Justin Baldoni reportedly attends Blake Lively's deposition amid legal feud
Justin Baldoni was reportedly present at Blake Lively's deposition amid their legal feud.
Citing sources, TMZ reported that Baldoni was in the room while his It Ends With Us co-star was being questioned at her lawyer's office in New York City on July 31.
Only present at the affair are Lively, Baldoni, their attorneys, a court reporter, and a videographer.
Judge Lewis J. Liman had earlier granted a protective order for Lively that allowed her to dictate where the deposition was held, and required Baldoni and the Wayfarer Studios to notify Lively's team about who would attend.
The deposition focused on Lively's sexual harassment complaint against Baldoni, which allegedly happened on the It Ends With Us set.
Previously, Baldoni said exploring other legal options after the dismissal of his $400 million countersuit against Lively.
Liman dismissed some cases filed by Baldoni, which involved a $400 million (P22 billion) countersuit accusing Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and their publicist of extortion and defamation, and a $250 million (P13.9 billion) libel lawsuit against The New York Times over its Dec. 21, 2024 article titled 'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.
According to the judge, Lively's statements to a California state agency regarding Baldoni's alleged harassment during filming were protected and could not be used as the basis for Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios' defamation claim.
At the time, Baldoni's legal counsel, Bryan Freedman, said the dismissal "was not fair," and that the actor wants "to be vindicated."
"I think that he's a person who wants to be vindicated, and that's all that he cares about," Freedman told TMZ in June. "He knows who he is. He knows what he's done. He knows what he hasn't done. And he wants the truth to come out, and he wants to do that in the appropriate way. He's waiting for his day in court, where he can speak out to tell the truth."
Lively filed a sexual harassment complaint against Baldoni and Jamey Heath of Wayfarer Studios, the producer of It Ends with Us, accusing them of running a smear campaign against her.
In her complaint, Lively accused Baldoni and Heath of telling her about their past sexual relationships and "previous porn addiction." Heath also allegedly showed Lively a video of his wife naked and giving birth. Baldoni and Heath likewise supposedly entered Lively's makeup trailer without permission, "including when she was breastfeeding her infant child." Lively also recalled Baldoni claiming he could communicate with the dead, including her father, Ernie Lively. She found it "off-putting and violative."
The New York Times later published a report titled 'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine, which used excerpts from alleged text messages and emails that Lively obtained through a subpoena and detailed the work of crisis management firm TAG PR for Baldoni, including allegedly planting negative stories in the media.
In response, Baldoni's camp has called the accusations in the report "categorically false." They later released a series of video takes during the production of It Ends with Us in an attempt to debunk Lively's sexual harassment allegations, which prompted Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, to request a gag order.
On Feb. 3, Baldoni launched a website containing two documents: his $400 million 224-page amended complaint against Lively and Reynolds and a 168-page "timeline of relevant events," which included a compilation of screenshots as an additional exhibit to his amended complaint. It came two days before their first court hearing.
The trial for the Lively v. Wayfarer Studios et al. case is slated for March 2026.
