A new development in the ongoing legal saga between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has occurred, with Baldoni’s legal team releasing never-before-seen footage from It Ends With Us that they claim disputes Lively’s claims of sexual harassment.
What happens in the It Ends With Us video?
The new video comes courtesy of Baldoni’s legal team, which released a selection of behind-the-scenes footage from the filming of It Ends With Us. In the footage, Baldoni and Lively can be seen dancing together for one of the film’s scenes.
In the video, the pair can also be heard talking, jokingly talking about whether or not they talk when dancing with their significant others, and also joking about how big Baldoni’s nose is.
Check out the video below:
The reason the video is important, according to Baldoni’s legal team, is due to Blake Lively’s original complaints of sexual harassment against the filmmaker. According to Lively’s complaint, during a scene in which the pair are slow dancing, Baldoni stopped acting in character and began commenting on Lively’s looks and smell in a way that was not in character and had nothing to do with the movie.
According to Baldoni’s legal team, the video debunks those claims, and allegedly refutes some of Lively’s claims. It’s unclear exactly how much of the video was released, however, and whether or not any more footage was captured that might show Baldoni doing what Lively claimed.
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.”
