Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni set 2026 court date

A pre-trial hearing has been set for next week to address Lively's request for a gag order.

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni set 2026 court date

To say It Never Ends With Us is low-hanging fruit, but that’s sure how it feels, huh? On Monday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman told both Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s teams to prepare for a March 9, 2026 court date, according to the Associated Press. That means we may continue to be subjected to the actors’ messy, vicious public relations battle for many months to come. 

There is a chance that the back-and-forth may quiet down should Lively’s legal team be granted the gag order requested against Baldoni’s team. Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, has been on a press blitz, giving interviews and dropping videos from the set of It Ends With Us. On Monday, Lively’s lawyers issued an additional complaint to the court that Freedman “has made it clear that his priority is to ‘torpedo Blake Lively’s career for good’ by, among other things, creating a website to release strategically selected documents and communications between Lively and Baldoni” (per The Hollywood Reporter). “The endless stream of defamatory and extrajudicial media statements must end. It will not stop without this court’s intervention. The Wayfarer Defendants’ efforts are being financed by a billionaire, who has pledged to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family. Mr. Freedman is using that money, his roster of current and former clients, and a blatant media and social media strategy to assassinate Ms. Lively’s character in advance of trial,” Lively’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the judge. 

Of course Freedman issued a response, saying in part that the “irony is not lost on anyone that Ms. Lively is so petrified of the truth that she has moved to gag it.” However, Lively’s lawyers argued that Freedman is “engaging in this extrajudicial campaign to influence these proceedings and the public perception of legal filings to this Court, and there already is a serious risk that his misconduct is tainting the jury pool.” In a move that may signal support for Lively’s request, the judge moved a scheduled pre-trial hearing from mid-February to next week, telling both teams to “be prepared to address complaints about pretrial publicity and attorney conduct,” per the AP.

Separately, Lively’s team has filed a request in Texas for a deposition from Jed Wallace, the “crisis management specialist” who supposedly has a “proprietary formula for defining artists and trends.” Wallace was reportedly brought on by Baldoni’s crisis PR manager Melissa Nathan to help create the alleged online smear campaign against Lively. Sources for Variety previously described Wallace “as a Ray Donovan type fixer employed by powerful people.” The outlet reported in December that Baldoni’s lawyer Freedman, “who knows Wallace well, said he would not describe him as a fixer but rather someone with deep resources for unusual circumstances (he knows how to get a chopper for medical evacuation in remote parts of Italy, for instance).”

Wallace himself isn’t named as a defendant in Lively’s suit (though Melissa Nathan is), but his deposition could be a precursor to an additional lawsuit. If Wallace does indeed have the ability to “seed and influence online forums” and “influence public opinion and thereby cause an organic pile-on,” his deposition could potentially be a revealing look at how the levers of power operate in the digital sphere—the It Ends With Us PR battle is surely not the only arena where these shadowy tactics are being deployed. 

 
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