New details are emerging of the 11th-hour deal between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni to avert a headline-splashing trial over alleged sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us.
Baldoni indicated in a joint filing on Thursday that he waived his right to appeal the court’s order last year dismissing his $400 million lawsuit against Lively, opening the door for the actress to recover legal fees and pursue damages under a California law intended to shield sexual harassment victims from retaliatory defamation claims.
If Lively’s bid is granted, the court will schedule proceedings to assess the reputational fallout that flowed from Baldoni’s lawsuit. The actress also seeks punitive damages, which are meant to punish the It Ends With Us director and his faction in the case for particularly egregious misconduct.
After the settlement was announced on Monday, both sides issued a tame joint statement saying that the movie was a “source of pride to all of us” and that Lively’s concerns “deserved to be heard.” At the time, neither group proclaimed they came out of the deal on top.
Now, Lively is jockeying for a legal and public relations edge. Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, lawyers for Lively, in a statement called the settlement a “resounding victory.” They added, “Justin Baldoni and every individual defendant now face personal liability for abusing the legal system to silence and intimidate Ms. Lively. And by admitting that Ms. Lively’s concerns ‘deserved to be heard,’ the defendants have ended once and for all the fiction that Ms. Lively ‘fabricated’ claims of sexual harassment and retaliation.”
Thursday’s filing adds to the uncertainty around the scope of potential liability by Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer, for initiating defamation battles against Lively and The New York Times. Also in play: a lawsuit filed by one of Wayfarer’s insurers for the film, Harco National Insurance, seeking a court order that it has no duty to pay legal fees. Baldoni later accused a trio of other insurers of breach of contract for refusing to cover litigation costs. In total, their policies collectively carried at least $8 million in insurance.
With the settlement, Lively already met one of the hurdles to recover damages from Baldoni after the court last year dismissed his defamation claims. And because he waived his right to appeal the ruling in the deal, the judgment is final.
Under the California law Lively asserts, the actress could be entitled to attorneys’ fees, plus treble and punitive damages, for harm caused by Baldoni’s defamation claims. The law, which went into effect in 2024, is intended to shield sexual harassment and assault victims when they report misconduct as long as they had a reasonable basis for their claims.
In the filing, Lively argues that Baldoni’s lawsuit was meant to retaliate against her. He cites a statement from Wayfarer cofounder Steve Sarowitz in which he said that he was “prepared to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family.” The billionaire financier later said, “I will protect the studio like Israel protected itself from Hamas. There were 39,000 dead bodies. There will be two dead bodies when I’m done. Minimum,” according to the court document.
The actress also contends that she reported the incidents of alleged sexual harassment on the set of the film in good faith, saying that she repeatedly raised concerns to the production, negotiated contractual protections to address the issue and exposed herself to intense scrutiny by filing her lawsuit.
“The Wayfarer Parties defamation action against Blake Lively was baseless from the start,” Hudson writes in the court document. “Despite repeated warnings about the impropriety of their legal claims, and the consequences of continuing to pursue them, the Wayfarer Parties refused to back down. Instead, they stoked the flames of public sentiment.”
Lively says she expects to seek a “multimillion dollar reward” to recover her legal fees and is entitled to damages for harm caused by Wayfarer’s allegedly frivolous lawsuit.
Both sides hired a sprawling team of lawyers for the litigation, with legal expenses likely in the tens of millions of dollars. Many of their firms charge north of $1,000 an hour, and there were nearly 1,500 docket entries in Lively’s case alone.
