Lawyers for Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are back in court, despite a settlement being reached weeks ago, over Lively's claims of sexual harassment on the set of their 2024 film It Ends With Us.
Lawyers for Lively and Baldoni battle in a New York court despite settling claims weeks ago Blake Lively appears at the SNL50: The Anniversary Special at Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Feb 16, 2025 and Justin Baldoni appears at a special screening of The Boys in the Boat in New York on Dec 13, 2023.
NEW YORK — The legal battle between actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni isn't quite over yet. Just a month ago, the two announced a settlement that avoided a trial over Lively's claims that Baldoni led a campaign to smear her reputation after she accused him of sexually harassing her on the set of their 2024 film It Ends With Us.
But on Monday , lawyers for Lively were back in court, trying to get a judge to make Baldoni pay her legal bills plus other penalties. They said she's entitled to the money under a California law because Baldoni's countersuit, which claimed she had defamed and extorted him, was thrown out last year by a judge.
Baldoni and his lawyer, Ellyn Garofalo, accused Lively of trying to do "an end run" around a trial that was cancelled when the two agreed to settle. While the financial terms of the settlement weren't announced publicly, Garofalo told the court it was resolved without Baldoni and his production company "paying a cent of the US$300 million in damages she was demanding".
"Reopening this for basically what is an alternative trial would involve reopening discovery, new experts, new expert depositions," she said. Lively's lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, asserts that the lawsuit Baldoni brought against Lively was the very kind of litigation the California law was designed to stop. The law is intended to protect survivors of sexual harassment from protracted and damaging legal fights.
The two actors have been fighting in court since late 2024 over the fraught filming of It Ends With Us. Lively had claimed that during filming, Baldoni made inappropriate comments about her appearance, violated physical boundaries while filming a love scene, and pushed for nudity — against Lively's wishes — during a scene in which her character was giving birth.
Lively also accused Baldoni and his production company of then orchestrating an effort to damage her public reputation and her credibility, in case she went public with her complaints. Baldoni, who directed the dark romantic drama and starred in it with Lively, denied harassing her or orchestrating a smear campaign. He claimed the complaints about his behaviour were made up by Lively as part of an effort to seize creative control of the movie.
He countersued, accusing Lively and her husband, Deadpool"actor Ryan Reynolds, of defamation and extortion. The judge ultimately dismissed Lively's sexual harassment claims, ruling that she couldn't pursue them under federal law because she was an independent contractor rather than an employee on the movie set. In a joint statement after the deal was reached, the two sides said they agreed Lively's concerns "deserved to be heard" and that they "remain firmly committed to workplaces free of improprieties and unproductive environments".
It Ends With Us, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling 2016 novel about a relationship devolving into domestic violence, was released in August 2024 and exceeded box office expectations. Lively appeared in the 2005 film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the TV series Gossip Girl from 2007 to 2012 before starring in films including The Town and The Shallows.
Baldoni starred in the TV comedy Jane the Virgin, directed the 2019 film Five Feet Apart and wrote Man Enough, a book challenging traditional notions of masculinity.
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