Blake Lively now seeking gag order against Justin Baldoni's very vocal lawyer

Although the two are, of course, currently embroiled in actual legal battles with each other—having each sued the other in the span of the last month—Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are also currently battling it out in the court of public opinion, presumably because that’s much faster, and you can do it from your couch. Lively, though, has now taken steps to try to lower the volume of the discourse a bit, having apparently requested a gag order against Baldoni’s lawyer, high-profile/volume attorney Bryan Freedman.

To be fair, Freedman is a very loud dude: He’s been front and center in this matter (and many other Hollywood conflicts—including an unrelated 2021 case where he sued Baldoni), decrying Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds for smearing his client by accusing him of orchestrating a smear campaign against her. The Lively camp’s assertion is that by having Freedman get up every week and lob ever more vitriol at Lively, meanwhile, it’s just a continuation of the previous smear campaign. (The one against Lively, not Baldoni; it’s important, at times like this, to keep your smears clear and distinct.) In what could be understood as a hilarious burst of self-awareness, Freedman has opted not to explode publicly about this, although THR has statements from an anonymous source that it’s very easy imagining the attorney saying, asserting that it’s “grossly unfair to impose a gag order after Justin has been defamed by The New York Times in an article that they say has cost him three jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars.”

News of the gag order comes after the Baldoni side launched a new escalation this week by releasing a brand new online Rorschach test for all of us plebes to stare at: Footage of Lively and Baldoni together on the set of their movie It Ends With Us, which Baldoni is clearly hoping will demonstrate a positive take on their relationship during filming, and which Lively has responded to by saying, essentially, “If you can’t tell that I’m skeeved out here, that’s part of the problem.” The major takeaway, then, is that there’s an incredibly ugly fight happening right now for control of the public narrative, and it will almost certainly continue in one way or another—possible gag orders be damned—right up until this whole thing lands in front of a judge.