The “It Ends With Us” legal hell will never end. Blake Lively’s legal team did not mince words when it came to director Justin Baldoni’s $400 million lawsuit against the actress and her husband Ryan Reynolds.
“This latest lawsuit from Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and its associates is another chapter in the abuser playbook,” representatives for Lively’s legal team said in a statement to People. They also likened Baldoni’s strategy to DARVO, the shorthand for how abusers discredit their victims, which stands for deny, attack and reverse victim offender.
“Their response to sexual harassment allegations: she wanted it, it’s her fault,” the statement noted. “Their justification for why this happened to her: look what she was wearing. In short, while the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy of attacking the woman is desperate, it does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and it will fail.”
The legal team also accused Baldoni and his team of trying to “shift the narrative” to claim that Lively took over creative control of the movie and “alienated” the cast from Baldoni. “The evidence will show that the cast and others had their own negative experiences with Mr. Baldoni and Wayfarer,” the statement continued. “The evidence will also show that Sony asked Ms. Lively to oversee Sony’s cut of the film, which they then selected for distribution and was a resounding success.”
On Thursday, Baldoni filed a $400 million lawsuit against Reynolds, Lively and her publicist, claiming that Lively “falsified” stories that the director sexually harassed her. Baldoni also sued the New York Times for $250 million for its article “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” citing “defamatory” reporting as the reason.
His lawsuit against Lively is actually a countersuit as Lively sued Baldoni in late December for breach of contract over what she described as a smear campaign against her. She initially accused him of sexual harassment in December.
Following Baldoni’s Thursday filing, his lawyer Bryan Freedman told TheWrap, in part: “This lawsuit is a legal action based on an overwhelming amount of untampered evidence detailing Blake Lively and her team’s duplicitous attempt to destroy Justin Baldoni, his team and their respective companies by disseminating grossly edited, unsubstantiated, new and doctored information to the media.”
“Let’s not forget, Ms. Lively and her team attempted to bulldoze reputations and livelihoods for heinously selfish reasons through their own dangerous manipulation of the media before even taking any actual legal action,” the statement continued. “We know the truth, and now the public does too.”
