Justin Baldoni‘s $400 million lawsuit against Blake Lively has officially been dismissed, potentially ending Baldoni’s hopes to claim that Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds were defaming him.
Why did Justin Baldoni’s lawsuit get thrown out?
According to a decision on Monday (via Variety) from Judge Lewis J. Liman, Baldoni’s lawsuit was dismissed because Lively’s accusations of sexual harassment at the hands of Baldoni were legally protected, and could not be alleged to be defamation. In a statement regarding the news, Lively’s lawyers said the decision was a “total victory,” and vindicated her for her claims.
“Today’s opinion is a total victory and a complete vindication for Blake Lively, along with those that Justin Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties dragged into their retaliatory lawsuit, including Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Sloane and The New York Times,” Lively’s lawyers said in a statement. “As we have said from day one, this ‘$400 million’ lawsuit was a sham, and the Court saw right through it. We look forward to the next round, which is seeking attorneys’ fees, treble damages and punitive damages against Baldoni, Sarowitz, Nathan, and the other Wayfarer Parties who perpetrated this abusive litigation.”
All of this stems from a formal complaint that Lively made against Baldoni in December. In it, she states that things got so severe during the filming of It Ends With Us that an all-hands-on-deck meeting was called in response to her claims of a hostile work environment. During the meeting, Lively asked that Baldoni stop showing her nude videos or images of women, that he stop mentioning his pornography addiction to her, that Baldoni stop discussing sexual experiences in front of her, and that he also stop mentioning Lively’s weight.
The complaint also claims that an agreement was made between production company Wayfarer Studios and the cast in which the promotion of the movie would focus “more on [Lively’s character’s] strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” However, Lively claims that Baldoni would renege on that and instead spoke in interviews about the film’s serious story.
Lively also claimed that Baldoni and his PR manager, Melissa Nathan, discussed ways to start a social media campaign to harm her reputation. The filing by Lively includes 22 pages of texts between Baldoni’s publicist and Nathan, in which they discuss wanting to have Lively “buried.”
