If you’ve been anywhere on the internet recently, you’ve probably heard of the legal battle going on between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. To say the least… It’s messy. In this article, I will be talking about everything from the beginning to current day.
Before reading, please bear in mind this will briefly go over the topic of domestic violence, sexual harassment, alleged sexual assault, and contains other sensitive topics, as well as extremely minor spoilers to both the movie and book of It Ends With Us.
The up and coming teen movie It Ends With Us, is based on the Colleen Hoover novel of the same name. Where Lily Blossom Bloom (Played by Blake Lively) moves to Boston to start a flower. She meets her best friend and her friend has a brother named Ryle (Played by Justin Baldoni). Lily and Ryle hit it off and start dating, and things take a turn for the worse.
The whole situation happened back in August when Blake Lively decided to help promote the movie as the main character. She would start to go on to different interviews to try and garner attention and excitement for the movie. Though her tactics to try and promote it was to say the least, bad. Interview after interview, promotion after promotion she was not saying or doing the right things to show the movie. To be quite blunt this is not a movie for everyone, it is literally a movie depicting domestic violence and the life of someone experiencing it in a partner. This is why Blake’s campaigns were so awfully problematic.
During these interviews Lively would say a lot of controversial things such as saying “Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out and see it.” This quote went completely viral for Lively’s out-of-touch nature towards the movie about abuse. It felt to most people Lively was trying to have a viral moment to positively promote it similarly like the cultural moment Barbie had. And because of how jarring this was to say in a movie about abuse the clip of her saying it went completely viral on social media. Making the already controversial moment 10 times worse. If you saw any clip of her saying that on social media, there were absolutely no comments siding with her.
Yet she still kept doing interviews, which frankly is common. Usually celebrities still do interviews but they watch what they say. This is what Lively probably tried doing. Yet she kept talking. Which created another viral and controversial video of things Blake had said. This was an interview where a reporter asked “So if someone understands the themes of this movie and comes across you in public and they want to really talk to you, what’s the best way for them to be able to talk to you about this?” Instead of having a genuine conversation and giving a good and serious answer, Lively sarcastically responded with “Maybe asking for, like, my address, or my phone number. Or, like, location share?! I could just location-share you and then we could…” With her just laughing and trailing off. Again the public was extremely upset at her sarcastic joke-like responses for such a serious question.
She was quoted in yet another interview saying “The iconic rooftop scene, my husband actually wrote it. Nobody knows that but you know.” This unsurprisingly wasn’t taken well either. The rooftop scene was a scene in the movie where Lily (Blake) is upset about her fathers funeral and is on the rooftop thinking about him when an angry, violent man comes on the roof destroying a chair. That person later being relieved to be Ryle (Justin). This again was very criticized because she was praising a scene that was not to be painted in a good light.
The public in all wasn’t very happy with Blake. It seemed like the whole internet all agreed that she was out of line with all of her unserious comments about anything related to the movie or domestic abuse. And it got to the point where the cast and workers from the production of It Ends With Us. And who else would be the most susceptible to hearing about it, but none other than Justin Baldoni himself. In contrast to Lively, Baldoni was very respectful in his interviews for answering seriously and would talk about his understanding of the abuse. In basic terms he was getting a LOT of good rep. He was heavily praised for his raw and rich answers and truly understanding the book as more of something that showed people the importance of knowing and understanding how bad domestic abuse is.
So what happened when he heard about all the bad press Lively was getting? Simple. He hired a crisis PR team to hopefully calm down all the bad rep that Blake Lively gathered. But there was a problem with this PR team. It painted Blake in a bad light.
During the time this PR team made a past video of Lively during an interview started to circle around the internet. The interview took place while Lively was pregnant. It was an interview of both Blake Lively and her Co-Star Parker Posy for their movie Cafe Society. The interviewer, Kjersti Flass, had congratulated Lively happily about her, “Little Bump”. In retaliation to this comment Blake sarcastically responded to Kjersti and telling her, “Congratulations on your little bump,” which just ended up being awkward. What’s even worse is that Kjersti was obviously not pregnant. To add more flame to the fire, Kjersti relieved that Blake had made her feel “almost paralyzed,” as she had been struggling with infertility (betches). So making a comment about her being pregnant made the already bad comment ten times worse.
