Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni both claim total victory in legal battle that’s still ongoing

The détente lasted barely three days.

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni announced on Monday (US time) that the pair had reached a settlement in their duelling lawsuits against each other, and, as is customary, released a gracious statement that tilted to moving on and recognising the significance of the film that kicked all of this off, It Ends With Us.

But it wasn’t the end. At stake still are millions of dollars of legal fees and with that, another round of hostilities.

Yesterday, both camps released statements that claimed victory was theirs, and contained within were definite fighting words.

“Let’s be clear, this is a win and total victory for the Wayfarer parties,” Bryan Freedman, the lawyer for Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer, said.

“The court had already dismissed 10 of Ms Lively’s 13 claims, including every sexual harassment claim, every defamation claim, and all claims against the individual defendants.

“Ms Lively voluntarily dismissed the rest. In our view, they settled because they knew they were going to lose in court.”

Lively’s lawyers clearly disagreed with that characterisation and said that the settlement was actually a “resounding victory for Blake Lively” .

“Justin Baldoni and every individual defendant now face personal liability for abusing the legal system to silence and intimidate Ms Lively,” her legal team said in a statement.

“And by admitting that Ms Lively’s concerns ‘deserve to be heard’, the defendants have ended once and for all the fiction that Ms Lively ‘fabricated’ claims of sexual harassment.”

Because of a law related to protecting sexual harassment victims from retaliatory defamation claims, the door is open for Lively to pursue the payment of her fees and damages from Baldoni and Wayfarer.

The specific Californian law is relatively untested, and was introduced in 2023 in the wake of the MeToo movement.

If she succeeds in having the matter heard, a court could assess if this whole entanglement resulted in fallout to Lively’s career, and award huge compensatory damages.

But no matter what the court decides, the real damage has already been done. To both sides.

Likely, that’s why, or at least part of the why, Baldoni and Lively settled the bulk of their suits against each other before it was to be played out in open court in a few weeks’ time.

This back-and-forth legal circus, which resulted from allegations of misconduct during the production of the 2023 drama movie It Ends With Us, has done irreparable injury to both their careers.

That was part of Lively’s claims, that she had been the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by Baldoni and his representatives in an attempt to blunt her credibility because she had made official complaints against him, and that those claims could be made public.

During the promotional campaign for the film’s release, Lively had been the subject of considerable online criticisms targeted at how she was marketing the movie, whose subject was family violence.

Her side alleged that Baldoni and his team had seeded and stoked negative online sentiment against her.

There’s no doubt that Lively, best known for her role in teen drama Gossip Girl and films including The Town and A Simple Favour, had seen her social stock plummet.

Baldoni, who had a much lower profile before It Ends With Us, was now primarily known for the drama around these accusations and competing lawsuits.

Both had their supporters but just as many detractors as interested persons on the internet quickly declared their loyalties. The various private communications that had been unearthed during the legal process looked good for neither.

Both looked petulant, petty, desperate, vindictive and, perhaps worse, cringe.

Lively and Baldoni have upcoming and in-development projects listed on their IMDb pages, but none are particularly high-profile. Given that It Ends With Us was a huge commercial success, both should be attached to much bigger opportunities.

No matter what they do for the rest of their careers, whether long or short-lived, this legal battle will forever be in the top half of their obituaries. Everyone lost.