The legal team of Justin Baldoni is reacting to a recent statement released by the legal team of Blake Lively.
The two parties are embroiled in a legal battle and a reputational battle that has captivated the industry. Here is the most recent barb exchange between them.
In a statement verified by The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s attorney, hinted at more material that will likely be revealed in a countersuit against the It Ends with Us star.
“It is painfully ironic that Blake Lively is accusing Justin Baldoni of weaponizing the media when her own team orchestrated this vicious attack by sending the New York Times grossly edited documents prior to even filing the complaint,” he said.
“We are releasing all of the evidence which will show a pattern of bullying and threats to take over the movie. None of this will come as a surprise because consistent with her past behavior Blake Lively used other people to communicate those threats and bully her way to get whatever she wanted. We have all the receipts and more.”
The comment followed a statement released by Lively’s legal team to People magazine on Monday, in which they accused Baldoni’s team of attempting to divert attention and launch attacks in the media, characterising such actions as a traditional tactic to discredit a victim of sexual harassment.
“This is not a ‘feud’ arising from ‘creative differences’ or a ‘he said/she said’ situation,’” read the statement from Lively’s lawyers.
“As alleged in Ms Lively’s complaint, and as we will prove in litigation, Wayfarer [Studios] and its associates engaged in unlawful, retaliatory astroturfing against Ms Lively for simply trying to protect herself and others on a film set. And their response to the lawsuit has been to launch more attacks against Ms Lively since her filing.”
“A classic tactic to distract from allegations of this type of misconduct is to ‘blame the victim’ by suggesting that they invited the conduct, brought it on themselves, misunderstood the intentions, or even lied,” the statement continued.
“Another classic tactic is to reverse the victim and offender and suggest that the offender is actually the victim. These concepts normalize and trivialize allegations of serious misconduct. Most importantly, media statements are not a defence to Ms. Lively’s legal claims. We will continue to prosecute her claims in federal court, where the rule of law determines who prevails, not hyperbole and threats.”
In her initial complaint, filed on December 20, Lively accused her co-star and director of It Ends with Us of sexually harassing her on the set of the movie and then planning a retaliatory smear campaign. The allegations were described in depth in a Times article that also featured dramatic text exchanges between Baldoni’s crisis management and public relations teams.
Following up on her complaint, Lively filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York last week, alleging that Baldoni and his PR staff had orchestrated a complex, multi-layered scheme to damage her reputation as payback for her reporting sexual misconduct on the movie’s production.
In a statement, Lively’s attorneys said she was subjected to “further retaliation and attacks” after she went public with misconduct allegations against Baldoni and his public relations team in a Times report.
“Wayfarer and its associates have violated federal and California state law by retaliating against her for reporting sexual harassment and workplace safety concerns.”
Baldoni accused the Times of conspiring with Lively to selectively provide facts that misled readers about specific text exchanges in a $250 million libel complaint he filed against the publication last week.
“In this vicious smear campaign fully orchestrated by Blake Lively and her team, the New York Times cowered to the wants and whims of two powerful ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites, disregarding journalistic practices and ethics once befitting of the revered publication by using doctored and manipulated texts and intentionally omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative,” Freedman said at the time.
“In doing so, they pre-determined the outcome of their story and aided and abetted their own devastating PR smear campaign designed to revitalize Lively’s self-induced floundering public image and counter the organic groundswell of criticism amongst the online public. The irony is rich.”