This PR wasn’t all puppies and rainbows though. A lot of people online had realised that this PR team was the same PR that Johnny Depp had used during the Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp trails. And I think we all know the public on Amber Heard at that time. But this audience wasn’t focused on the contents of the same PR team or the fact that these two had both used the same one they were focused on mainly the interviewer believe it or not. The interview, Kjersti, she had ironically interviewed both Depp and Lively. Online theorists started to analyze both interviews that Kjersti was in. And realized a common theme for both interviews.
Both of the interviews that were taken were frankly old. Depp’s interview was taken for the movie Transcending which was back in 2014, and was posted in 2014. But mysteriously started to gain attention from the general public around April of 2022. And this was around the exact same time the infamous Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp trails started. For Blake Lively’s interview again it was for the movie Cafe Society. This movie came out in 2016 and the interview was presumably around that time. Yet unlike Depp’s interview this video was posted only once online and this time was when Baldoni hired the team right around the Blake Lively hate train was going on. But both interviews had one thing in common, they were old videos painting a person in the light they were meant to be painted in. This left a lot of people with a weird taste in their mouth about this PR team and Baldoni’s ethics for hiring them. It also made a lot of people rethink the liability of what was shown on social media about Blake Lively and what was even going on.
But for most people they still didn’t like Lively because either way she still had rude and unserious answers to important things and at this point the Blake Lively hate train was only growing. But like anything in life and especially with legal cases nothing is ever truly “2D,” there is always more to what is going on and this is even more the case for Hollywood of all places.
To say the least Blake was not just going to take this PR team and public opinion so she decided to sue him. I can’t say the public wasn’t shocked by this as frankly it was expected but what was shocking to the public was what she had alleged her Co-Star and Director Justin Baldoni of doing. Blake had started to talk to the public about how allegedly “Resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her, and others, from speaking out.” She had started to place heavy claims on Baldoni for his “creepy behavior on set” and practically painted both Baldoni and Jamey Health, The CEO of Wayfarer Studio and producer of It Ends With Us.
Lively publicly accused Baldoni of: Improvised kissing when filming, unwanted constant pornography addiction, comments about her breastfeeding, uncomfortable and unwanted encounters outside of filming, sexual texts, comments about her weight, trying to add explicit sexual scenes that weren’t needed, and harassment to other women in their workspace.
One of the main points she would make and probably the most popular claim was how Baldoni “Body shamed,” thereby asking for her weight, discussing her weight without her and instead while a private trainer. Lively talked about how insulting it was to her as she just gave birth and took him asking for her weight as basically asking her ‘Are you too fat and heavy where I can’t hold you up.’ This was probably the only claim that had the internet still divided unlike all the other claims she made. This was also the first one Baldoni responded to. Baldoni explains how he has and has had a serious back injury where he cannot lift things in a certain weight range without proper training before it becomes a danger to injure his back more. And how he didn’t mean it as an insult and more of a question so that if Lively wasn’t in the weight range he could lift he would be able to train to lift her. Yet even though most of the public was on Baldoni’s side still she didn’t hold back on what else she’d talk about.
Though that wasn’t the only one she talked about in depth. To go into further depth of all of these claims she provided instants to win public opinion. She had mentioned times where Baldoni forcefully tried to shove his tongue down her throat, as well as kissing her neck and collarbone during a dance scene. Would tell the public about Baldonis and Healths alleged Porn Addiction where they would often talk about it and bring up how much they watch it. Also talking about uncomfortable conversations from Baldoni outside of filming and an event that Lively explained as Baldoni coming into her private trailer. It was then that she alleged that he had made her extremely uncomfortable, and she even ended up crying.
It’s safe to say that after she had told the public about all of these alleged events people started to turn their opinion of Baldoni. Countless youtubers, posts, tweets, literally almost everyone started to turn on Baldoni calling him a creep, a weirdo, and in general a complete pervert. Baldoni was not happy at all with these claims and started to push his own claims on Lively. He was mostly silent to the public on allegations against Lively and instead just denied most of the claims. So Baldoni’s social media page was getting stalked and over analyzed by people. One of the things they found was that during the New York premier of the movie, Justin and his family were sent to the basement to watch the movie completely separate from where everyone was watching the movie. Garnering a lot of fans backlash, going as far to say “because [Blake Lively is] a bigger name, she obviously wanted to almost hijack the movie,” (Jumpers Jump). Even through the immense hate directed at him, it painted Blake in a light that made it seem like she wanted the attention on her. The problem with this document is that a lot of the text messages and emails sent in Lively’s legal document have been accused of being fabricated, which would make the claims which would make Lively less credible. Baldoni had at least released unedited images of the conversations.
