The lawyers for Blake Lively just filed an updated complaint against Justin Baldoni with minutes to spare before the court-mandated limit of midnight ET. This is part of Blake’s case against her It Ends With Us co-star and director for sexual harassment and smear campaigns.
With the addition of more women to the amendment, the fight had already had a pretty big effect on law and culture. Things just got even bigger.
Also, there is no settlement in sight, mediation has been turned down by all sides, and telecomm subpoenas are being fought. In her 141-page FAC (First Amended Complaint), Lively now adds a defamation claim and a civil conspiracy to the story of alleged misconduct, money, astroturfing, and a career crash and burn. Also, Crisis PR company Street Relations and its founder Jed Wallace are now being sued by two new people who were not a surprise.
Other Women
This complaint is 48 pages longer than the one Lively first made on New Year’s Eve, and it names other women. This may be more important. There were other women who said Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios CEO Jamey Heath hurt them. People whose names aren’t in the paper yet but plan to be witnesses in the trial that will begin next year in federal court in New York City.
In order to get Baldoni’s new complaint thrown out, Lively’s new complaint focuses more on the harassment and revenge she talked about in her old complaints. It says:
“The Defendants’ campaign of retaliation has created a dangerous environment of threats, harassment, and intimidation. As a result, Ms. Lively has had to make changes to her personal and professional life and take steps to protect innocent bystanders instead of putting them in danger.” So, this Amended Complaint doesn’t name some witnesses and doesn’t include screenshots of their text messages. It’s important to note, though, that these witnesses have agreed to let Ms. Lively include the text of their conversations in this Amended Complaint. They will also testify and provide relevant papers during the discovery process.
In his new file, Livley says Ange Giannetti at Sony, the publisher, knew that Lively and other women were uneasy about IEWU. After that it says:
“More importantly, the Defendants’ false story falls apart when you look at the fact that Ms. Lively wasn’t the only one who complained about Mr. Baldoni. She brought up her concerns as they came up in 2023, not as part of an imagined power play for control of the Film in 2024. Beginning in May 2023, Ms. Lively’s and other people’s events were written down as they happened. It’s important to note that Mr. Baldoni did admit the complaints in writing at the time, which goes against the whole story the defendants have made up. He knew that other women, besides Ms. Lively, were uncomfortable with him and had told him so.
Also, Lively’s first court filing at the end of last year included many of the same meetings, events, and text messages that were included in today’s amended complaint. For example, it seems that the alleged online smear campaign derailed “the long-planned launch of her haircare line, Blake Brown.” This new complaint tries to show how serious the situation is in some very real and potentially scary ways:
“The Defendants’ actions have made the online environment so toxic that mean things are said about Ms. Lively, her family, other cast members, and different fact witnesses. All of these people have received disturbing threats.” As a recent example, a fact witness who openly supports Ms. Lively was told that their family would be sexually assaulted and killed if they didn’t “make a statement and give the truth.” Because the Baldoni-Wayfarer parties were trying to get back at each other, this kind of environment was likely to happen, if not inevitable. This happened both before and after the lawsuit started.
The January 31 FAC that Baldoni and his team filed against Lively and Ryan Reynolds for defamation and extortion replaced their original $400 million complaint from January 16. Similarly, Lively’s paperwork from Tuesday replaces her New Year’s Eve suit that came after the December 20 filing in California’s Civil Rights department. New suspects were added to both Baldoni’s and Lively’s FACs. The man who played Jane the Virgin sued each of them separately on December 31 for $250 million. He then went after the New York Times. Tonight, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actress brought on board Wallace, who is the head of Street Relations and is accused of manipulating social media, as well as Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, its CEO and moneyman, and publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, as well as Nathan’s The Agency Group.
Over the past few weeks, people have been waiting for Wallace and Street Relations to be added.
However, Judge Lewis J. Liman did not grant the protective order that was asked for against lead Team Baldoni lawyer Bryan Freedman in the case’s first real hearing earlier this month. As a result, the defamation claim has become even more specific, naming the former Megyn Kelly lawyer by name. “The things Wayfarer, Baldoni, and Heath, through their agents, including Bryan Freedman, wrote about Ms. Lively could have been taken to mean that Ms. Lively made up claims of harassment and filed those claims with the Civil Rights Department of the State of California and this Court,” the defamation claim section says.
Lively’s Camp Sends Out A Statement
The FAC was added to the court’s agenda just before Wednesday ET. Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb, Lively’s main lawyers, told Deadline what’s going on and where they think it’s all going:
Mrs. Lively made an updated complaint today that adds a lot more proof to her original claims and backs them up. That proof includes conversations between Ms. Lively, Sony and Wayfarer representatives, and many other witnesses that had not been made public before. The complaint includes important contemporaneous evidence that Ms. Lively wasn’t the only one who complained about misconduct on the set more than a year before the film was edited. It also includes evidence of the threats, harassment, and intimidation that have happened to many innocent bystanders as a result of the defendants’ campaign of retaliation.
The new lawsuit includes a claim for defamation because the defendants have said many false things about Ms. Lively since she filed the first complaint. It also names Jed Wallace and his company as defendants.
We are going to try to get the lawsuits against Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds thrown out over the next few weeks because they have no basis in fact. At the same time, we will start discovery right away, which we think will reveal shocking details about how far the defendants have gone in their never-ending attempts to “bury,” “ruin,” and “destroy” Ms. Lively and her family.
Deadline asked representatives for Baldoni, the other defendants, Freedman, and Sony for their thoughts on Lively’s amended complaint, but they did not reply. This post will be changed if any of them do.
More to come
That being said, there will almost certainly be more filings since there is still more than a year until the hearing starts on March 29, 2026. These papers don’t even include the other cases about what happened during the filming of IEWU and the harassment Lively says she faced online last summer from Baldoni’s publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, as well as Wallace, who calls himself a “hired gun.”
Wallace’s deposition demand was recently pulled by Lively’s team in Texas so that his name and the name of his company could be added to this new lawsuit. In a text message on February 5, Wallace denied having anything to do with any smear campaign, even though it looked like Baldoni’s defenders were talking about him. The business owner from Texas sued Lively for $7 million. Wallace said that Lively’s CRD report and the fact that his name has been brought up in the case many times since then has cost him “millions of dollars in reputational harm” and will likely cost his company more than another million dollars.
Additionally, Nathan and Abel have also said that they never actually attacked Livley before the August 2024 release of hit IEWU. This is because, as Abel said in a now-deleted Facebook post just before Christmas, “the internet was doing the work for us.”
Now, just a few days after Lively and Reynolds walked the red carpet at 30 Rock and were on SNL50: The Anniversary Special, Wallace has been dragged into the big show. The internet will be very busy. A show that will probably get even crazier before the trial starts next year.
What do you say about this story? Visit Parhlo World For more.
