For the first time since the 18-month legal saga between It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni began, Baldoni has spoken out.
The director and actor addressed his court battle with Lively for the first time last week in a nearly five-minute video with his wife, Emily Baldoni, posted to his Instagram account. The Baldonis said they felt now was “the moment” to thank fans for their support and share how they are “healing” from what Justin called a “traumatic” experience.
The video came days before the actor’s legal team submitted a filing characterizing Lively’s demand for some $8 million in legal fees and other expenses “excessive” and requesting a judge reduce it.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by celebrity reporter Rob Shuter, author of It Started With a Whisper, to discuss the Baldonis’ decision to speak out and why Lively continues to lose the PR war.
The Legal Fee Battle
In case you are just getting up to speed on the Lively-Baldoni drama, the former Gossip Girl star filed a lawsuit in December of 2024 accusing Baldoni and his production company of sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us and orchestrating an online smear campaign against her after she spoke up. U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman ultimately dismissed 10 of her 13 allegations, including the sexual harassment claims.
Baldoni, for his part, denied all the allegations and countered with a $400 million defamation claim against Lively that was dismissed last summer. In September, Lively filed a motion for attorneys fees, triple damages, and punitive damages under a 2023 California law meant to protect sexual abuse accusers from retaliatory defamation suits.
That motion was awaiting ruling when Lively and Baldoni reached a last-minute settlement in May on what remained of her case against him. She earned nothing for her claims in the settlement, but, as part of the agreement, both sides said they would abide by Judge Liman’s ruling on the fee motion and not appeal.
Judge Liman gave Lively a partial victory last month when he ruled she was entitled to recover her defense costs related to the countersuit that was only active for less than five months. In a late June court filing, Lively’s legal team claimed the sum totals $8 million to cover nearly $7.5 million in attorney’s fees from two law firms that represented her and some $500,000 in other expenses.
“She is out there now, having clearly lost this ridiculous attempt at PR rehab, which was her lawsuit, trying to turn her loss into a win by trying to get Justin Baldoni to pay her,” Megyn said. “She filed 13 claims, 10 of her claims were thrown out… and she didn’t have to pay his legal fees for any one of them. He filed one, she got it thrown out, and he’s got to pay all of her legal fees for this one because of this wacky California law having to do with sexual harassment victims, of which she is not one. That claim was thrown out too.”
Baldoni’s legal team reacted to Lively’s request earlier this week, writing in a filing that “the most cursory review of Lively’s submission shows multiple lawyers at the same hearings, numerous charges for lawyers conferencing, conferring or strategizing with one another, and to put it mildly, extremely excessive research and online investigation.”
His lawyers noted that The New York Times previously requested just $181,622.70 in attorneys’ fees in a “motion to dismiss precisely the same defamation claim.” Baldoni sued the publication for $250 million on New Year’s Eve 2024 after it published an article detailing Lively’s claims against him. It was later dismissed.
It remains to be seen how much Judge Liman will award Lively, but Shuter said it will do little to repair her reputation. “Basically, he won, and she’s really, really angry. So, what is she going to do? She’s going to kick him one last time somewhere where it really hurts – in his pocketbook. He does not have the money she and Ryan [Reynolds] has, and so she she just wants to punish him,” he said.
“But in the process, I think she’s going to end up punishing herself again, which has been the ongoing theme of the last couple of… years,” Shuter added. “Every time she tries to hurt him, she ends up really, really hurting herself.”
The Baldonis Speak Out
Speaking of losses, Shuter believes Lively and Reynolds have once again lost the PR battle in the wake of the Baldonis dropping their direct-to-camera response to the saga.
“My sources tell me the one that’s really angry is her husband Ryan, who thinks of himself as a PR/marketing genius, and the fact he was arguably beaten to the punch here. They say in PR, whoever tells their side first is often the one that wins, and so now they’re going to be playing catch up,” Shuter explained. “I’m pretty sure at some point they will respond… Ryan’s writing a script as we speak, and it will be in the teleprompter, and it will be the opposite video to what we just saw.”
What we saw was Justin and Emily sitting on what looked like a front porch with little to no hair and makeup and speaking off the cuff to their followers for nearly five minutes. Watch:
“We have not spoken publicly for the better part of the last two years and it’s not because we haven’t had anything to say, because Lord knows we have, but it just felt like every time we went to make a video like this, we wanted to speak, something was telling us not to. It just didn’t feel like the right time and we were talking about it and feeling into it and praying about it,” Justin began.
While Emily expressed “immense gratitude for so many things and so many people and so many things that have happened to us,” she made it clear she and her family were the victims of “injustice” and said they have “had to wrestle with so many things… like, how could something like this even happen? Let alone disguised as a fight for women.”
Shuter is a former celebrity publicist, and he what made the Baldonis’ video so effective is how authentic it seemed. “That’s the way to do it… You sit there. You tell the truth. You’re not over lit. You’re not overly made up… They’re talking directly to the camera, and they’re saying really beautiful things,” he explained.
“If I was Blake Lively, I’d be really worried because that’s just the beginning,” Shuter continued. “Baldoni and his wife have acted, I think, with such grace. That video is just the beginning. I hope they keep doing it. I think it was really smart that they didn’t sit down and do an interview. I don’t think they want questions at the moment. They just want to say it the way they want to say. It got picked up by every every media outlet in the world… That’s the way that you do one of… these videos.”
Megyn agreed. “They handled it beautifully. They came across as very classy,” she concluded. “And I think it’s very interesting and effective to have Emily quietly and expertly slide in the dagger with the sort of aside of ‘disguised as a fight for women.'”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Shuter by tuning in to episode 1,359 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.