoni and the other defendants, Freedman and Sony did not respond to request for comment from Deadline on Lively's amended complaint. If any of them do, this post will be updated.
With more than a year to go before the whole thing actual starts a trial on March 29, 2026, it is very likely (like certain) that there will be many more filings to come. Future filings here don't even include the other lawsuits orbiting what went on during production of IEWU and the retaliation Lively alleges she was subjected to online last summer by Baldoni's publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel and self-described 'hired gun' Wallace.
Lively's team recently pulled a deposition demanding filing in Texas against Wallace as a prelude to putting his name and that of his company in this amended complaint. On February 5, after Wallace denied he had anything to do with any smear campaign despite what seem like references to him by Baldoni flacks in text messages, the Texas-based entrepreneur sued Lively for $7 million. The action came out of Wallace asserting that his name being in Lively's CRD complaint and coming up again and again in the matter since has caused him 'millions of dollars in reputational harm with a projected loss to his company that exceeds another million.'
It should be noted that Nathan and Abel have also said that they never actually activated any attacks on Livley in the lead-up tp the August 2024 release of hit IEWU, 'because the internet was doing the work for us,' as Abel exclaimed in a now deleted Facebook post just before Christmas.
Now, just days after Lively and Reynolds walked the red carpet at 30 Rock and participated in the SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the internet will get busy in some way or another again and Wallace has now been hauled into the big show. A show that is sure to get a lot wilder before next year's trial start date comes around.
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