Blake Lively’s very slimmed down federal case against her It Ends With Us director and co-star Justin Baldoni is weeks away from going before a New York City jury, and reports indicate the actress is concerned about how she will be portrayed at trial.
The Daily Mail exclusively reported that Lively is objecting to certain articles and witnesses Baldoni’s defense team is planning to submit and call because they make her look like a “bully” and a “mean girl.”
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Britt Mayer, host of The Britt Mayer Show, and Will Witt, author of Do Not Comply, to discuss the latest in the case as it barrels towards what is sure to be a very high-profile and reputation-damaging trial.
Potential Witness
The Daily Mail viewed court records in which Lively’s legal team objected to Baldoni calling reporter Kjersti Flaa as a witness to recount what happened during a now-infamous 2016 interview. The Norwegian journalist sat down with the actress and her Café Society co-star Parker Posey to discuss their roles in the Woody Allen flick, but the interview was derailed after Flaa made an innocent comment about Lively’s baby bump.
In one of many humiliating exchanges, Flaa congratulated Lively on her pregnancy which led the actress to sarcastically congratulate Flaa even though she wasn’t pregnant. There was another awkward back-and-forth about the costuming in the film, where Lively and Posey seemingly pretended Flaa was no longer in the room.
The absurdly disrespectful and cringe-worthy footage resurfaced in 2024 when Lively was under fire for her behavior promoting It Ends With Us and rumors swirled about issues on set with Baldoni. Flaa, for her part, has called the incident “traumatizing” and said it made her consider quitting journalism altogether.
In the court filing referenced by the Mail, Lively’s lawyers expressed concern that “Ms. Flaa’s testimony ‘about her interview with Ms Lively’ will inevitably echo her numerous public statements describing Ms. Lively as ‘rude’ and exuding ‘mean girl energy.'”
According to the outlet, Lively’s team argued the testimony will unfairly advance the “mean girl” narrative, which, they said, is “wholly irrelevant” to the case. “Whatever marginal relevance her testimony might conceivably have is substantially outweighed by the significant danger of undue prejudice to Ms.Lively by Ms. Flaa coming into court to paint her as a ‘bully’ and a ‘mean girl,'” the attorneys claimed.
In The Daily Mail’s telling, Lively’s team is “begging” Judge Lewis J. Liman of Federal District Court in Manhattan – who dealt a serious blow to their case earlier this month when he tossed out Lively’s sexual harassment claims against Baldoni because they failed to meet key legal requirements – to bar this and other potentially damaging info from the jury.
Mayer said Lively should hope the jury doesn’t get to see the tape or hear from Flaa because it is not going to help her cause. “I think the jury is going to react exactly how we all did. It makes you feel really, really uncomfortable and it paints Blake in such a mean girl light,” she said. “Even just seeing her facial expressions, it makes you wonder what she is capable of and how far she will go to secure the next level of whatever it is she is trying to gain.”
Likely Outcome
While Witt admitted he was not familiar with the case, he questioned whether this trial will actually have any real impact on the actress. “There’s only really two ways to get canceled in Hollywood, and that’s either your movies stop making money, or you don’t align with the leftist principles,” he posited. “I feel it’s very sad that Blake Lively is going to be completely fine after this… She’s going to continue to get cast in films… and these are just the kind of things that the American people deal with as long as [the actors] have the right opinions and they keep making money.”
But Mayer wasn’t so sure. “We know that Hollywood is left… but I think she way overplayed her hand and I don’t think women are going to be showing up to see her movies anymore,” she predicted. “I think it signals a larger fallout where I just don’t think people are going to show up and watch her in a romance film and be thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I could be her,’ which is really the play for women’s emotions. I think she overplayed it, and I personally think she is done.”
Megyn agreed and likened it to another high-profile case involving Hollywood stars. “I agree,” she concluded. “I think she is in an Amber Heard situation at the end of this trial, where she’s got nothing.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Mayer and Witt by tuning in to episode 1,297 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.