Late last month, Blake Lively filed an amended complaint in her suit against Justin Baldoni, Jamey Heath (the CEO of Baldoni’s studio), Baldoni’s crisis PR team, and others in the Southern District of New York for 15 causes of action related to claims of sexual harassment, retaliation and infliction of emotional distress. New revelations include allegations that Baldoni made two additional women uncomfortable during filming. These women—unnamed in the document to protect them from continuous retaliation campaigns—reported the inappropriate behavior by Baldoni and Heath in writing at the time it took place and are prepared to testify.
The legal battle between Lively and Baldoni has been messy. There are several players, including multi-billionaire Steve Sarowitz, who is furnishing near-unlimited resources for Baldoni’s legal and PR crusades, a variety of complaints in several courts, and misinformation spreaders all over social media. Coverage has been rife with misogynistic and confusing storytelling. Baldoni and Heath have made (profitable) careers out of being male feminists, and this battle endangers their carefully crafted public personas.
In this author’s opinion—which I have to say because Baldoni and his team tend to file lawsuits against publications for “defamation”—Justin Baldoni found a commercially successful niche as a public-facing feminist. In my opinion, he loved the attention from it, and it made him feel like a good guy after what he has described as a past of porn addiction and not quite understanding consent. I find the claims pushed by Baldoni, his team, and their defenders online and in various legal documents to be unpersuasive at best and harmful at worst.
This piece aims to add context at a time when Baldoni continues to play his cases out in the press. He has strong support from conservative all-stars like Candace Owens, who pushes the story that Lively just had a crush on Baldoni, and Megyn Kelly—who, in a recent CPAC speech, characterized Lively’s claims as an example of “leftist overreach,” called Lively a “high maintenance diva bully brat” who is “looking a lot like Amber Heard” (a proxy for “unbelievable”), and compared Baldoni to men she believes are unfairly maligned, like Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse.
It is for a court to decide whose claims are most legally compelling, but below, I am going to sketch out Baldoni’s feminism, the movie release and controversy, ongoing court cases, and Lively’s allegations and Baldoni’s meager responses—so that readers might find, as I do, that this battle actually looks quite similar to what happens any time a woman stands up for herself against a well-resourced man.
Baldoni’s Feminist Brand and the Start of It Ends With Us
In November 2017, Justin Baldoni did a TEDTalk titled “Why I’m Done Trying to Be ‘Man Enough.’” He dares the men in his audience to “be man enough to stand up to other men when [they] hear locker room talk, when [they] hear stories of sexual harassment.” He asks, “Will you actually stand up and do something so that one day we don’t have to live in a world where a woman has to risk everything and come forward to say the words ‘me too’?” It’s a great question.
Also in 2017, Baldoni started a male talk show called Man Enough under the umbrella of his production company, Wayfarer Studios. Baldoni founded Wayfarer with Steve Sarowitz, the multi-billionaire founder of Paylocity who bonded with Baldoni over their shared Baháʼí faith. Episodes of Man Enough featured “influential men from Hollywood discuss[ing] manhood, societal roles, body image, fatherhood, happiness and feminism.”
In 2021, he launched a podcast series, also called Man Enough, also through Wayfarer, and published a book called Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity. The podcast, which is about “what it means to be a man today and how rigid gender roles have affected people,” was hosted by Baldoni; Jamey Heath, the CEO of Wayfarer; and Liz Plank, journalist and author of For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity. The podcast, according to its website, “instead of polarizing and demonizing men and masculinity … invites all humans to participate and thrive in the world.” The most recent episode, called “The Power of Speaking Out,” was released in October 2024 and featured FKA Twigs. Shortly after Lively filed her first complaint, Plank left the Man Enough podcast, writing, “I will continue to support everyone who calls out injustice and holds the people standing in their way accountable.”
Back in 2019, Baldoni announced that he had secured the rights to It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover novel that became a bestseller and BookTok favorite. The book is about Ryle and Lily, two people with traumatic childhoods caught in an abusive relationship. The novel pushes a narrative that Ryle “desperately wants to be good but is tormented by inner demons.” Baldoni echoed this account in an email to Hoover back in 2019, writing, “I love that the[re] really are no ‘bad guys’ and that we are the su[m]s of our experiences and our trauma.”
