Unpacking Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s Legal Showdown

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

In August 2024, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us arrived amid a flurry of press-tour drama, suggesting a messy rift between the movie’s star, Blake Lively, and her co-star and director, Justin Baldoni. By the time the film had managed to pull in $345 million globally, tensions seemed to settle — that is, until December, when Lively filed a legal complaint with the California Civil Rights Department. In it, she accused Baldoni, his production studio Wayfarer, his business partners, and several publicists of mounting a retaliatory smear campaign against her after she complained about sexual harassment on set.

The New York Times published a report based on her claims, co-bylined by prominent Me Too reporter Megan Twohey and peppered with text messages that appeared to show Baldoni and his PR team conspiring to tank Lively’s reputation. On their face, these texts looked damning, but then Baldoni came forward with a lawsuit of his own. Suing the Times for defamation, he alleged that Lively’s team had doctored its supposed evidence, covering up a plot by the actress to tarnish his good name and stage a “hostile takeover” of the film. A few hours later, Lively officially sued Baldoni for sexual harassment and retaliation, he sued her back, and the two became locked in a protracted legal battle — and a war of reputations — that has not subsided, even after a judge dismissed Baldoni’s lawsuits. Here’s what’s happened.

What was the It Ends With Us beef again?

Cast your mind back to summer 2024: The It Ends With Us press tour was in full swing and, as tabloid readers will recall, there seemed to be some friction between castmates. The two stars never seemed to be in the same place at once: Baldoni often promoted the film solo, while Lively (who was also an executive producer) appeared alongside her fellow actors and IEWU author Colleen Hoover. Fans noticed that while Baldoni followed his castmates on Instagram, none followed him back.

Soon enough, tabloid sources were whispering about alleged misconduct by Baldoni, a possible creative coup by Lively, and two different attitudes about marketing the film. While Baldoni focused more on the domestic violence at the heart of the story, Lively took an approach that rubbed viewers the wrong way. Some felt her styling choices — all floral, all the time — and the way she talked about the movie were more appropriate to a rom-com than a drama about abuse. She also sprinkled collabs with her hair-care, beverage, and alcohol brands throughout the junket, tie-ins that struck many as tone-deaf. Then old press clips resurfaced in which Lively seemed rude or dismissive to her interviewers and colleagues. Public opinion on the actress promptly soured, but then the IEWU promotional cycle wrapped, the tabloid churn slowed, and online, the feud rumors seemed to die down.

What are the central allegations?

Things stayed quiet until December 20, when Lively filed her initial complaint — and precursor to her lawsuit — in California. In the documents, Lively said Baldoni and Wayfarer CEO Jamey Heath “created a hostile work environment that nearly derailed production,” speaking to and behaving toward their female colleagues in inappropriate and sexually charged ways. When she spoke up about it, she said Wayfarer appeared to take her seriously, signing off on a 17-point list of protections she demanded the studio put in place. But when it came time for the press tour, she believes Baldoni colluded with publicists to (in the words of one text message featured in her suit) “bury her” before any damaging allegations could tarnish his reputation as a feminist ally. Her lawsuit against Baldoni, filed on December 31 in New York, repeats the initial complaint’s argument nearly point for point, claiming sexual harassment, retaliation, breach of contract, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and false-light invasion of privacy.

Baldoni’s lawsuits aimed to flip that narrative on its head. The first of his now-dismissed complaints, filed on December 31 against the Times, accused the paper of leaning on “‘cherry picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced” into a defamatory article. The $250 million suit contended the Times failed to do its due diligence and became willingly complicit in Lively’s “orchestrated campaign to rehabilitate her image.” The complaint additionally claimed that the paper gave Baldoni and his team insufficient time to respond to Lively’s allegations, preventing them from sharing their side of the story. In a statement to Variety, the Times maintained that the story was “meticulously and responsibly reported.”

His $400 million lawsuit against Lively — and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist, Leslie Sloane, filed mid-January — accused them of defamation and extortion. Lively, he said, used her star power to hold Wayfarer hostage and “steal” It Ends With Us out from under them. He alleged that, beginning in preproduction, Lively overstepped her role as an actor, first wresting control of her wardrobe away from the costume designer; then rewriting the script; then demanding to see the dailies; then insisting on editing the film herself. The suit claims that Lively went over Baldoni’s head to create her own cut, which she strong-armed distributor Sony into releasing. She allegedly forced the studio to award her a producer credit, and had Baldoni confined to a basement storage room during his own premiere so that they would not have to interact on the red carpet.

