“I’m really sorry, I f*cked up,” Justin Baldoni admitted to his It Ends With Us co-star Blake Lively in a 2 a.m. April 2023 voice message after delivering a lower than enthusiastic response to scene rewrite from the Gossip Girl vet. “I will admit and apologize when I fail, the Jane the Virgin alum added in the six minute missive. “I’m a very flawed man, as my wife will attest.”
Far from the primary piece of personal correspondence or communication between the co-stars and their varied publicists unveiled since Lively filed a sexual harassment and retaliation criticism on December 20 with California’s Civil Rights division, at the moment’s practically two-year previous and rambling voice message comes as a federal choose has penciled in a March 9, 2026 trial begin date for the thespians’ bitter dispute.
“By Thursday, January 30, 2025, the parties shall submit a case management plan with deadlines which would enable trial to occur on that date,” Judge Lewis J. Liman ordered at the moment of the trial begin. A dispute that has spilled over quite a lot of lawsuits, together with Lively suing Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, his PR bosses and others on New Year’s Eve, and Baldoni, who sued the New York Times for $250 million on NYE, suing Lively, Ryan Reynolds and their PR chief Leslie Sloane for $400 million in a January 16 defamation and extortion case.
All of which makes Baldoni’s very early morning phrases of 21 months in the past nearly prophetic, nearly: “I’m gonna piss you off, probably, but I will always apologize and find my way back to center. I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I will, for sure, do better.”
In the zone flooding that this seemingly by no means ending assortment of filings and statements is, Judge Liman Monday additionally sought to quick monitor a boil on the virtually assured to be consolidated circumstances by shifting up a deliberate February 12 listening to on Lively’s January 22 transfer to have a protecting order placed on Baldoni’s predominant lawyer Bryan Freedman to primarily muzzle him within the media for “in further unlawful retaliation against Ms. and that Lively, and demanded that he immediately cease and desist from making further defamatory, and retaliatory, statements relating to Ms. Lively.”
Today, Lively lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb wrote one other letter to the choose over Freedman’s alleged “endless stream of defamatory and extrajudicial media statements” and in search of a halt to such.
The DC-based Willkie Farr & Gallagher lawyer added of the combative Freedman: “there already is a serious risk that his misconduct is tainting the jury pool.” While it was Lively’s CRD submitting that first introduced a slew of textual content messages and emails by Baldoni’s PR troopers Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel to everybody’s consideration, Gottlieb mentioned Monday that Freedman was exasperating “an arms race of selective public disclosures of text messages to the media.”
“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,” Gottlieb went on to say of Wayfarer co-founder Steve Sarowitz, who’s a defendant in Livelly’s filings, in the third such letter to the choose is simply over as many days. “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.”
Shifting from New York to Texas Lively and Reynolds (whose blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine has been dragged instantly into this with a January 7 proof preservation letter despatched to Disney and Marvel over the Nicepool hypocritical character) opened up a possible new authorized entrance in Hays County, Texas. That is the place attorneys for Lively and Reynold put a submitting within the docket wanting that Jed Wallace, the web subcontractor supposedly employed by Baldoni’s Crisis PR to turned social media in opposition to Lively, be ordered to take a seat for a deposition. Wallace and his Street Relations firm “weaponized a digital army around the country, including in New York and Los Angeles, to create, seed, manipulate, and advance disparaging content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums” the Lone Star state submitting proclaims.
Hard to inform if that voice message dropped by Baldoni’s group did their shopper any favors or confirmed Lively’s telling of occasions – with Reynolds and buddy Taylor Swift praising her rewrites to Baldoni’s displeasure and alleged intimidation. What isn’t exhausting to inform is that lawyer Gottlieb and others on Team Blake are very involved in regards to the optics and impressions of their shopper and her Merc with a mouth partner from the promised web site from Freedman of such recordings, extra IEWU BTS footage to counter Lively’s model of occasions on set and who was actually conducting a “smear campaign” in opposition to who. “Neither the media nor public will have any way of knowing which communications Mr. Freedman has selectively omitted from disclosure,” Gottlieb wrote at the moment.
“Moreover, what Mr. Freedman’s communications ignore—and likely are designed to obscure—is that Ms. Lively is in possession of numerous additional communications relating to her claims against the Wayfarer Parties,” Gottlieb goes on to jot down Monday a.okay.a. FAFO.
Neither facet responded to request for touch upon the 2023 voicemail, the Texas submitting, the moved up NYC listening to and subsequent 12 months’s probably trial date. If both Lively’s group or Baldoni’s group get again to us, this publish shall be up to date.