But, as Jennie Young wrote in Ms. back in 2022, Ryle is actually a “sadistic, pre-meditating and cruel” man who plans incredibly dark physical, sexual and emotional attacks on Lily. Young explains that the novel “romanticizes red flags and glorifies a charismatic-but-dangerous man (he’s complicated! he’s damaged!) and it ultimately delivers a decidedly anti-feminist message.” Even so, in one interview Baldoni described Ryle, a man who arranged a rape attempt that only stopped because he knocked Lily unconscious as she fought back, as “likable and charming, and a little bit dangerous.”
Making a film out of It Ends With Us was surely a smart monetary decision—it was a bestselling book, and it ended up being a box office hit. Yet, in the days before the film’s release, Baldoni talked about how he made the movie to “make a difference in the lives of women.” If I wanted to change women’s lives with a book-to-movie adaptation, It Ends With Us and its fairly classic valorization of violent masculinity would not be my first choice. But maybe Baldoni gets women more than I do.
Movie Release
During the film’s release in August 2024, rumors swirled about a rift between Baldoni and the rest of the It Ends With Us cast. Online commentators noticed that Baldoni was always interviewed about the movie alone and pictured alone or with his wife at premieres, while the rest of the cast did interviews and took pictures together. Then came reports that Hoover, Lively, Ryan Reynolds (Lively’s husband) and other cast members were not following Baldoni on social media.
Speculation about fissures in the cast turned into outrage at Lively for failing to talk about domestic violence in press interviews for the film. But, according to Lively’s complaint, she and other cast members were following the marketing plan circulated by the film’s distributor, Sony, and approved by Wayfarer. The plan directed the cast to “focus more on Lily’s strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” Actors were contractually obligated to talk about the film as “a story of hope,” and, if they were asked about the story “not being an authentic representation of domestic violence,” they were instructed to say that the story is “just one perspective” that is personal to Hoover. Lively’s complaint states that Baldoni only departed from the marketing plan a few days before the film’s release to divert attention from the fact that his cast unfollowed him and refused to appear with him in public. Indeed, Baldoni launched the marketing plan with Hoover in May 2024 at a trailer screening event that featured It Ends With Us-inspired latte art and floral-bouquet-arranging with influencers.
Domestic violence talking points and survivor stories appeared instrumental to Baldoni. After fans started theorizing about why Baldoni may not be welcome near the cast, he asked his press team to post only about domestic violence and even publicize private DMs he received from survivors of domestic abuse (they smartly refused).
Lively’s amended complaint cites a text to Lively from a fellow female cast member who was disquieted by Baldoni’s sudden shift in August 2024 to speaking about domestic abuse, which the cast member predicted would ultimately backfire “because it would eventually come out that Mr. Baldoni was using domestic violence commentary to cover his own behavior.”
The Cases (All of Them)
On Dec. 20, 2024, Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) alleging sexual harassment and retaliation. Her legal team also released a full-length, more formal complaint that outlined her factual and legal allegations, which were largely reproduced in her federal complaint eleven days later.
The next day, The New York Times published its exposé on Baldoni’s long, targeted smear campaign against Lively after he and Heath, the Wayfarer CEO, became nervous that she would make harassment that happened during filming public.
Baldoni’s legal team claims that Lively filed this administrative CRD complaint as a PR move to attack Baldoni publicly because it was not filed in court. His online defenders have suggested that this move is out of the ordinary—but in reality, it appears to be very ordinary. In employment cases based on California law, plaintiffs must submit a complaint to the state’s Civil Rights Department. Plaintiffs then have a choice: They may either let the department do its own investigation into their claims or they may choose to file a lawsuit themselves. If they choose the latter, they need to obtain a right-to-sue notice from the department. Lively did so.
On Dec. 24, Stephanie Jones, the founder of Jonesworks—Baldoni’s PR company until August of 2023—sued Baldoni, Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan. Jennifer Abel was Baldoni’s publicist at Jonesworks until she started her own firm in August 2024. While at Jonesworks, she brought Melissa Nathan, a crisis PR expert who leads The Agency Group (TAG), on to Baldoni’s team. Nathan is known for representing Drake, Logan Paul and Johnny Depp as well as spearheading the online smear campaign against Amber Heard (who came out in support of Lively). Jones filed suit in the Supreme Court of the state of New York (the state trial court), alleging the theft of clients and business as well as claims related to secretly planning a “smear campaign” against Lively and publicly blaming it on Jones. In her complaint, Jones explained that she did not want Nathan to work with Jonesworks, claiming that she witnessed Nathan do work for another client that went “far over the line,” but Baldoni hired her anyway.
