Four months after the release of It Ends With Us, Blake Lively is set to sue Justin Baldoni, her costar and director, for sexual harassment, asserting that he also lead a coordinated effort to destroy her professional reputation during the film’s rollout. In a legal complaint filed on Friday, Lively notes that Baldoni enlisted the services of Melissa Nathan—a crisis PR specialist whose previous clients include one Johnny Depp—to help him do it.
It’s been a matter of public record for a while now that Depp manipulated the truth and weaponized the public’s distaste for complicated, independent women in order to win his 2022 defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard, painting her as abusive and unstable. The media war that Baldoni waged against Lively was similar, making the actor seem difficult and out-of-touch in part by underscoring that she and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had commissioned their own edit of It Ends With Us. (It was this, rather that Baldoni’s cut, that was ultimately released.) In text messages subpoenaed by Lively’s lawyers, Baldoni also discusses the various publicity and social media strategies that could be used warp the narrative around the film in his favor.
Yet Lively’s complaint details the toxic work environment that Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath created while they were shooting. In early 2024, upon returning to the set of It Ends With Us following the guild strikes of the year before, Lively called a meeting with Baldoni and several of the film’s producers, asking, according to documents, that Baldoni and Heath stop “showing nude videos or images of women, including producer’s wife, to BL and/or her employees,” among other inappropriate behaviors, such as improvising kissing scenes. (She also requested the presence of an intimacy coordinator on set.) Elsewhere, the documents allege that “Throughout filming, Mr. Baldoni and Mr. Heath invaded Ms. Lively’s privacy by entering her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding her infant child.” Baldoni apparently engaged Nathan’s help after he realized that Reynolds had blocked him on Instagram, hoping to get ahead of Lively’s complaints on set becoming public.
Baldoni’s legal team has called the suit “shameful” and full of “categorically false accusations,” but at this point, I think we all owe Blake Lively an apology. As Nathan put it in one text message, “It’s actually sad because it just shows you [how] people really want to hate on women.” No one deserves to put up with that—an A-list Hollywood actor or otherwise.