At every turn, Baldoni said, Lively threatened to quit and abdicate all responsibilities to the film if she did not get her way, outcomes that would have cost Wayfarer millions of dollars and eliminated a lot of jobs. Baldoni said that when Lively’s promotional efforts seeded an “organic” public backlash, she and Reynolds tried to make him and Wayfarer take the fall, threatening that “the gloves would come off” if they did not publicly apologize. According to Baldoni’s suit, Reynolds had already approached an executive at their shared talent agency, WME, claiming Baldoni was a “sexual predator” and lobbying his contacts to “drop” Baldoni from the roster. Although Baldoni was purportedly fearful of what the couple might do, he said he did not bend to their demands and issue a mea culpa. At that point, he alleged, Lively used her “Machiavellian and civilly extortionate tactics” to burn his public image to the ground.

Responding to the suits, attorneys on both sides denied all wrongdoing by their clients. In a statement to the Times, Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, called Lively’s allegations “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious” and accused her of making “yet another desperate attempt to ‘fix’ her negative reputation.” Baldoni’s studio, Wayfarer, told the Times that it “did nothing proactive nor retaliated” against Lively.

Responding to Baldoni’s lawsuit, Lively’s legal team said it was “another chapter in the abuser playbook.” At the end of January, they moved to have Baldoni’s suit dismissed. In a statement to the Cut, her spokesperson said the idea that “Lively decided to fabricate earlier documented claims of sexual harassment only to be able to gain future leverage over the film she was starring in, even before it was done … makes no sense.” Her attorneys, Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb, said they had “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.”

After Baldoni’s suits were dropped, Lively’s attorneys celebrated “a total victory and a complete vindication” of their client’s allegations.

What did the lawsuits say about sexual harassment?

Very different things. Lively claims Baldoni would ask her “invasive” questions about her marital sex life while they were supposed to be working on their scenes and “often referred to women in the workplace as ‘sexy.’” In Lively’s telling, Baldoni improvised kissing without an intimacy coordinator on hand nor nudity riders in place and repeatedly tried to insert “gratuitous” sex scenes and nudity into the script. Both Heath and Baldoni would constantly barge in on Lively in states of undress, her complaints say, insisting on having impromptu meetings when she was breastfeeding or topless. Her complaints allege her co-star would frequently break character while filming in ways that made her feel uncomfortable: On one occasion, she claims, they were shooting a slow-dance scene when he “leaned forward and slowly dragged his lips from her ear and down her neck as he said, ‘It smells so good’” — choreography and dialogue that were not in the script. She alleges that several HR complaints were filed against Baldoni, and not just by her: Other women on set found his behavior uncomfortable, one allegedly telling her that she wouldn’t speak to him outside their scenes.

Baldoni, as you can probably guess, took issue with all of this. He said Lively was the one who first started talking about sex while they were working. He alleged that, before production began, she neglected to sign her nudity rider and refused to meet with the intimacy coordinator, obligating Baldoni to convey their recommendations to her as they hashed out the choreography themselves. (“Blake did not ‘refuse’ to meet with the Film’s intimacy coordinator, she had no need to meet with her before production. Instead, she spoke to her during preparations once production began,” Lively’s spokesperson maintained. “The purpose of an intimacy coordinator is to work with the actors to establish the appropriate boundaries based on what is in the script, not to rewrite the script to add more sexual content to satisfy the Director’s demands.”) Baldoni also insisted that “Lively herself invited [him] to her trailer to ‘work on lines’ while she pumped breast milk,” and included a text message documenting the invitation.

And as for that slow-dancing scene, according to Baldoni, Lively wouldn’t stop talking about the scent of her fake tan during the shoot. Baldoni was “instructed to somehow get her to stop,” his suit said. He opted to just act through it, “slow dancing as he believed his character would with his partner,” per the docs. In January, his legal team leaked footage of the scene being filmed — with sound — to the media, claiming it “clearly refute[s] Ms. Lively’s characterization of his behavior,” while hers described it as “damning evidence” that proved her point.