On Dec. 31, Lively filed her federal suit in the Southern District of New York. Her complaint paints a disturbing picture of misogynistic entitlement; strange, intrusive behavior; and backlash for reporting such behavior. In it, she alleges sexual harassment; failure to investigate, prevent and/or remedy harassment; aiding and abetting harassment; false light invasion of privacy; intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress; and retaliation. These claims are made under California law, California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), California’s Labor Code and federal law (Title VII). Each claim is against a different configuration of people, but the full cast of characters includes: It Ends With Us Movie LLC; Wayfarer; Justin Baldoni; Jamey Heath, the CEO of Wayfarer and co-host of Man Enough; Steve Sarowitz, the multi-billionaire co-founder and financier of Wayfarer; Melissa Nathan, the crisis PR specialist; The Agency Group (TAG), Nathan’s PR company; and Jennifer Abel, a former employee of Jonesworks, the PR company that originally represented Baldoni until Abel started her own firm in August of 2023.
Also on Dec. 31, Baldoni sued The New York Times in Los Angeles Superior Court for $250 million. Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman—who has also represented a number of media power players like Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Kevin Spacey—is representing several others, including Melissa Nathan (Baldoni’s crisis PR agent). The suit accuses the Times of libel, or publishing false statements that damaged Baldoni’s reputation, and concocts a new story about Lively that is continuously planted in later filings: that Lively schemed to take control of the film away from Baldoni and, after the fact, tried to destroy his reputation.
The Times released a statement in response to the suit: “Our story was meticulously and responsibly reported. It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article.” In the lead-up to publication, the Times sought comment from Baldoni and all others mentioned in the article—they sent back a joint statement, which the paper included. It is my opinion that this suit is a ridiculous PR move that Baldoni’s team has an extraordinarily low likelihood of winning. It makes sense for his team, though; Baldoni’s lawyer will be able to seed his arguments into public consciousness as this case continues, which helps them fight against Lively.
On Jan. 16, Baldoni filed his federal complaint in the Southern District of New York. In it, he alleges that Lively, Reynolds and Lively’s publicist engaged in civil extortion by trying to take over the film, defamation in collaboration with the New York Times, false light invasion of privacy, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and intentional interference with contractual relations and prospective economic advantage. His central claim is that Lively was trying to steal his film from him and that all she experienced was a “self-inflicted press catastrophe.”
Baldoni filed an amended complaint on Jan. 31, further claiming that Lively’s team gave the Times inappropriate early access to her CRD complaint and that her husband, Ryan Reynolds, made fun of Baldoni in his movie Deadpool & Wolverine with a character called “Nicepool”—a performatively progressive guy with a man bun that turns out not so nice, with whom Baldoni evidently identified.
Alongside this amended complaint, Baldoni’s team launched a website that purports to keep the public informed about his case. The site adds nothing helpful to the court proceedings, but it serves to make the public think it is getting the real story. Baldoni’s team also released a 10-minute video of Baldoni and Lively in a slow-dancing scene filmed on May 23, 2023, to show that the actors were behaving “with mutual respect and professionalism.” Again, Baldoni’s team is doing everything they can to wage this battle not in court but in the press, likely because they saw how successful the retaliation campaign against Lively was.
The Times called the Baldoni/Wayfarer legal filings “rife with inaccuracies” based on investigations by “amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong.” (They clarified that the date on Lively’s CRD complaint reflects a Google-generated timestamp, not the date the Times received it.)
On Feb. 28, Lively filed her amended complaint, which explains that she often tried to remedy the difficult situation on set by talking to Baldoni about his inappropriate behavior, but, as she told a fellow cast member, Baldoni was “snippy and impatient” after she spoke up, which made her “feel awful for saying something.” As stated above, the document also claims that two other cast members raised concerns with producers (and Baldoni himself) and found their reports inadequately addressed.
Lively’s Suit: Sexual Harassment, Protections for Return to Production, and Retaliation
May-June 2023: Inappropriate Behavior and Sexual Harassment During Filming
- Lively alleges that Baldoni regularly made comments about women’s bodies on set (calling them “sexy”) and was fixated on her weight: He called her personal trainer to find out how much she weighed because he was concerned about needing to lift her (even though no lifting scene existed) and connected Lively with a weight-loss specialist when she had strep throat. Lively says Baldoni and Heath violated her boundaries, coming into her makeup trailer while she was undressed, and Baldoni improvised physical intimacy, like kissing her or caressing her face with his mouth while filming, without the involvement of an intimacy coordinator and “without notice or consent.” When Lively expressed discomfort after one of these moments, Baldoni allegedly said, “I’m not even attracted to you.”
