Blake Lively‘s legal team has responded to Justin Baldoni‘s newest, $400 million lawsuit against both Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, calling it a page straight out of an abuser playbook.
What did Blake Lively’s team say?
“This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim Offender,” read a statement from Lively’s lawyers that was given to The Hollywood Reporter.
The statement comes just a few hours after Baldoni filed a new, 179-page lawsuit in New York against Lively and Ryan Reynolds, as well as two publicists. Baldoni’s lawsuit alleged various claims of extortion, defamation, and breach of contract claims centered around the making of It Ends With Us.
Baldoni previously filed a lawsuit against Lively just ahead of the new year and alleges that Lively’s public relations team began pushing an “unverified and self-serving narrative” against Baldoni while using “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context” to paint him in a bad light. The lawsuit sees Baldoni seeking at least $250 million while claiming fraud and breach of contract as well as libel.
“In this vicious smear campaign fully orchestrated by Blake Lively and her team, the New York Times cowered to the wants and whims of two powerful ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites, disregarding journalistic practices and ethics once befitting of the revered publication by using doctored and manipulated texts and intentionally omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative,” Bryan Freedman, a lawyer for Baldoni and his public relations team, said in a statement.
Lively’s complaint alleges that Baldoni created a hostile work environment
The lawsuit stems from a formal complaint that Blake Lively made against Baldoni last month. In it, she states that things got so bad during the filming of It Ends With Us that an all-hands-on-deck meeting was called in response to her claims of a hostile work environment. During the meeting, Lively asked that Baldoni stop showing her nude videos or images of women, that he stop mentioning his pornography addiction to her, that Baldoni stop discussing sexual experiences in front of her, and that he also stop mentioning Lively’s weight.
The complaint also claims that an agreement was made between production company Wayfarer Studios and the cast, in which the promotion of the movie would focus “more on [Lively’s character’s] strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” However, Lively claims that Baldoni would renege on that and instead spoke in interviews about the film’s serious story.
Lively also claimed that Baldoni and his PR manager, Melissa Nathan, discussed ways to start a social media campaign to harm her reputation. The filing by Lively includes 22 pages of texts between Baldoni’s publicist and Nathan, in which they discuss wanting to have Lively “buried.”