What did the lawsuits say about fat-shaming?

Lively gave birth to her fourth child in February 2023. Shortly before they began shooting the movie that spring, she says Baldoni covertly pressured her to slim down. “Ms. Lively was humiliated to learn that Mr. Baldoni secretly called her fitness trainer, without her knowledge or permission, and implied that he wanted her to lose weight in two weeks,” her suit cites as an example. “Mr. Baldoni told the trainer that he had asked because he was concerned about having to pick Ms. Lively up in a scene for the movie, but there was no such scene.”

Baldoni’s suit fired back using alleged texts from Lively, time-stamped in February 2023, asking if they could shoot “body scenes at the end of the schedule” to give her more time to lose her baby weight. “Anything you feel insecure about we will talk through and get creative together and make you comfortable,” he seemingly told her, according to texts reproduced in his filing. “I just don’t want you to stress about your body, it’s the last thing you need.” She allegedly told him thanks, but “as woke as we both are and work to be, this movie requires a certain aesthetic. It’s part of the job that we both excitedly signed up for.” Baldoni’s suit maintained that he has “lifelong back injuries, multiple bulging discs, and chronic pain,” so he merely wanted “to train his back muscles” for the lifting scene, which Reynolds — whom Baldoni claimed screamed at him for “fat-shaming his wife” — “demanded” he remove from the film.

What’s the deal with the 17-point list?

Filming of It Ends With Us shut down in spring and summer of 2023, when the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild went on strike. As the team prepared to resume production that November, Lively’s suit says, she told Wayfarer her return to set would depend on its willingness to “implement a list of protections … designed to require Wayfarer to cease the on-set behavior of Mr. Baldoni and Mr. Heath.” Among other things, she asked that an intimacy coordinator be present whenever she was on set, that there would be “no spontaneous improvising of any scenes involving physical touching, simulated sex, or nudity,” that no one would come into her trailer while she was naked, and that nudity riders needed to be in place before any relevant scenes were shot. She also asked for an all-hands meeting to discuss how these protections would be enacted, which she says took place at her home on January 4, 2024, with her husband on hand as her “representative.” Lively says the parties “agreed to implement and follow the Protections,” and that production resumed the following day.

Baldoni, it seems, experienced this negotiation differently. He said he and Wayfarer were “blindsided” to receive Lively’s list, given what they believed was a friendly working relationship. Still, he maintained that they signed the document in the interest of getting the cast and crew back to work, and because even though they resented the list’s insinuations, most of the “protections” on it were already in place. Still, when his team showed up to Lively’s penthouse for the all-hands, Baldoni alleged Reynolds “launched into an aggressive tirade, berating Baldoni.” Baldoni, his suit claimed, felt he “had virtually no choice” but to go along with Lively’s demands if he wanted to finish the movie.

What about all those texts?

Arguably the most explosive component of Lively’s case is the involvement of Melissa Nathan, a crisis-PR expert best known for having worked with Johnny Depp during his defamation trial against Amber Heard. Lively’s filing points to a quote Nathan appeared to send Wayfarer, outlining her services: For $175,000, she could execute a “social manipulation” plan that included “reddit,” “social account takedowns,” a “social crisis team,” and “threads of theories,” all designed to turn the public against Lively.

According to the complaints, Nathan subsequently circulated a planning document with media talking points, including that Lively leveraged her influence to seize creative control. According to texts that appear in the complaint, Baldoni’s publicist Jennifer Abel told Nathan that Baldoni didn’t feel the document went far enough: “He wants to feel like she can be buried.” Nathan appears to have responded that she couldn’t put the specifics in writing. “We can’t write we will destroy her,” Nathan allegedly wrote. “You know we can bury anyone.”