- On set, Baldoni and Heath talked about their past sexual encounters and prior pornography addictions. Heath showed Lively and her assistant a video of his wife giving birth, naked, partially submerged in water. The two men talked about passing a woman to each other. In one moment, Baldoni was reexamining his sexual past aloud to Lively and said, “Did I always ask for consent? No. Did I always listen when they said no? No.” According to Lively’s complaint, her driver witnessed the conversation and expressed that he did not think it wise for her to be alone with Baldoni again.
- After Lively joined the film, Baldoni added several sexually explicit and/or nude moments, including one in which Lively “was to orgasm on camera,” explaining that he wanted to make the film “through the female gaze.” He talked extensively about his sex life with his wife and asked Lively about hers (e.g., he and his wife orgasm together—do Lively and Reynolds?). While filming a sex scene for an underage Lily, Baldoni said to the two young actors: “I know I’m not supposed to say this, but that was hot,” and “did you two practice this before?”
- The filming of the birth scene was “invasive and humiliating” for Lively. That morning, Heath and Baldoni pushed her to simulate total nude without any prior discussion: Baldoni’s wife “ripped her clothes off” during birth, so Lively should do the same. They compromised on partial nudity but refused to close the set as they filmed. Then, Baldoni introduced Lively to the actor playing her OB-GYN, who would have his “face and hands … in close proximity to her nearly nude genitalia.” It was Baldoni’s best friend.
There are several other allegations, like one that Baldoni claimed he could speak to the dead and had been speaking to Lively’s deceased father, but Baldoni denies them all.
Unsurprisingly, Baldoni employs the typical harasser playbook in response. He first claims that there couldn’t have been harassment because look at how friendly she was with him after it all allegedly took place: She knew his tea order, took pictures of him with her newborn, and sent him kind messages. He then moves on to DARVO—deny, attack, reverse victim and offender—by weaving a narrative that Lively, the unlikable diva that she is, was just trying to take control of Baldoni’s film, and he was the victim of her extortion. In his story, Jones and the Times are Lively’s abettors.
November 2023: Protections for Return to Production
The WGA strike interrupted filming, but by the time it could resume, Lively refused to return to set without guarantees that the inappropriate behavior would stop. Her lawyers drafted a document laying out inappropriate behaviors Baldoni and Heath must cease, and Wayfarer responded, in writing, that with regards to the “outlined requests, we find most of them not only reasonable but also essential for the benefit of all parties involved.”
The document required an “all-hands meeting” with Baldoni, Heath and others to discuss the protections, which occurred on Jan. 4, 2024. The meeting also was attended by representatives of Sony, a new director brought on as part of the protections, and Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, her chosen representative.
Baldoni’s complaint alleges that Reynolds demanded apologies from him for behavior that he says never happened—that Reynolds “berat[ed]” him in a “traumatic” way. His complaint says that the “power dynamics at play” were clear: Lively and Reynolds had power, and he did not. Production resumed on Jan. 5, 2024, and ended on Feb. 9, 2024.
Baldoni and Lively each made their own cut of the movie. Sony, the film’s distributor, chose Lively’s.
May 2024-Onwards: The Retaliation Campaign
It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.Melissa Nathan
In May of 2024, Baldoni and Wayfarer were still represented by Jennifer Abel at Jonesworks. Baldoni told Abel that he needed a plan in place just in case allegations against him were to be publicized.
Over the following two months, according to Lively’s complaint, Abel, Baldoni and Heath brainstormed ways to explain away information that might come to light. At one point, Baldoni suggested pushing out a narrative about his neurodivergence, which could cause misinterpreted “social awkwardness and impulsive speech,” by staging an interview with a doctor who would analyze pictures of his brain.
Abel suggested that Wayfarer retain a crisis specialist for Wayfarer and Baldoni—and that’s exactly what they did. At the end of July 2024, Wayfarer contracted with Melissa Nathan and her recently formed PR company, The Agency Group (TAG).
On Aug. 2, 2024, Nathan and TAG forwarded a draft “social manipulation” strategy to sully Lively’s reputation, likely similar to the one she created to drag Amber Heard through the mud. Proposed actions “should [she] and her team make her grievances public” included pushing any story about Lively’s being difficult to work with and “explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in [Lively’s] circle like Taylor Swift have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.”
