Blake Lively filed a motion Monday to hit her “It Ends With Us” co-star and director Justin Baldoni and his team with sanctions after their letter last week claiming that her team tried extorting Taylor Swift in exchange for her public support.
In Lively’s 30-page motion, which was filed Monday in New York’s Southern District Court, representatives for the actress state claims from Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman have “no reasonable basis in law and clearly were brought for an improper purpose” and that the claims were filed as an “obvious” vehicle “to seed harassing media narratives against Ms. Lively.”
“These public attacks, combined with the Rule 11 Plaintiffs filing numerous claims against Ms. Lively without any basis in law or fact, is willfully improper and warrants sanctions,” the legal document read.
In a second motion filed Monday, the actress’ legal team moved to acquire records of the “It Ends With Us” investigation into its filmmakers’ purported sexual harassment and retaliation campaign.
Lively’s team submitted the letter motion to “compel” Wayfarer Studios and the “It Ends With Us” movie to “to produce materials” in response to Lively’s “Fourth Set of Requests for Production,” which seeks documents and witness recordings from Wayfarer’s “purported ‘neutral’ workplace investigation into Lively’s sexual harassment and retaliation claims.”
“This so-called ‘Investigation’ is a disingenuous charade. Wayfarer failed (although it was legally required) to investigate Ms. Lively’s concerns when she first raised them in May 2023,” the four-page letter submitted to Judge Lewis J. Liman read. “Had it done so, Ms. Lively would have participated in such an investigation, and it would have substantiated the sexual harassment she suffered while on the set of the film ‘It Ends With Us’ (the “Film”), which included (among other things) Mr. Baldoni’s unsolicited discussions about his addiction to pornography and sex life, and his improvised intimacy scenes without Ms. Lively’s consent.”
“If her complaints were promptly investigated, as the law requires, she may also have been spared the retaliatory smear campaign by Wayfarer and its Co-Defendants,” the letter went on. “Instead, Wayfarer waited years, until late January 2025, to initiate this Investigation. By that time, Wayfarer had already forcefully publicly denied Ms. Lively’s allegations and sued her and several others for $400 million for making the very same allegations that are now the subject of this ‘neutral’ investigation (for a workplace that no longer exists, the Film set). What’s more, by January, its counsel had repeatedly called Ms. Lively a liar in widely-circulated media interviews.”
By the end of the letter, Lively’s team referred to the requested investigation items as “highly relevant” and necessary to “ensure that witness engagement has been proper, and have been put at issues by Wayfarer.”
Lively’s latest hit back at Baldoni came after Baldoni’s attorney Freedman claimed in a letter last week that Lively’s lawyer threatened to release Taylor Swift’s “private text messages of a personal nature” unless the singer agreed to delete supposedly incriminating texts.
Blake’s attorney Mike Gottlieb quickly responded, telling TheWrap in a statement, “This is categorically false. We unequivocally deny all of these so-called allegations, which are cowardly sourced to supposed anonymous sources, and completely untethered from reality.”
On Thursday, Lively’s attorneys filed a motion to have the letter stricken from the court’s record, which was granted. A spokesperson at the time said in a statement, “It took the court less than 24 hours to see through Mr. Freedman’s irrelevant, improper and inflammatory accusations, strike them, remove them from the court and warn Mr. Freedman that further misconduct may be met with sanctions.”
Judge Liman wrote in his ruling, “The Letter is improper and must be stricken. It is irrelevant to any issue before this Court and does not request any action from this Court … The sole purpose of the Letter is to ‘promote public scandal’ by advancing inflammatory accusations, on information and belief, against Lively and her counsel.”
