Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's competing 'It Ends With Us' lawsuits: Breaking down the accusations

We imagine Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni didn’t have legal battles on their 2025 vision boards, but here we are.

As the year ended, the It Ends With Us co-stars traded allegations of workplace misconduct while making the film, which Baldoni also directed and was a 2024 box office hit. There have been three separate legal filings over this in less than two weeks:

On Dec. 20, Lively filed a sexual harassment complaint against Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios with the California Civil Rights Department.

Baldoni, who has denied Lively’s “false and destructive” claims, including that he waged a smear PR campaign against her, sued the New York Times for libel over the actress’s allegations in Los Angeles Superior Court on Dec. 31.

The same day, Lively sued Baldoni for retaliation for her harassment claims in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Within these hundreds of pages of legal documents — including text messages between each other and with various publicists and other players in this Hollywood saga — have been a flurry of bombshell accusations back and forth. We break down the biggest allegations.

Lively claims Baldoni sexually harassed her

The film began production in June 2023 and was released in August 2024. In Lively’s complaint and lawsuit, the actress and producer claimed Baldoni — her love interest in the film, an adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel — allegedly improvised “physical intimacy that had not been rehearsed, choreographed, or discussed with [her].”

She said he tried to add a graphic sex scene without her consent, which would have her character have an orgasm on camera. She said Baldoni talked about his sex life with his wife and asked her personal details about her relationship with husband Ryan Reynolds. She said Baldoni and Wayfarer producer Jamey Heath pressured her to simulate full nudity for a birth scene “despite no mention of nudity for this scene in the script, her contract, or in previous creative discussions.” Lively said Baldoni and Heath told her they had “previous porn addictions.” Lively said Heath showed her and her assistant a video of his fully nude wife giving birth. She also alleged that they entered her hair and makeup trailer unannounced multiple times, including when she was getting dressed and breastfeeding.

Baldoni categorically denied the accusations through his attorney Bryan Freedman, who has said the claims are “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious” and her complaint was to “fix her negative reputation.” Baldoni said that Lively saying she was shown “pornographic” videos, when it was footage of someone’s wife giving birth while they were discussing a birth scene, is an “outrageous” distortion. Baldoni claimed Lively “refused” to meet with the intimacy coordinator to plan out the film’s sex scenes and that he took the meeting alone. Baldoni shared texts in his filing in which Lively invited him to her trailer to work on lines while she was pumping.

Lively claims Baldoni launched a PR campaign to ruin her reputation when she spoke up

In Lively’s complaint, she accused Baldoni and Wayfarer of embarking on a “multi-tiered plan” to damage her reputation after she called a meeting during production, also attended by Reynolds, to address what she described as “repeated sexual harassment and other disturbing behavior.” She claimed a crisis PR team planted theories online that were critical of her to “bury” and “destroy” her reputation. Lively’s attorneys have since said she was subjected to “further retaliation and attacks” after she went public with the misconduct allegations against Baldoni, detailed in a Dec. 21 New York Times story titled “'We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which is why she’s suing him — as well as his crisis manager Melissa Nathan and publicist Jennifer Abel — in federal court.

Baldoni denied there was a PR campaign against Lively, providing additional text messages he claimed the New York Times omitted showing that he and his publicist didn’t want to or try to smear Lively. In his lawsuit, Baldoni said the New York Times article “relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives.”

Lively claims Baldoni weight-shamed her

The actress, who gave birth to her fourth child in February 2023, said Baldoni “routinely” criticized and questioned “her body and weight.” She claimed he called her “fitness trainer, without her knowledge or permission, and implied that he wanted her to lose weight.” She also claimed that when she was diagnosed with strep throat, Baldoni sent her to an expert to help her combat the sickness, but she found out the person was a weight loss expert.

Baldoni denied this, saying in his lawsuit that he has “back issues and has multiple bulging discs” and was worried about picking up Lively in a scene. No such scene existed, Lively's lawsuit countered. He claimed Reynolds confronted him and “aggressively berated” him for “fat-shaming” Lively during a meeting at Lively and Reynolds’s New York City penthouse.

He claimed Reynolds was “so aggressive” that he felt “compelled to offer repeated apologies, despite his question being entirely reasonable and made in good faith.” Baldoni claimed that the “inappropriate and humiliating” verbal attack took place “perhaps intentionally, as other celebrity friends were coming in and out of” the couple’s penthouse. Baldoni said a producer on the movie, who was at the meeting, allegedly told him “that in his 40-year career he had never seen anyone speak to someone like that” — referring to the way Reynolds allegedly spoke to Baldoni.

Baldoni claims Lively tried to kick him out of his film

While he was the director, he claimed Lively made a “calculated and audacious attempt to seize control of the Film.” After Lively called for the meeting during production to express her grievances against him, Baldoni said she allegedly insisted on joining him in the editing bay, during a period in which he said a director typically has sole access to the film. He said Lively eventually fired his film editors and replaced them with her own, including one favored by Reynolds, and shut Baldoni out of the process completely. In his lawsuit, Baldoni included a text he sent at the time that said, “She’s kicked me out officially from the film now. She’s finishing it all. I can’t be involved. Music sound VFX everything. I’ll make it through somehow.”

Baldoni claims Reynolds pressured his agent to drop him

Baldoni said in his lawsuit that he “grew increasingly fearful of what Lively and Reynolds were capable of” as a Hollywood power pair and claimed that Reynolds personally pressured his then-agent to drop him at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere in July. Reynolds, Lively and Baldoni had all been repped by WME at the time.

WME — which has since dropped Baldoni, one day after Lively filed her complaint — denied Baldoni’s claim in a statement, saying, “This is not true. Baldoni’s former representative was not at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere nor was there any pressure from Reynolds or Lively at any time to drop Baldoni as a client.”

Baldoni claims Lively tried to block him from attending the premiere

Baldoni’s lawsuit said that not only “had Lively stolen the Film” by using editors she selected, but she also robbed Baldoni and his team of any genuine opportunity to celebrate their hard work” at the August premiere.

It claimed that “further undermining Baldoni’s role,” Lively “initially refused to permit his attendance at the … premiere.” It was “only after significant pressure did she reluctantly agree to allow Baldoni and the Wayfarer team to attend,” but he claimed it was “under humiliating conditions.” While Reynolds, Lively and her co-stars Jenny Slate and Brandon Sklenar were front and center, Baldoni and the Wayfarer team and their families “were segregated from the main cast, barred from the exclusive after-party, and forced to organize their own event at additional cost.” He said his participation on the red carpet was “cut short” and “his family and friends were confined to a makeshift holding area in the basement before being escorted into a separate theater after Lively’s departure.”

The way it played out made it clear to the press that something was amiss behind the scenes of the film.

After Baldoni filed his lawsuit, Lively’s attorney said in a statement, “Nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms. Lively’s California Civil Rights Department Complaint, nor her federal complaint... This lawsuit is based on the obviously false premise that Ms. Lively’s administrative complaint against Wayfarer and others was a ruse based on a choice ‘not to file a lawsuit against Baldoni, Wayfarer,’ and that ‘litigation was never her ultimate goal.’ As demonstrated by the federal complaint filed by Ms. Lively earlier today, that frame of reference for the Wayfarer lawsuit is false. While we will not litigate this matter in the press, we do encourage people to read Ms. Lively’s complaint in its entirety. We look forward to addressing each and every one of Wayfarer’s allegations in court.”