Justin Baldoni's Lawsuit Against Blake Lively: All The Allegations

The widely-known It Ends With Us drama is now officially a legal matter. On Jan. 16, Justin Baldoni filed a hefty lawsuit against his co-star Blake Lively, as well as her husband Ryan Reynolds and their publicist Leslie Sloane. TMZ was first to report the suit.

The documents make several claims about Lively, Reynolds, and Sloane’s behavior when making their 2024 movie It Ends With Us, and in the aftermath of its Aug. 9 release. Baldoni is suing on the following grounds: civil extortion, defamation, false light invasion of privacy, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, intentional interference with contractual relations, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage. He is asking for $400 million.

In particular, Baldoni (who both starred in the film and directed it) alleges that Lively exerted an untoward amount of creative control when filming It Ends With Us. In his suit, he claims Lively demanded complete control of her character’s wardrobe, and asked to rewrite a scene in the script.

This rewriting incident is where Reynolds (and another “megacelebrity friend” of Lively’s) are brought up in Baldoni’s lawsuit.

Baldoni claims that Lively used her celebrity connections to pressure him into letting her rewrite the rooftop scene where Lively’s character Lily meets her love interest Ryle (Baldoni). Baldoni claims that after he was “hesitant” about the changes Lively made to the scene, she created an environment to coerce the director into going along with her vision.

“Lively summoned Baldoni to her New York penthouse where Baldoni was greeted by Ryan Reynolds, who launched into enthusiastic praise for Lively’s version of the scene,” the lawsuit reads. “Hours later, as the meeting was ending, a famous, and famously close, friend of Reynolds and Lively, walked into the room and similarly began praising Lively’s script. Baldoni understood the subtext: he needed to comply with Lively’s direction for the script. Later, Baldoni felt obliged to text Lively to say that he had liked her pages and hadn’t needed Reynolds and her megacelebrity friend to pressure him. Lively responded that the two were her ‘dragons.’”

Baldoni’s suit comes a little under a month after Lively filed a legal complaint against him, accusing him of sexual harassment and orchestrating a smear campaign against her.