Director and male lead of “It Ends With Us,” Justin Baldoni, filed a $400 million countersuit on Jan. 16 against co-star Blake Lively, her husband Ryan Renolds, and their publicist Leslie Sloane, accusing them of defamation and extortion. Though the lawsuit is widely discussed across the entertainment industry, many are confused about how this situation started and who is truly at fault.
Rumors of Baldoni and Lively’s feud started swirling after fans noticed the co-stars’ failure to appear together during the film’s promotion in August of 2024 and the general distance between Baldoni and the rest of the cast, including the author of the novel, Colleen Hoover. Online speculation only intensified after Baldoni hired crisis management and PR professional Melissa Nathan, who successfully represented actor Johnny Depp during his notorious defamation trial against Amber Heard, which he won in June of 2022.
The public’s view of Lively’s pristine reputation quickly shifted after journalist Kjersti Flaa, posted her 2016 interview with Lively on Aug. 15, 2024. People were taken aback by a comment Lively had made in response to Flaa congratulating the newly pregnant actress on her “little bump,” to which Lively responded with, “Congrats on your little bump.”
As the rumors regarding the co-stars continued to gain popularity, so did the Lively skepticism. Meanwhile, Baldoni was receiving the Voices of Solidarity Award for having “shown courage and compassion in advocating on behalf of women and girls.” Baldoni could not have looked better leading up to the bombshell accusations Lively would drop only 12 days later.
First to break the news, “The New York Times” published the article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” on Dec. 21, 2024, only a day after Lively filed the legal complaint against Baldoni and his team alleging sexual harassment and the orchestration of a smear campaign against her.
In Lively’s 80-page complaint, she accuses Baldoni of ignoring “well-established industry protocols in filming intimate scenes and [exploiting] the lack of controls on set to behave inappropriately,” “objectifying” her and other woman on set, and the failure to use an intimacy coordinator during “intimate scenes.” The complaint also features numerous screenshots of messages between Baldoni and his team as evidence of a “retaliation campaign” launched by Wayfarer with the employed help of The Agency Group (TAG), founded by publicist Melissa Nathan.
Baldoni was dropped from his talent agency only a day after the article was released and his Voices of Solidarity Award was rescinded on Christmas Eve. Many of Lively’s co-stars came out in support of Lively, including Hoover herself.
“As Blake’s friends and sisters for over 20 years, we stand with her in solidarity as she fights back against the reported campaign waged to destroy her reputation,” stars America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, and Alexis Bledel said in a joint statement on Instagram. “We are struck by the reality that even if a woman is as strong, celebrated, and resourced as our friend Blake, she can face forceful retaliation for daring to ask for a safe working environment.”
Baldoni fired his first shot back on Dec. 31, 2024, when he and his publicist filed a $250 million lawsuit against “The New York Times” on accounts of defamation. The lawsuit was in response to the “We Can Bury Anyone” article released on Dec. 21, 2024, which Baldoni claims was “rife with lies, doctored ‘evidence’” that relied on Lively’s “self-serving ad factually baseless narrative.”
Only two weeks later Baldoni filed his second lawsuit, this time directly going for Lively, Reynolds, and Lively’s publicist, Leslie Sloane. The 179-page long lawsuit accuses Lively of orchestrating a smear campaign against him and well and “hijacking” the movie and premiere.
Following the lawsuit, Baldoni and his lawyer continued to release additional evidence to the public including behind-the-scenes footage from May 23 production in order to refute Lively’s claims. The footage shows the “slow dance” scene in which Lively had cited in her lawsuit as one of the uncomfortable moments for her on set.
The trial is set to start on March 9, 2026; however, a federal judge threatened to move the date up if the matter continued to be “litigated in the press” at the preliminary hearing on Feb. 3.