Shortly after that, Lively’s filing alleges, Baldoni sent Abel a social-media thread cataloguing Hailey Bieber’s purported history of bullying and wrote, “This is what we would need.” A few days later, the suit says, Nathan brought on Jed Wallace, a crisis-management expert whose since-deleted LinkedIn page reportedly described him as a “hired gun” with a “proprietary formula for defining artists and trends.” With Wallace involved, Lively’s complaint claims, Nathan’s team employed a strategy known as “astroturfing,” or planting social-media posts to make it seem like a sentiment has developed organically. On August 10, the complaint says, one of Nathan’s employees texted her that “we’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts.” Lively’s suit also accuses Nathan and Abel of planting false, damaging stories about her to select “friendlies” in the media. It points to an August 16 exchange, in which Abel apparently texted Nathan a Daily Mail article teasing Lively’s impending cancellation. “You really outdid yourself with this piece,” Abel apparently wrote. “That’s why you hired me, right?” reads Nathan’s reply. “I’m the best.”

All of which looks pretty bad. But the texts don’t tell the whole story, according to Baldoni’s lawsuit. In his complaint against the Times, he said he retained Nathan as a defensive measure amid Lively’s escalating demands, “to prepare for worst-case scenarios.” While his publicists played defense — “verifying facts and correcting misinformation without retaliation” — he insisted they ultimately had no need to resort to extremes. “The backlash against Lively was the inevitable fallout from her own tone-deaf messaging and self-promotional tactics, amplified by her inability to read the room in addressing such a serious subject,” Baldoni’s suit against the Times stated. (For her part, Lively claims she stuck to Sony’s marketing plan, which steered actors away from talking about “sad or heavy” themes and instead encouraged them to focus on Lily’s “strength and resilience.”)

In support of that theory, Baldoni included what he said were the full exchanges, which Lively’s team edited to suit their narrative. For instance: Refuting one of Lively’s more jarring examples — texts from Nathan to Abel appearing to say “he doesn’t realize how lucky he is right now [sic] we need to press on him just how fucking lucky,” “the whispering in the ear the sexual connotations like Jesus fucking Christ … there is just so much” — Baldoni pointed to the texts that allegedly came after. “Doesn’t matter if it’s not true,” Nathan finished, to which Abel replied: “I know, I don’t think they get that. They think the truth wins.” She went on to say, “I’m like, we are dealing with a psychopath who literally called you a sexual predator.”

His complaint further alleged that Lively didn’t include conversations between the two publicists talking about how they weren’t involved with anonymously sourced tabloid articles coming out against Lively. “Damn this is unfair because it’s also not me,” Nathan texted Abel on one occasion. “Everything now looks like it’s me.”

And that dragon text, specifically?

This one pertains to the widely discussed “rooftop scene,” Lively and Baldoni’s meet-cute in the film. Baldoni asserted that Lively insisted on “taking a pass” at the dialogue, and that he felt pressured to accept her notes when both Reynolds and a “famous friend” approached him with effusive praise for her edits. (One unredacted text message in the document refers to that friend as “Taylor,” leading people to assume it was Swift.) According to his filing, Lively later told him that Reynolds and Taylor were her biggest cheerleaders, comparing herself to Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen: “I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually for better. Because my dragons also protect those I fight for. So really we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine.”

Baldoni also noted that Lively would eventually announce that, actually, it was Reynolds who rewrote the rooftop scene during the WGA strike, a revelation that surprised the screenwriter, Wayfarer, and — per documents included in the filing — Sony.

What about that website of evidence?

After filing his lawsuit against Lively et al., Baldoni’s team made good on a previous pledge to put their evidence online, launching thelawsuitinfo.com in early February 2025. The landing page links to his amended complaint and its new 168-page “timeline of relevant events,” cataloguing endless communications between the co-stars. In a letter to the presiding judge on the case, which the Cut has reviewed, Lively’s legal team called the website another installment in Baldoni’s “retaliatory media and online campaign.” They claim his team violated New York law by litigating the case outside the court.

Aren’t there spinoff lawsuits at play here, too?

Absolutely. In addition to Baldoni and Lively’s camps, two other parties have filed suits. One is Stephanie Jones, a publicist whose company, Jonesworks, used to employ Abel and represent both Wayfarer and Baldoni. In his lawsuit against Lively, Baldoni alleges that the text messages Lively says she subpoenaed actually came from Jones, who confiscated Abel’s phone when Abel quit to start her own business. Baldoni says Jones was salty over Wayfarer’s decision to leave with Abel, and — text history in hand — “approached Lively’s team with an appealing offer: Ammunition sufficient to destroy Baldoni, Wayfarer, and Abel in one fell swoop.”

