Blake Lively’s legal team is asking a court to stop Justin Baldoni’s lawyer from engaging in a “harassing and retaliatory media campaign” against the actress and husband Ryan Reynolds, amid Lively and Baldoni’s dueling lawsuits.
Lawyers for the “Gossip Girl” alum filed a letter on Tuesday requesting the court put the kibosh on attorney Bryan Freedman’s “improper conduct,” TMZ reports.
The Lively-Reynolds camp claim Freedman’s recent remarks to the press are false, irrelevant and harassing, and risk prejudicing the jury. The letter points in particular to Freedman’s release Tuesday of unedited footage from “It Ends With Us.”
The nearly 10-minute, behind-the-scenes footage shows three takes of Lively, 37, and 40-year-old Baldoni filming a slow dance from one of the early scenes of their characters’ passionate-turned-abusive romance.
Lively cited the scene in her December 2024 complaint, which accused Baldoni of sexual harassment on the set, followed by a retaliatory smear campaign. She formally sued the “Jane the Virgin” alum on Dec. 31, the same day he filed a $250 million lawsuit against The New York Times for an allegedly libelous deep-dive into Lively’s allegations.
While releasing the footage was apparently an effort to refute some of Lively’s claims, her lawyers said in a statement to People that it serves to corroborate what she previously said in her lawsuit about the scene.
They claim that all of the intimacy portrayed onscreen “was improvised by Mr. Baldoni with no advance discussion or consent, and no intimacy coordinator present.” Baldoni’s camp, meanwhile, says the footage shows he and Lively were professional and therefore clears his name.
Last week, Baldoni sued Lively, Reynolds and Lively’s publicist, Leslie Sloan, for defamation and an alleged smear campaign against him. He also accused Lively of trying to take over creative control of the film, which he directed and she co-produced.