Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni Lawsuit Sets First Court Hearing Date
As Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni‘s legal matters continue, a New York court has officially set a date for when the first hearing between the parties will occur.
When is the first court hearing date in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni lawsuit?
In a series of moves on Tuesday (via THR), U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman revealed that the court plans to consolidate the various separate lawsuits being levied by each party and has set a tentative trial date for March 9, 2026, for when the many arguments between both parties will be legally heard.
Alongside the news of the first court hearing date, Liman also ordered that a pretrial hearing occur on February 3, 2025, moved up from February 11, after Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ legal team continued to allege that Baldoni’s legal team, led by Bryan Freedman, and his production company Wayfarer, are trying to smear Lively and Reynolds online.
“The endless stream of defamatory and extrajudicial media statements must end. It will not stop without this court’s intervention,” states a Monday filing from Lively. “The Wayfarer Defendants’ efforts are being financed by a billionaire, who has pledged to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family. Mr. Freedman is using that money, his roster of current and former clients, and a blatant media and social media strategy to assassinate Ms. Lively’s character in advance of trial.”
Lively’s legal team also filed a petition last week in Texas state court in an effort to depose Jed Wallace, whom Lively’s original complaint alleged helped create and promote content that smeared Lively’s name during her and Baldoni’s initial back-and-forth. Wallace was alleged to have been hired by Baldoni and Wayfarer and paid to post on sites like Reddit, attacking Lively and defending Baldoni in the process.
Lively’s complaint alleges that Baldoni created a hostile work environment
The lawsuit stems from a formal complaint that Blake Lively made against Baldoni last month. In it, she states that things got so bad during the filming of It Ends With Us that an all-hands-on-deck meeting was called in response to her claims of a hostile work environment. During the meeting, Lively asked that Baldoni stop showing her nude videos or images of women, that he stop mentioning his pornography addiction to her, that Baldoni stop discussing sexual experiences in front of her, and that he also stop mentioning Lively’s weight.
The complaint also claims that an agreement was made between production company Wayfarer Studios and the cast, in which the promotion of the movie would focus “more on [Lively’s character’s] strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” However, Lively claims that Baldoni would renege on that and instead spoke in interviews about the film’s serious story.
Lively also claimed that Baldoni and his PR manager, Melissa Nathan, discussed ways to start a social media campaign to harm her reputation. The filing by Lively includes 22 pages of texts between Baldoni’s publicist and Nathan, in which they discuss wanting to have Lively “buried.”
(Source: The Hollywood Reporter)
