The question surfacing again and again in the monthslong public legal dispute between It Ends With Us stars Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively is not so much who behaved in the right and who behaved in the wrong so much as who has suffered most in the fallout from the numerous lawsuits. “I actually think a lot of people are victims here,” Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, said on Matt Belloni’s podcast, The Town. “I think Justin is a victim here, I think Melissa Nathan is a victim, I think Jed Wallace is a victim, I think Jen Abel is a victim, I think Steve Sarowitz is, Jamey Heath is,” Freedman added, rattling off names of various members of Baldoni’s team who have been caught up in the never-ending cascade of lawsuits surrounding the film. As for Lively, who alleges Baldoni and Heath harassed her, Belloni was quick to point out that Freedman grants she’s a victim — in scare quotes. “A victim can be in the eye of the beholder,” Freedman conceded.
Freedman is pursuing both Lively and the New York Times in suits relating to Lively’s harassment claims, which were filed in court and in public with the Times last December. Since the New Year, Lively has kept to herself, appearing alongside her husband, Ryan Reynolds, at SNL50 and the premiere of Another Simple Favor at SXSW but otherwise avoiding conversations about the cases between herself and Wayfarer Studios, set to go to trial next spring. Baldoni and his team, however, continue to release videos and text messages and appear on podcasts to speak about the nature of the case. While Belloni on his podcast was clear to mention that he extended an invite to both Baldoni’s and Lively’s counsel, only Freedman took up the baton.
What Belloni iterated at the top of the episode, “Lively vs. Baldoni and the Legal Stakes With Baldoni’s Lawyer” is what many are thinking: The more this case gets drawn out, the more information gets released; the uglier this all gets, no one comes out of the proceedings looking good. Freedman’s podcast appearance was less about Belloni taking sides — it appears he isn’t rooting for anyone in this case, and he even likened one of Freedman’s thoughts to Donald Trump’s — and more an attempt to understand who’s mad about what and what can actually be done about it. Freedman reiterated Baldoni’s case as a twofold argument: the first being that he did not harass Lively as per her claims in the Times, the second that the Times had cooked up the publishing of this complaint months before his team knew anything about it. What Freedman pointed out — and where this case is admittedly fuzzy — is that just because Lively felt harassed does not mean she was legally harassed. Or, as he put it, “People can feel different ways about different things.” Had Lively perhaps not gone to the Times with her complaint but rather filed it quietly and it was subsequently reported on, perhaps Wayfarer’s legal response would feel less aggressive, but it’s hard to speculate on the “what ifs” of something that has become so “now what.”
Freedman was especially unhappy with the Times, saying the paper deliberately tried to mislead its readers through selective editing of texts as well as — absurdly — the deletion of emoji in the messages posted in Lively’s complaint. “As you know, and as you’ve seen,” Freedman explained to Belloni, “there are emojis that have been removed that make it look like they’re sarcastic conversations.” Freedman harped on the missing emoji as recontextualizing the sentiment on display in some of the messages between Baldoni’s PR team, noting that the “satire of the upside-down smiley-face emoji was removed from the New York Times stuff.” Freedman’s main point was that this specific suit and framing, thanks to Lively’s team, has completely destroyed Baldoni’s career. After the Times piece, Baldoni was dropped from talent agency WME, and Liz Plank, the co-host of his podcast, Man Enough, quit the show.
“It’s not in [Baldoni’s] interest for this movie to do anything other than reap rewards in the box office and have domestic-violence survivors feel an affinity to the project and to be understood and heard,” Freedman said after a series of arguments that Baldoni’s alleged smearing of Lively would not benefit his film — that someone who worked on a project from the ground up for five years would gain nothing from the negative PR surrounding the movie upon its release. That Freedman prioritized the box office, however, above the victims for whom Baldoni made the movie, speaks to the shallow nature of both parties’ continued pursuit of this case. This trial is no longer about righteousness or labor but about the financial consequences of accusations such as these.
Toward the end of the episode, Belloni wondered aloud why the parties have yet to settle, given the pricey nature of the proceedings to come. “If this thing goes to trial, this is a 10 or 15 million-dollar piece of litigation,” he suggested. Asking Freedman how long this can go on, Belloni predicted, “I do not believe there will be a trial in this case. I just think that the potential for the circus and damage to both sides here will ultimately win out and you guys will settle.” “This is not a circus when you go through an experience like this,” Freedman responded. “In this day and age, the only way that you can truly get back is to prove your innocence, and that’s what we’re actively working to do.” But that active work is still an afterthought in the court of public opinion no matter how much evidence his team relentlessly releases. It may not be a circus to Baldoni, but that hasn’t stopped his team from making it one anyway.
