Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s public legal battle is taking yet another turn, with Lively’s team calling out Baldoni for being disrespectful to other victims mentioned.
According to a recent report from Deadline, Lively’s team is looking to limit the publicity of the case, requesting a protective order on some of the details of the case as it relates to other women mentioned in the lawsuit. Although the women intend to be witnesses in the trial, Lively’s side wants to limit who can look at the information and keep it to lawyers only.
In a response to the matter, lawyer Mitchell Schuster tried to downplay the need for any such protections, calling out Lively’s team for publicizing things even more.
“Given how actively the Lively Parties have publicized and litigated Ms. Lively’s claims in the media, we are surprised to now learn how vehemently she wants to prevent the public from accessing material and relevant evidence,” wrote Schuster in a letter to Judge Liman.
In response to Schuster’s letter, Lively’s team, led by attorney Michael Gottlieb, argued that Baldoni’s camp has been far more hurtful to their side through the use of social media.
“Leaving aside the callous disregard and disrespect for a woman advocating for the most basic workplace protections against sexual harassment, the Wayfarer Parties’ position that a woman who speaks up against sexual harassment has somehow waived any and all privacy interests shows the futility of future conferral,” Gottlieb noted.
Lively’s initial complaint alleges that Baldoni created a hostile work environment
All of this stems from a formal complaint that Lively made against Baldoni in December. 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.”
