Blake Lively’s lawsuit against her It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni was never expected to end well for her because of the damage it did to her reputation. As it turned out, it didn’t end well for her legally either – but her attorneys don’t want to admit that.
Despite the actress settling for nothing after an 18-month legal saga that aired a lot of dirty laundry and reportedly cost her a famous friend or two, her legal team is now trying to spin last week’s shock settlement as some kind of win.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by In The Well co-hosts Mark Geragos and Matt Murphy to discuss the sorry spin and why Lively’s case was doomed to fail from the start.
The Legal Drama
Last Monday, Lively and Baldoni announced they had reached an agreement to end their legal battle and avoid trial. The drama started back in December 2024 when the actress alleged Baldoni sexually harassed her on the set of It Ends With Us and then 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 months of unflattering discovery, Lively was dealt a major blow to her case when U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman dismissed 10 of her 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 reports indicate she settled for nothing and was forced to cosign a highly sanitized joint statement with Baldoni.
The Settlement Spin
Rather than accept the loss and move on, Lively and her team are now trying to spin the stunning conclusion of the case as some sort of victory. A California statute allows the actress to recoup legal fees related to the defamation lawsuit Baldoni filed against her. That is a fact that has been known since his case was dismissed last summer, but that is not how Lively’s lawyer is portraying it.
Michael Gottlieb, the lead attorney representing Lively, described the outcome as a “resounding victory” for his client during an interview with Matt Belloni on The Town podcast. He claimed Lively is “ecstatic with the settlement” because “it gives her the power and the opportunity to pursue what we believe is her most potent and powerful claim in a way that is efficient, in a way that is final, in a way the defendants have no appeal rights over, and in a way that cuts off most of the noise that would be surrounding this case.”
“[It] lets us get straight to the core issue of how the defendants retaliated against her, specifically the retaliatory lawsuit that they filed that called her a liar, that branded her a liar,” he added. “And it’s not one of these statutes where there’s discretion for awarding the damages once the conditions are met. We believe the conditions have essentially already been met. And what’s important about that, Matt, is that they filed a $400 million defamation lawsuit against our client, against Ryan Reynolds, against Leslie Sloan. They claimed that all of this was a lie, was all made up, and they were going to prove it in court. They lost that.”
Megyn wasn’t buying it. “To say that this was the best claim that they had all along, for attorneys fees on the thrown out defamation cross claim that? What a revisionist history,” she said.
Murphy agreed. “The funny thing for me is watching [Geragos’] face as we’re both listening to that clip because… we’re both literally laughing out loud,” he said. “Albert Einstein had a great quote that applies to the practice of law. He said, ‘If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’ And I can add, ‘or it’s just pure spin.’ And that’s what we’re watching here.”
The Moral Spin
But Gottlieb’s reframing, which has been widely panned in the wake of the interview, didn’t end there. When Belloni asked what kind of money Lively is hoping to collect, he offered this:
“I want to step back from that because this lawsuit has never been principally about money for our client. It has been about accountability. It has been about shining a light on this underground smear machine that retaliated against her for raising claims of sexual harassment, retaliation and has harmed so many other people. And what you’ve seen since Blake stood up and brought this lawsuit is evidence coming out in our case that has led to information being used now in other litigations… This underground smear machine has been exposed, and people are now on notice that if they see, you know, if you see a MattBelloniSucks.net website pop up, you’re going to maybe have an idea of who might have put that website up.”
So, Lively, you see, is actually the hero of this story. “Really, we should be grateful to Blake. [That’s] what he’s saying,” Megyn quipped. “No one is going to get smeared anymore on the internet because of her… This is a fantasy. Harassment on the internet was a thing before this case, and it will be a thing after this case.”
“You can’t make up facts about somebody that are false. But if we think she’s a terrible, spoiled, mean girl bully, we’re free to say that,” Megyn said. “And we do think that… based on the interview with [Kjersti Flaa] among many other clips and behaviors by Blake Lively. For this guy to be pretending that she was really just an Avenger for others. Meanwhile, you and I both know it was her tissue paper-thin skin that led her to bring this lawsuit because she was like, ‘There’s no way anyone could possibly just hate me organically. Justin had to have made it happen.'”
Possible Motive
Gottlieb went on to claim that the disastrous end to this case should not discourage others from filing these types of lawsuits because what Lively did is show how to fight back when “people assassinate your character and reputation with untraceable digital smear campaigns.”
Geragos had a theory as to why Gottlieb chose to speak to Belloni and present this black eye as some kind of win. “When Blake Lively’s case was gutted by Judge Liman, he issued an order and, if you read that order, he was unflinching in his criticism of her lawyers to the point where it explains why, if what is being reported is true, as soon as they saw that order, as soon as her case was gutted, she had a monstrous legal malpractice action against her lawyers,” he explained. “How did her lawyers solve that problem? They immediately beg Baldoni’s team to go into private mediation.”
According to Geragos, Baldoni and Lively worked with a California-based mediator and that is relevant to where the case stands now. “There’s a Supreme Court case in California that says… if you go through private mediation, you can’t sue your lawyer for legal malpractice,” he noted. “So what this was was a very sophisticated legal strategy to insulate the big firm from getting sued for the tens of millions of dollars for what could have been argued was, if you read Judge Liman’s order, missteps by her lawyers. That’s just the cynic in me explaining why all this happened.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Geragos and Murphy by tuning in to episode 1,315 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.