A judge dismisses Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit against Blake Lively.

A U.S. judge has dismissed actor Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit against actress Blake Lively, who had accused Baldoni of sexually harassing her during the filming of the movie Break the Circle (Baldoni, 2024). The lawsuit also included claims against her husband, fellow actor Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist Leslie Sloane. Additionally, Baldoni filed another lawsuit for $250 million against the newspaper The New York Times, which has also been dismissed.

The judge believes that Baldoni and his team did not demonstrate that the defendants acted with malice or intentionally, a necessary requirement for accountability. Baldoni’s team has not publicly reacted to the ruling.

The case began in late 2024: Lively sued Baldoni for sexual harassment, accusing him of creating a huge, million-dollar smear campaign against her. This was detailed in a lengthy article in The New York Times, We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine (‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside Hollywood’s Defamation Machine), published in the American newspaper on December 21.

The New York Times investigation describes, in more than 4,000 words and authored by three reporters, the harassment Lively experienced, supported by internal documents, messages, and phrases like: “[Baldoni] entered multiple times, uninvited, into her dressing room when she was undressing or even breastfeeding.” It was claimed that the director and co-star of Break the Circle attempted to undermine her self-esteem by mocking her appearance and shared intimate details, such as hypothetical infidelities or his addiction to pornography. Lively stated in the article that she had to set contractual boundaries, for example, requesting that no more sex scenes be added to the filming.

Just 10 days later, Baldoni countersued Lively and The New York Times for $250 million, accusing them of presenting the facts in a “decontextualized and manipulative” manner. He claimed the newspaper was “cherry-picking,” meaning it only used data that supported their narrative while omitting information that weakened it. The plaintiffs argued that the paper violated their privacy to reconstruct the alleged harassment against Lively and that it used communications and messages out of context in a deliberate attempt to confuse the reader, as reported by Variety. He accused the actress of doing exactly what she accused him of: creating a campaign to undermine him with “false allegations of abuse to unilaterally take control of the production.”

This case of cross-complaints has become more complicated over time. At one point in the process, Baldoni sought to summon pop superstar Taylor Swift as a witness in the upcoming trial, a close friend of Blake Lively, but later retracted. Despite everything, Taylor’s friendship with Lively appeared to be strained after the judicial back and forth.