Breaking Down Justin Baldoni’s New Lawsuit Claims: Blake Lively’s ‘Dragons’ and More
Justin Baldoni’s legal battle with It Ends With Us costar Blake Lively continues with a brand-new explosive lawsuit.
According to the filing obtained by Us Weekly on Thursday, January 16, Baldoni, 40, is accusing Lively, 37, her publicist, Leslie Sloane, and Ryan Reynolds of civil extortion, defamation, false light invasion of privacy and other claims. The actor is seeking damages of $400 million.
Following the lawsuit, Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, shared in a statement to Us, “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.”
The statement continued, “It is clear based on our own all out willingness to provide all complete text messages, emails, video footage and other documentary evidence that was shared between the parties in real time, that this is a battle she will not win and will certainly regret. Blake Lively was either severely misled by her team or intentionally and knowingly misrepresented the truth.”
“Ms. Lively will never again be allowed to continue to exploit actual victims of real harassment solely for her personal reputation gain at the expense of those without power,” the statement read. “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. We know the truth, and now the public does too. Justin and his team have nothing to hide, documents do not lie.”
The “publicists affected by Lively” also released a lengthy statement on Thursday. “It is devastating that we are forced to answer this viciously selfish ongoing litigation littered with documented and provable lies in the midst of the tragedy impacting California where we reside,” they began.
“Five months ago Ms. Lively chose to promote a film about domestic violence in a way that caused instant negative and organic backlash due to her own highly publicized actions,” the statement continued. “Instead of accepting responsibility, she decided to cruelly blame us. This malicious attack on private individuals by Ms. Lively and her team in which they chose to spoon feed The New York Times with doctored, out of context and edited text messages in an effort to paint herself as a victim set off a chain of events that has been harmful beyond measure.”
“To be clear, Ms. Lively and her team initiated this smear campaign in the media for the sole intention of gaining undeserved public sympathy for her own missteps,” the statement read. “Over the last month we have received death threats, abhorrent abuse and vile anti-semitic slurs hurled at us due to her decision to use us as scapegoats for her own choices promoting her film in which she made millions of dollars. With this filing, we lift our own curtain of what happens when the entitled weaponize power, fear and money to destroy, intimidate and bully those who get in their way.”