Blake Lively v Justin Baldoni: it ends with us? Not yet it doesn’t

The actor Blake Lively’s long-running and high-profile legal action against her former colleague Justin Baldoni ended in a settlement last week. That may sound final, but immediate post-deal briefings by the rival legal teams suggest it has miles to run.

Lively, who with her husband Ryan Reynolds is one half of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples, worked with Baldoni on his 2024 film It Ends With Us, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel of the same name about a woman escaping an abusive relationship. She filed a lawsuit claiming sexual harassment on set in December of the same year, and, in turn, Baldoni, a director, actor and self-proclaimed feminist, filed a $400m countersuit.

However, court documents from both sides show a parallel battle behind the legal dispute: Baldoni is alleged to have paid for a preemptive PR campaign against Lively before the film had been released or she took legal action. It suggests Lively could be the latest victim of a new Hollywood PR playbook – a strategy similar to that which Tortoise Media, now the owner of The Observer, revealed in the podcast series Who Trolled Amber?, concerning the fraught legal dispute between actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.

During filming in 2023, Lively had complained to distributors Sony about elements of Baldoni’s behaviour, including alleged inappropriate kissing, the demand for extra sex scenes, lewd conversations and him entering her trailer while she was breastfeeding. Baldoni has always denied the allegations.

Seemingly fearing they might become public, in July 2024 Baldoni and his PR, Jennifer Abel, briefed Melissa Nathan, a crisis PR specialist, about a possible campaign against Lively – a blend of online activity and press briefings that would suggest she was a “mean girl” who wanted control of It Ends With Us.

Before she set up her own agency in 2024, Nathan was one of a team at communications firm Hiltzik Strategies who handled Depp’s PR during his libel case against ex-wife Heard in 2022, who had written an op-ed against sexual violence which Depp claimed implicated him. Alexi Mostrous, then an investigative reporter for Tortoise, uncovered a coordinated online character assassination of the actress leading up to and during the trial.

The conversations about a possible campaign against Lively, which appears to resemble the Heard case, became public when Lively’s legal team subpoenaed the contents of Abel’s phone. On the phone, they found messages including one from Baldoni to Abel referring to a plan Nathan had presented on behalf of her company the Agency Group to “explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism”.

In an exchange of messages in August 2024, which were not disputed as evidence by Baldoni's team, Abel told Nathan: “I think you guys need to be tough and show the strength of what you guys can do… He [Baldoni] wants to feel like she can be buried.”

Nathan replied: “We can’t write it down to him. We can’t write we will destroy her. We will do this.” And after a few more texts: “You know we can bury anyone. But I can’t write that to him.”

The Agency Group told The Observer that it does not engage in digital work.

According to the court documents, in a subsequent text message sent to Abel and Baldoni's business partner, Nathan provided quotes for two unnamed digital teams that she had used in the past, offering a “website (to discuss), full reddit, full social account take downs, full social crisis team on hand for anything” as well as “threads of theories” and social engagement to “change narrative” all of which would “be most importantly untraceable”.

Days later Nathan sent Abel the following message: “Socials are really really ramping up. It’s actually sad because it just shows you how people really want to hate on women.”

That same month, Kate Lindsay, culture reporter and host of Slate’s ICYMI podcast, said: “I started seeing rumours mumbling that there was something off with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni during the press lead up to the premiere of the film.”

“People were noticing that [they] were not taking pictures together, which was jarring because they’re the two leads. People felt that she was being a little careless and a little too chipper doing press for the movie, which is about domestic abuse.”

Crisis PR Lauren Beeching says there is an industry building up around smear campaigns. “Around 20% of the people who want to be my clients want Lively-style retaliation, asking if I’m willing to do the most outrageous things,” she said. “I always refuse but a month later I see that what they wanted has happened, so there’s plenty of people doing it and it’s growing.”

In December 2024, Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department followed by a full lawsuit, claiming sexual harassment. Baldoni sued back, although his case was dismissed by the court, and the legal action rumbled on until April this year when Judge Lewis Liman dismissed most of Lively’s claims.

“Under American law, employees have many rights, including the right not to be sexually harassed or discriminated against,” said Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor now an LA personal injury lawyer. “Those same rights don’t apply to an independent contractor. There’s a big distinction, and the judge ruled in this case that Blake Lively’s relationship with Baldoni was not employer/employee, but rather an independent contractor. And therefore, all of her harassment claims were dismissed.”

Judge Liman allowed Lively’s claim of retaliation to continue, saying Baldoni’s “conduct at least arguably crossed the line” and that “there comes a point where the accused stops simply defending him or herself and starts taking action that a reasonable jury could view as retaliation”.

Liman found that some of the allegations advanced by Baldoni could constitute an attack on Lively’s reputation and said there was evidence that could lead a jury to conclude that his production company Wayfarer planned “more aggressive moves meant to destroy her career”.

A settlement has saved the pair, whose legal costs are estimated to have reached up to $60m, an expensive trial. But one of the implications is that Lively has not been able to defend herself publicly or to a jury against the alleged smears, which may explain why Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freeman told entertainment news channel TMZ the settlement was “a huge victory”.

That celebration may be premature. Lively’s legal team told reporters they expected to take the case further. “By agreeing to this settlement, and waiving their right to appeal, Justin Baldoni and every individual defendant now face personal liability for abusing the legal system to silence and intimidate Ms Lively.”

On Thursday, Lively’s lawyers released a court document suggesting Lively plans to return to California and use the phrasing of the settlement to secure damages with a local court. “From day one, Blake Lively’s mission was clear: expose and hold accountable those who weaponize smear campaigns and retaliatory lawsuits to intimidate and silence survivors. That mission continues.”

Both Baldoni and Lively’s careers have been hit by the cases – although Baldoni produced the Scarlett Johansson-directed movie Eleanor the Great last year, suggesting he still has some Hollywood backing.

“ I think it’s going to be incredibly hard for Blake to rebuild from this,” said Beeching. “She has a very big mountain to climb. It’s possible with very good PR. She’ll never, ever get back to how she was prior to all of this but I’m sure her priority is just getting back into films and working again.”

Photographs by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images, Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images