Lively Wants Damages for Baldoni's Alleged Retaliation

The legal drama surrounding Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's shelved film It Ends With Us isn't quite ready for its credits to roll. While both sides announced this week that they'd settled their main court fight, new filings show one key issue is still in play—and it could mean more sparring and potentially millions of dollars in damages, the New York Times reports. A notice from Lively's lawyers, filed Thursday in federal court, says she is pushing to collect legal fees and damages tied to a $400 million defamation suit Baldoni and his associates brought against her last year, then saw dismissed.

She's invoking a new, largely untested 2023 California law designed to shield people who report sexual misconduct from retaliatory defamation suits. If she convinces the judge she acted with a reasonable basis and without malice—and a judge previously found evidence she believed she had been legitimately harassed—Baldoni and the other defendants could face significant penalties. Baldoni's lawyers describe the effort as "a pending request for fees based on a very narrow issue," adding monetary penalties would be "draconian." Lively's lawyers, meanwhile, say Baldoni faces "personal liability for abusing the legal system to silence and intimidate" their client, per Reuters.