Jones, meanwhile, is suing Baldoni, Wayfarer, Abel, Nathan, and ten John Does for breach of contract and defamation. She contends they all conspired to smear Lively and then pin the blame on her. The suit notes, “Jones has never doctored any text messages, and has no reason to do so. Abel’s text messages were forensically extracted directly from the company phone that Abel used during her employment at Jonesworks and voluntarily returned to Jonesworks upon her termination.” The messages pertaining to Lively that appear in her suit, however, closely resemble the ones that appeared in Lively’s complaints. The Cut has contacted Jones for comment. In April, she alleged in legal filings that any information she shared, she shared after receiving a subpoena.

In March, Baldoni and Abel hit Jones with a countersuit, alleging that the publicist — who, in the summer of 2024, was facing several critical reports about her tactics and spinning her wheels because of them — violated California’s labor laws in her firing of Abel. They believe Lively’s camp got ahold of the text messages directly from Jones, claiming Nathan received a phone call from Lively’s publicist, Sloane, immediately after Jonesworks confiscated Abel’s phone. “During that call, Sloane told Nathan that Sloane had seen Nathan’s text messages (which could only have come from Abel’s phone) and that Nathan should expect to be sued,” the filing reportedly states. As a result of Jones’s efforts, the suit states, “Baldoni has been wrongfully labeled as a sex pest, his accolades have been rescinded” — he lost a women’s solidarity award — “and his future projects thrown into doubt.” In a statement to Variety, an attorney for Jones called Baldoni’s countersuit a “work of fiction masquerading as counterclaims.”.

Also in the mix is Wallace, who in February filed a $7 million defamation suit against Lively, accusing her of publicly involving him in a situation that had nothing to do with him. In a statement to the Cut, a spokesperson for Lively maintained that Wallace “served a critical role” in the smear campaign.

How is Jenny Slate involved?

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Slate, who plays Lively’s sister-in-law in the film, filed her own complaint with Sony over an offer Heath allegedly made on Wayfarer’s behalf. Slate was apparently unhappy with the accommodations she rented for filming in New York — something to do with her young son — but didn’t want to find another apartment because she’d lose her $15,000 security deposit. Heath, according to THR, told her Wayfarer would fully reimburse her, but did so in language that was “focused intensely on the sanctity of motherhood and Slate’s role as a mother,” allegedly making Slate uncomfortable enough to report him. The Cut has contacted both Sony and Slate’s reps for comment.

And Taylor Swift? What’s going on there?

As soon as Lively’s dragon text surfaced, the tabloids got to work. While some alleged that the mention of Swift’s name created tension between the longtime besties, others sought to minimize Swift’s attachment to the movie. “Taylor has always been Blake’s friend, but Taylor doesn’t have any involvement in the case” or the film itself, someone supposedly familiar with the situation told Us Weekly. “While she and Blake are friends, this case is now a legal matter for the courts to resolve. Dragging Taylor into it is unnecessary and misrepresents what really happened.”

Baldoni’s legal team did think getting Swift involved was necessary. His lawyers subpoenaed her for a deposition in early May, prompting Lively’s team to accuse them of turning “a very serious legal matter” into “Barnum & Bailey’s Circus.” Swift’s spokesperson responded with a more pointed statement, insisting, “Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film, she did not even see It Ends With Us until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history.”

Within days, however, Baldoni’s lawyers ratcheted up the drama once again, accusing Lively of attempting to blackmail Swift into deleting certain texts and threatening to release “private text messages of a personal nature” if Swift didn’t publicly voice her support for the actress. Lively’s legal team countered that the allegation was “unequivocally and demonstrably false,” but Freedman then doubled down. In another filing, he said he had it on the authority of someone “very closely linked to Taylor Swift” that Lively’s attorneys “requested, on Ms. Lively’s behalf, that Taylor Swift make a social media statement in support of Ms. Lively given her absence from the Super Bowl that year, and stated that if Ms. Swift failed to do so, Ms. Lively would release ‘10 years’ of private texts with Ms. Swift.” A judge subsequently struck the matter from the docket as “improper,” “irrelevant to any issue,” and engineered to “promote public scandal.” About a week later, Baldoni’s lawyers withdrew the subpoena.