Baldoni was clear about what he wanted from Nathan. He wanted a dirtier campaign, texting Abel that he was “not in love with the document they sent.” Abel texted Nathan directly, saying “[h]e wants to feel like she can be buried.” Nathan explained “we can bury anyone, [b]ut I can’t write that to him … Imagine if a document saying all the things that he wants ends up in the wrong hands.”
A few days later, Baldoni decided to send Abel inspiration to share with Nathan in the form of a Tweet about Hailey Bieber’s “history of bullying many women.” He told her: “This is what we would need.”
As expected, Nathan and Abel started planting stories with editors of and contributors to tabloids like the Daily Mail and People. At the same time, Lively’s complaint explains, Nathan and TAG hired subcontractors to wage an astroturfing campaign on social media sites, including Reddit. Astroturfing is the practice of mimicking grassroots support for a particular stance by publishing comments or threads on the internet or in media “that appear to come from ordinary members of the public but actually come from a particular company or political group.”
At the film’s New York premiere on Aug. 6, 2024, Sarowitz allegedly told a witness “he was prepared to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family.” Later in August, he told someone else that if Lively or Reynolds “ever cross the line, ever, then I will go after them … I will protect the studio like Israel protected itself from Hamas. There were 39,000 dead bodies. There will be two dead bodies when I’m done. Minimum. Not dead, but ‘you’re dead to me.’ So that kind of dead. But dead to a lot of people. If they ever get me to that point. Then I’ll make it worth their while. Because I’m gonna spend a lot of money to make sure the studio is protected.”
Sarowitz continued spending his money on the smear campaign, and around Aug. 10, 2024, Nathan and TAG reported an anti-Lively “shift” in coverage.
Legal filings from both The New York Times and Stephanie Jones support Lively’s account. Indeed, while the Wayfarer/Baldoni team contends that these messages are taken out of context, the Times legal fillings explain that any extra “context” Lively and the paper did not include “merely establishes that Nathan had a reputation for being able to plant negative stories; it does not undercut … the conclusion that the Wayfarer Parties planned for and executed a ‘smear campaign’ against Lively.”
The Wayfarer-Baldoni team also smears Jones in its complaint as erratic, controlling and unable to manage her own business; the story is that Abel’s choice to leave Jonesworks and take clients with her, as well as Jones’ refusal to work with Nathan because of her past disgraceful PR tactics are the products of a volatile woman’s mind.
In Sum
Baldoni’s legal strategy rests on painting Lively (and Jones, to an extent) as a domineering shrew who wrapped her greedy hands around Baldoni’s small, feminist movie. Lively stands in stark contrast to Baldoni, a man who just wants to help women. Lively and her husband are Goliath, and Baldoni is David. Granted, he’s a David whose film grossed $350 million, whose co-founder pledged unlimited financial resources to his battle against Lively, and who used those resources to wage gendered warfare online.
Whatever one thinks of Lively’s performance or press tour, her allegations are serious and cogent. She is continuously targeted by online accounts, including some engaging in “pornographic trolling,” and she and the witnesses who support her are receiving threatening messages. Baldoni and his legal team egg them on with PR stunts like the website and video releases and misinformation about the cases. They claim that Baldoni is still just standing up for women—while tearing a woman down.
Whatever you think of Baldoni, it admittedly is a strange move for a self-proclaimed (so many times it’s painful) feminist to choose this book to adapt into the movie to “help women”—a book that has been described as glorifying abuse. It’s also a strange move for such a feminist man to hire Nathan, the person who is responsible for one of the most misogynistic media campaigns against a victim of domestic abuse in recent history. And to empower that same person to launch a smear campaign against his co-star. And it’s a very strange move to paint his woman co-star as a controlling diva who couldn’t have been harassed because of how close she was willing to be with her co-star afterwards in both the press and in his legal filings.
In my opinion, Baldoni has become adept at weaponizing his brand of male feminism to get praise and to shield him from his inappropriate conduct. It is possible, as Kate Manne suggests, that Baldoni’s closely held identity as an ‘ally’ has lulled him into “moral complacency.” An entitled ‘ally,’ he cannot see his behavior as anything other than supportive and valuable. Regardless of the source of his misconduct, Baldoni joins the ranks of ‘equality-minded’ men who are anything but: performatively feminist men like Neil Gaiman and Louis C.K. who think they can fool everyone until women start saying “me too.” It’s our choice, again, whether to listen to them.
