With just two weeks to go before what Megyn believed would have been the “[civil] trial of the century,” Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni reached a shocking agreement to avoid going before a jury.
According to NBC News, the pair effectively ended their ugly 18-month legal dispute after a court-ordered settlement conference last week. The terms of the settlement were not made public, but the agreement was announced Monday.
The Legal Battle
The court battle between the It Ends With Us co-stars began in December 2024 when the actress alleged Baldoni, who directed and starred in the project, sexually harassed her and later orchestrated a retaliatory smear campaign to destroy her reputation. Baldoni denied the allegations and countered with his own lawsuit against Lively that was later dismissed.
After failed attempts at mediation and a very messy discovery process that aired a lot of dirty laundry, what remained to be settled was a very slimmed down version of the Gossip Girl star’s complaint. U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman dismissed 10 of Lively’s 13 claims – including sexual harassment, defamation, and conspiracy – last month, meaning only her accusations of breach of contract and retaliation would move forward to trial.
Court filings revealed the actress was seeking significant financial damages – to the tune of nearly $300 million – for that narrowed down complaint. But many wondered if it going to prove to be worthwhile.
That was the question many were asking as a lengthy article from Vulture revealed more embarrassing info for both parties and wondered if the “feud between Lively and Baldoni… could torch both their careers.”
On Monday’s show – before the settlement was reached – Megyn was joined by Emily Jashinsky, host of MK Media’s After Party, to discuss the latest revelations and what the trial would have boiled down to.
The Vulture Article
While writer Reeves Wiedeman mostly rehashed what had already been revealed over the course of this yearslong legal saga, Jashinsky said the Vulture piece “puts the meat on the bones… of the broad contours that [Megyn] and a lot of others saw immediately when that Christmas [2024] New York Times article dropped… which was like the first big article of the saga.”
As Jashinsky explained, that controversial article “was trying to point the finger at Baldoni in almost a #MeToo way” and “you could see in that story how something was being built and constructed, even at that time when we had so little context about what was happening behind the scenes.”
Wiedeman’s article, she said, filled in many of those gaps. “What you get in this vulture piece is the step by step TikTok of how Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds roped in a network of very powerful celebrities and their reputations to try to take down Baldoni and save Blake Lively’s career,” Jashinsky noted.
Over the last 18 months, a steady stream of damning text messages, voice notes, and emails between Lively and Baldoni, between Lively and her famous friends (hi, Taylor Swift), and between Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, and his Hollywood pals have become public. And none of them made anyone look good.
“They brought in Matt Damon and Matt Damon’s wife. Obviously, people have known about the Taylor Swift of it all for a long time,” Jashinsky said. “There’s message after message where they are invoking politics, feminism, being a good ‘ally’… Their text messages… are deeply embarrassing because they are groveling to their celebrity friends… You have secondhand embarrassment for these celebrities who are groveling over more powerful celebrities and trying to bring them to their side.”
In the case of the Damons, Vulture dove into how they were among the A-listers who got roped into the drama when Lively and Reynolds were trying to garner support for her cut of the film. In a note inviting the couple to a screening in New York, Reynolds called Baldoni “a malignantly vein, sociopathic FAUXminist with almost no sense of boundaries or shame.”
But Megyn believes it is actually the actress herself who lacks the feminist bona fides. “She is the fake feminist. She wraps herself in this cloak of female empowerment, but she instead uses it as a cudgel against perfectly legitimate business partners who happen to be male because she knows it’s a weapon. It’s a tool in her arsenal,” she noted. “So, those are the dueling narratives. It is almost like, who is going to win the narrative? Whoever wins the narrative, wins the trial.”
The Crux of the Matter
To that point, Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman, who has also represented Megyn, was the first guest on the new MK True Crime show In The Well with Mark Geragos and Matt Murphy where he previewed what the defense strategy may have been at trial (you can watch the whole interview here).
Lively and her team had been fighting to exclude evidence and testimony that made her look like a “mean girl” and “bully” even though they have alleged Baldoni’s team led a retaliatory smear campaign against her. Freedman’s comments to Geragos and Murphy led Megyn to believe Baldoni’s team may be preparing to concede some of that point.
“Are you defaming someone when… what’s showing up are videos that existed on the internet? You’re not creating new content… You’re actually just being blamed for content that was older content that is reappearing in the internet and reappearing in significant ways,” Freedman wondered. “I mean, I think we can all agree that during the premiere of a movie, the star of a movie, there’s a public publicity campaign. And, you know, that was another issue in why there was some organic hate. But, ultimately, you know, I think… when you’re basically doing nothing but showing what already exists, whether something like that can be actionable.”
That, in Megyn’s view, may have proven to be the crux of the trial. “If you’re showing something that exists, can it be actionable? I thought he might have been intimating that it’s possible those negative videos about Blake were recirculated by some on Baldoni’s team. I could be wrong, but I thought I gleaned that from his answer,” she said. “That is definitely [Lively’s] theory, which is that Baldoni people pushed it. There was not a lot of proof of that.”
“There was a lot of proof that a bad PR wave overcame her around the time of this movie, but not that Justin Baldoni caused it, she added. “But there may be a question of whether, if the PR people working for Justin helped circulate those bad videos, is that worth $[300] million as she’s now claiming?”
Jashinsky said she has found that piece of the case to be the most interesting. “One of the absolute most fascinating things about this story is the chicken or the egg component,” she said. “Were people organically already starting to question Blake Lively amid this kind of vibe shift that was happening at the time over like millennial feminism and how sort of weird it was and how outmoded it seemed to Gen-Z… or was it planted? Or [had it] percolated organically and then it became part of this business strategy in Baldoni’s camp to get his cut of the movie to win at the end of the day?”
“The level… of how small celebrities can be but then also… [have] this strategic grand plan to make more money… and protect their reputations – it is really amazing to see that in action when you go behind the scenes,” she concluded.
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Jashinsky by tuning in to episode 1,309 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.