How is all this affecting Blake Lively and Taylor Swift’s friendship?

By the time the subpoena chatter started, it had been months since the two friends had been seen publicly: no pap-walking into New York City restaurants or clutching each other in Chiefs suites. While Lively watched last year’s Super Bowl from Swift’s box, her absence at this year’s game kicked up tabloid speculation that Swift felt “used.” In May, fans also noticed that Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, had unfollowed Lively’s husband, Reynolds, on Instagram. And while some sources have claimed that “Taylor is working to trust Blake again but it’s going to take some time,” others have reported that the singer “totally cut ties” with Lively, even as Lively spams “her with texts, voicemails and even emails, begging to mend what they once had.” That’s according to “Page Six,” which claims that Swift “hasn’t responded to any of Blake’s pleas” and has “ignored all her groveling excuses.”

Lively has also thrown Swift’s professional enemy, Scooter Braun, into the mix, subpoenaing the American branch of the K-pop company HYBE. Braun runs HYBE America, which just so happens to be a majority stakeholder in Nathan’s PR company. Baldoni is also, evidently, pals with Braun. According to Deadline, Lively is looking to “hoover up any documents and information” Braun’s company might have on the Agency Group’s work for Baldoni.

Why did Lively drop two of her claims against Baldoni?

In early June, Lively’s legal team filed to withdraw her “intentional infliction of emotional distress” and “negligent infliction of emotional distress” complaints against the director. Baldoni’s side wanted Lively’s medical records and therapy notes as part of his effort to “disprove that she suffered any emotional distress.” According to Variety, that request isn’t as intrusive as it may sound. It is “standard procedure,” the outlet reports, for the defendant to review “medical records that would shine a light on the root and scope of alleged distress” in preparing for trial. Baldoni’s team accused Lively of dropping the related allegations precisely because she didn’t want to hand over those documents. Responding in a filing of their own, Lively’s attorneys said she hadn’t “refused” to sign the HIPAA release but was merely making a “good faith” attempt to “streamline” her case before it goes to court. Baldoni’s “Motion was filed for a single audience: the media,” Lively’s lawyers wrote. The judge in the case denied Lively’s request to dismiss the claims without prejudice — a maneuver that would allow her to file them again in the future — along with Baldoni’s effort to compel her to turn over the records.

What happens now that Baldoni’s suits have been dismissed?

On June 9, Judge Lewis J. Liman tossed Baldoni’s entire suit against Lively, Reynolds, Sloane, and the Times, ruling that Lively’s claims could not be defamatory because they were lodged in “privileged” legal documents. He also said that Wayfarer hadn’t proved Lively’s alleged attempts at extortion amounted to anything more than “legally permissible hard bargaining or renegotiation of working conditions.” As for the allegations against the other people and entities Baldoni’s suit named, Judge Liman said Wayfarer hadn’t demonstrated that, “based on the information available to them,” these parties would have reason to doubt they were speaking truthfully.

Baldoni’s team was quick to point out, however, that Liman allowed him to proceed with allegations of tortious interference with contract and breach of implied covenant if he refiles an amended complaint by June 23. It sounds like he does intend to do this. “Ms. Lively and her team’s predictable declaration of victory is false,” Freedman told E! News. “So let us be clear about the latest ruling.” Reiterating his belief that Lively made “false accusations of sexual harassment and retaliation and a nonexistent smear campaign,” Freedman added, “Ms. Lively’s own claims are no truer today than they were yesterday, and with the facts on our side, we march forward with the same confidence that we had when Ms. Lively and her cohorts initiated this battle and look forward to her forthcoming deposition, which I will be taking.”

Meanwhile, Lively’s attorney, Gottlieb, told CNN that the actress remained “determined to see her claims through and to pursue them to have a full public accountability of what she’s alleged happened to her.” Gottlieb has previously indicated that, when the case goes to trial, she plans to testify.

So how does this all … end?

Right now, it still looks reasonably likely that this legal battle will end up going to court in 2026. Baldoni has just under two weeks to rework his complaint, so … watch this space.