Blake Lively's lawyers maintain they're suing, not feuding with, Justin Baldoni
The It Ends With Us stars' attorneys are going back-and-forth in the press over the competing legal filings.
Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images
The It Ends With Us drama is a Russian nesting doll: a public relations war about a public relations war. Whatever tensions there were on set, Justin Baldoni escalated the situation by engaging Melissa Nathan’s crisis PR team to campaign against Blake Lively. Eventually, Blake Lively’s team went on the offense with a legal complaint covered in the New York Times. As the lawsuits pile up, lawyers from both sides continue to wage a PR war as they talk serious smack in the press.
Baldoni is working with Bryan Freedman, the self-described “pit bull” attorney to the stars whose client roster includes divisive figures such as Kevin Spacey, Tucker Carlson, and Chris Cuomo. Cuomo’s NewsNation show served as the platform for one of Freedman’s latest parries. “We’re going to take what the young kids call receipts, and we’re going to take those text messages and we’re going to put them out for the public to see,” the lawyer said on Monday’s episode (via Deadline). “And we’re doing it as we speak, and we have been doing it, and what you’re starting to see is you’re starting to see a complete turnaround in this story, and you’re starting to see a turnaround, because people are questioning, is this truthful or not?”
Lively’s team, which includes lawyers from L.A.-based Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and N.Y.-based Willkie Farr & Gallagher, came back late Monday with a lengthy statement in response (via People):
“Ms. Lively’s federal litigation before the Southern District of New York involves serious claims of sexual harassment and retaliation, backed by concrete facts. This is not a ‘feud’ arising from ‘creative differences’ or a ‘he said/she said’ situation. As alleged in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and as we will prove in litigation, Wayfarer [Studios] and its associates engaged in unlawful, retaliatory astroturfing against Ms. Lively for simply trying to protect herself and others on a film set. And their response to the lawsuit has been to launch more attacks against Ms. Lively since her filing.
Sexual harassment and retaliation are illegal in every workplace and in every industry. A classic tactic to distract from allegations of this type of misconduct is to ‘blame the victim’ by suggesting that they invited the conduct, brought it on themselves, misunderstood the intentions, or even lied. Another classic tactic is to reverse the victim and offender, and suggest that the offender is actually the victim. These concepts normalize and trivialize allegations of serious misconduct.
Most importantly, media statements are not a defense to Ms. Lively’s legal claims. We will continue to prosecute her claims in federal court, where the rule of law determines who prevails, not hyperbole and threats.”
As you can imagine (given everything that’s happened here so far), Freedman had more to say about that. “It is painfully ironic that Blake Lively is accusing Justin Baldoni of weaponizing the media when her own team orchestrated this vicious attack by sending the New York Times grossly edited documents prior to even filing the complaint,” he said in a statement to Deadline. “We are releasing all of the evidence which will show a pattern of bullying and threats to take over the movie. None of this will come as a surprise because consistent with her past behavior Blake Lively used other people to communicate those threats and bully her way to get whatever she wanted. We have all the receipts and more.”
That brings us to the final player in this game, The New York Times. Baldoni is suing the paper for defamation over the story about Lively’s federal complaint. But the NYT is holding the line. “Mr. Baldoni, Wayfarer and the other subjects chose not to have any conversations with The Times or address any of the specific text messages or documents and instead emailed a joint response, which was published in full,” the Times said in its own statement (via Deadline). “Also, they sent their response to The Times at 11:16pm ET Dec 20th, not at 2:16am ET Dec 21st as the complaint says. We plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”