Justin ended up picking a common decision: to counter-sue not only Blake Lively, but also her husband Ryan Reynolds for civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy. He is also suing the New York Times for libel. Not much information about the claims was released, unlike Lively, who quickly broadcast the claims. That changed, however, after they both published their full legal documents on their side of the legal matter- each document being around 90 pages. (If you’re interested in a further breakdown, there is a full article on the whspurplepress.org website!) To make a long story short, Blake’s document was talking about things that were no longer going to be allowed in the relationship between Justin Baldoni, Lively herself, and Baldoni’s workplace. This included text messages, instadents, and conversations between Justin and a few other coworkers. While Justin’s document disproved a lot of the conversations shedding his perspective on everything. To say the least… it was messy. However, after these documents were published, people started to side with Baldoni again. The public opinion shifted yet again from “we hate this perverted creep!” to “he was never the bad guy in the first place.”
Baldoni’s public image again changed perspectives on Lively and now Ryan Reynolds as well. Surprisingly enough Reynolds is starting to get heavily criticized for changing a lot of the movie’s script and scenes. As well as allegedly being extremely rude to Baldoni even when he was being polite and willing to change a lot for Reynolds. With Lively getting a monumental amount of hate for falsifying and fabricating text messages she used as evidence against Baldoni
As of writing this article, Baldoni just put out a website purely dedicated to showing all of the unedited evidence, involving Blake, Ryan, and now Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is not sued by Baldoni, at least right now. The website had provided 168 pages starting all the way on January 1st, 2019 when he first emailed Collen about the book, all the way to January 25th, 2025. It contained all 6 years of documentation of the events.
Even talking about the rooftop scene Reynolds directed. Where he texted Lively basically saying he liked the scene and wished Taylor and Reynolds weren’t there claiming it would be more fun without them. Ending with Baldoni’s attorneys claiming he “felt obligated to text Livey to say that he had liked her pages and hadn’t needed Reynolds and her megacelebrity friend to pressure him.” As of right now there is a legal meeting potentially set for February 3 2025. I’m currently in the process of making an article for Baldoni’s new Website and general information about what is in it and what it shows.
But there’s still one question. After everything, after the public bounce of who they support in this situation who do most support currently? To answer this question, I interviewed some of the people of Wauconda High School to get an Idea of public opinions.
Sophomore Megan Burns stated that “I think Blake Lively is good… I don’t know about Justin Baldoni. I don’t know right now, it’s all really early. I want to wait a little.” She publicly supports Lively, thinking she’s a good person. And a teacher who wishes to remain anonymous shared that they “ would hesitate to question someone, specifically, a woman’s claims when it’s something this serious. [This] subject is already difficult for someone to talk about and to come forward with it, there needs to be a good reason to talk publicly about it.”
Senior Briseida Mendoza has her own idea of what she thinks happened. “I think it’s Blake Lively caught cheating gone wrong. Ryan Renold’s is a toxic man who wanted Blake Lively to stay home and watch the kids, because that is what she was like for a long time before signing for the movie. While on the other hand Justin Baldoni absolutely loves his wife. So while they were filming those close scenes with the characters I feel like she caught feelings [for Justin]. But I don’t think Justin did and during the intimate scenes and [Justin] would be like my wife, my wife, my wife, your husband Ryan. And would constantly bring that up. On the other hand they were texting at night which is a red flag on both parties. And because of that I feel as though Ryan is upset like ‘no she’s like catching feelings for him,’ just like how during the filming of Green Lantern Ryan and Lively both cheated on their partners. So he starts coming to the set. And with that he’s making all these small jabs at Justin. With Blake to cover herself instead she tells him something like ‘No he’s being inappropriate to me I would never cheat on you. So he takes it head on and literally so he is constantly pushing for this lawsuit. But I don’t think he cares if he wins the lawsuit or not because either way it will damage [Lively’s] image and nobody will want to work with her,” she continues stating “If they are getting devorided it is not right away though. Because [Lively and Ryan] are very image people. So without Ryan, Blake doesn’t have anything anymore. Yes Ryan may be a terrible person but he has his own production company, and he has deadpool going on right now. So obviously I’m on Justins side. I don’t support Blake simply because I don’t believe her. But there are clips where she looks super giddy over him.” Shedding a huge light on some of what the missing pieces of the puzzle could be.
