Blake Lively has settled her legal claims against Justin Baldoni’s production company, the actors announced in a joint statement on Monday, after she had accused him of unleashing an online retaliation campaign against her.
The settlement was announced as the actors’ legal teams were gearing up for a contentious and high-profile trial scheduled to start on May 18 in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The actors have been warring for more than two years, since they co-starred in the 2024 movie “It Ends With Us,” which started as a friendly collaboration but devolved into accusations of sexual harassment and a headline-grabbing Hollywood legal fight.
The joint statement, released by the actors’ lawyers, came abruptly, with no hint of settlement talks during a hearing last week. It did not disclose the terms of the settlement.
“We acknowledge the process presented challenges,” the statement said of the film’s development, “and recognize concerns raised by Ms. Lively deserved to be heard.”
It went on: “We remain firmly committed to workplaces free of improprieties and unproductive environments. It is our sincere hope that this brings closure and allows all involved to move forward constructively and in peace, including a respectful environment online.”
The tone of the statement was remarkably amiable after Ms. Lively’s account of “degrading” comments by Mr. Baldoni on the film set led to an increasingly bitter volley of allegations between the actors.
The trial was widely anticipated in part because of the fame of those involved — text messages from Taylor Swift to Ms. Lively, her friend, were collected as part of the evidence. It also presented a test case for accusations of online manipulation at a time when the courts are only beginning to come to grips with the ways people’s reputations can be shaped by the internet.
Ms. Lively’s lawyers have argued that starting in 2023 individuals hired by Mr. Baldoni and his company used strategic interactions with the news media and manipulation on social media to impugn her character and to discredit any allegations about Mr. Baldoni’s behavior on set that might emerge.
Mr. Baldoni vehemently denied sexually harassing Ms. Lively, and his team maintained throughout the dispute that there was never a smear campaign. Rather, his lawyers have said, the actor hired crisis public relations professionals to protect him as he increasingly began to fear that false allegations would be made public.
A judge had dismissed Ms. Lively’s sexual harassment claims but allowed her retaliation claim to be brought in front of a jury.
The trial was expected to be a closely watched legal drama attended by throngs of traditional media and online influencers who have dissected nearly every piece of evidence released over the months of litigation. Ms. Lively and Mr. Baldoni were slated to testify, and it was likely that other celebrities such as Ryan Reynolds, Ms. Lively’s husband, would take the stand.
Ms. Lively had said in court papers that the set of “It Ends With Us” was rife with sexual harassment. She said Mr. Baldoni had announced in the presence of crew members that she had never watched pornography, called her “pretty hot” one day on set, and leaned in to nuzzle and kiss her without her consent during a slow dance scene.
She also accused Jamey Heath, the chief executive of Mr. Baldoni’s company that was co-producing the movie, of staring at her bare breasts in the mirror of her makeup trailer.
“They’re just being creeps,” Ms. Lively texted a friend during the first week of filming in 2023. “Like keep your hormones to yourselves.”
Lawyers for both men described the behavior as, at most, awkward comments or fleeting mishaps. They accused Ms. Lively of leveraging overblown complaints to seize control over the movie and of trying to ice Mr. Baldoni out of its premiere by refusing to appear alongside him. (They ended up taking red carpet photos separately.)
“Apparently not content to have wrested directorial and editorial control from Baldoni,” the actor’s lawyer wrote in court papers, “Lively set out to destroy his reputation and alienate him from his own film.”
Judge Lewis J. Liman found that Ms. Lively could not bring sexual harassment claims because, under federal and state law, she needed to be classified as an employee. Instead, he found that she operated as an independent contractor, with more power than someone in a subordinate employment role.
As the trial approached, Ms. Lively’s lawyers continued to assert that the jury needed to hear evidence about the harassment claims because they were central to the allegations of retaliation. Lawyers for Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni’s production company, were seeking to exclude such evidence. Judge Liman had yet to rule before the announcement of the settlement, which was earlier reported by TMZ.
Ms. Lively’s allegations of sexual improprieties threatened to undermine the reputation Mr. Baldoni had sought to build as a man in tune with feminism and the promotion of gender equality. His podcast, “Man Enough,” touted the dismantling of traditional gender roles, and he acquired the film rights to Colleen Hoover’s novel “It Ends With Us” to make a statement about domestic violence.
In 2024, as the movie’s premiere neared and Ms. Lively tried to distance herself from him publicly, Mr. Baldoni sought the advice of crisis public relations professionals.
He hired a company called The Agency Group PR, which soon compiled a “scenario planning document” that outlined key messaging points. Those included highlighting Mr. Baldoni’s reputation as a “longtime activist and advocate of and for women in Hollywood” and, by contrast, Ms. Lively’s “less than favorable reputation in the industry.”
After Mr. Baldoni expressed dissatisfaction with the document, Melissa Nathan, who founded the company, wrote to the actor’s publicist, “Imagine if a document saying all the things that he wants ends up in the wrong hands,” adding, “you know we can bury anyone.”
Mr. Baldoni and Ms. Nathan’s legal team asserted in court that these conversations were simply taking stock of the possible responses, and Ms. Lively was unable to identify an instance in which they had promoted a false story about her.
But around the time of the movie’s premiere, negative online commentary about Ms. Lively surged, including criticism that she sometimes took too light of a tone during a press tour promoting a film about a relationship devastated by domestic violence.
At trial, the two sides would have battled over whether that commentary arose organically or was seeded and amplified by Mr. Baldoni’s reputation management team.
In analyzing the evidence, Judge Liman found that certain conduct by those hired by Mr. Baldoni’s company “at least arguably crossed the line.”
The judge cited messages in August 2024 in which a publicist for Mr. Baldoni confirmed that the team was “amplifying” a video that criticized Ms. Lively as insensitive to domestic violence victims in the press tour. Judge Liman also highlighted the public relations team’s talking points for pitching an article to The Daily Mail, which published a piece echoing some of those ideas and calling the film’s release an “unmitigated disaster.”
The dispute between the actors escalated in late 2024, when Ms. Lively filed an administrative complaint against Mr. Baldoni in California that was at the center of an article published by The New York Times.
Mr. Baldoni soon sued Ms. Lively, accusing her of seeking to ruin his reputation, as well as The Times, alleging defamation. Judge Liman dismissed Mr. Baldoni’s claims against both defendants last year. Ahead of the trial, the judge dismissed Mr. Baldoni, Mr. Heath, Ms. Nathan and other individuals as defendants. The claims that had been expected to proceed to trial were against companies with which they were associated, including Wayfarer. The settlement announced Monday also includes The Agency Group, which faced a claim of aiding and abetting retaliation.
In the joint statement, the two sides projected a sense of reconciliation. The completed movie, it said, remains a “source of pride to all of us who worked to bring it to life.”
