The “It Ends With Us” legal woes just intensified as the film’s director and star, Justin Baldoni, has now filed a federal lawsuit against co-star Blake Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist Leslie Sloane.
Wayfarer Studios, the movie’s production company, which Baldoni co-owns, is suing for defamation, civil extortion and interference with contractual relations. The suit accuses Lively and Sloane of sparking a smear campaign against him to take control of the movie. The plaintiffs seek at least $400 million in damages from Lively, Reynolds and Sloane.
Baldoni says the 37-year-old actress was “determined to make Baldoni the real-life villain in her story” and to redirect the narrative from her public criticism for being “tone deaf” during the press tour, according to documents obtained by TMZ. The suit mentions Lively was promoting her hair care and beverage lines while doing press for a film about domestic violence.
Baldoni also claims his conflict with Lively started back in 2023 when the movie began shooting, after she organized a a “takeover strategy” for creative control of the film. The documents go on to detail a meeting that Baldoni, Lively, and her husband, Ryan Reynolds had about the the film’s critical rooftop scene where the main characters meet. Reynolds and Lively ended up rewriting the scene and presented it to Baldoni in a meeting he now feels was an ambush.
He says Reynolds pressured the rewrite during the meeting and that Lively’s friend Taylor Swift even chimed in to praise the couple’s version of the scene, making Baldoni feel he “understood the subtext: he needed to comply with Lively’s direction for the script.”
Also included in the lawsuit are text messages and emails between Lively and Baldoni, including one where the actress describes herself, Swift and Reynolds with a “Game of Thrones” reference — “I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons … we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine.”
Baldoni claims that he gave in to most of Lively’s demands because she threatened to not promote the film unless she could cut her own version. The director says he was eventually forced to fire himself from directing the movie.
In addition, Baldoni claims all of this happened despite Lively never having read the book of the same name that inspired the film, which led her to “Google the color of her character’s hair rather than pick up the book.”
After the film’s release, the whole cast unfollowed Baldoni on social media, seemingly in support of Lively. That’s when he says Lively’s publicist, Leslie Sloane, started the “campaign to frame [Lively] as a martyr and pin the blame.”
The suit also includes several texts Sloane sent to media outlets in attempt to “divert attention from Lively’s tyrannical behavior on set.”