Justin Baldoni’s team insists they have all the evidence needed to prove Blake Lively’s amended complaint, which his “It Ends With Us” co-star filed Tuesday night, is false.
“Our clients have been transparent in providing receipts, real time documents and video showing a completely different story than what has been manipulated and cherry picked to the media,” Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman said in a Wednesday statement to TheWrap. “Our clients have taken this matter and these issues very seriously notwithstanding the jokes made publicly by the plaintiff and her husband. Her underwhelming amended complaint is filled with unsubstantial hearsay of unnamed persons who are clearly no longer willing to come forward or publicly support her claims.”
Freedman’s message concluded: “Since documents do not lie and people do, the upcoming depositions of those who initially supported Ms. Lively’s false claims and those who are witnesses to her own behavior will be enlightening. What is truly uncomfortable here is Ms. Lively’s lack of actual evidence.”
In her newly amended, 141-page complaint, the actress claimed there are several women who worked on the “It Ends With Us” set who are willing to take the stand and testify against Baldoni in their trial, which is set for March 2026.
“Ms. Lively was not alone in complaining about Mr. Baldoni and raised her concerns contemporaneously as they arose in 2023, not in connection with some imagined power play for control of the film in 2024,” Lively’s court documents state. “The experiences of Ms. Lively and others were documented at the time they occurred starting in May of 2023. Importantly, and contrary to the entire narrative Defendants have invented, Mr. Baldoni acknowledged the complaints in writing at the time.”
Lively’s revised filing goes on to quote alleged remarks Baldoni made: “There is a woman or two that I in some way made uncomfortable by saying something or doing something that was chauvinistic or sexist. There is one million percent probability that that exists.”
“Ms. Lively has filed an amended complaint that provides significant additional evidence and corroboration of her original claims. That evidence includes previously undisclosed communications involving Ms. Lively, representatives of Sony and Wayfarer, and numerous other witnesses,” Lively’s lawyers Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb told TheWrap. “The complaint includes 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.”
“The amended complaint has also added a new claim for defamation based on the repeated false statements the defendants have made about Ms. Lively since she filed her original complaint, and adds Jed Wallace and his company as defendants,” they continued. “Over the next several weeks, we will move to dismiss the utterly meritless lawsuits brought against Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds, and we will move full speed ahead with discovery that we expect will reveal shocking details about the depth to which the Defendants have sunk in their unending efforts to ‘bury,’ ‘ruin’ and ‘destroy’ Ms. Lively and her family.”
As TheWrap previously reported, that update came after Baldoni’s attorney said he was “surprised” Lively and Ryan Reynolds mentioned the legal battle on “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend.
Baldoni is currently suing Lively, Reynolds, their publicist and The New York Times for $400 million over what he called “falsified stories” (he dropped his separate $250 million defamation lawsuit against the NYT, and instead amended the above counterclaim to include the paper). Lively first accused Baldoni of sexual harassment in December.
