Justin Baldoni’s lawyer has issued a scathing response to Blake Lively after she reacted to his $400 million lawsuit against her.
Baldoni is suing Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, their publicist Leslie Sloane, and Sloane’s PR firm, Vision PR, after several allegations were made about his conduct on set and behind-the-scenes of their It Ends With Us movie.
The Gossip Girl star dropped a bombshell weeks after the film was released to theaters and detailed her own allegations about Baldoni in a lawsuit in December last year.
She claimed Baldoni tried to ‘destroy her reputation’ and sexually harassed her while they starred in the movie, which saw Baldoni as the director and lead actor.
Baldoni’s team branded Lively’s allegations as ‘categorically false’ and is now counter-suing, but Lively’s response categorically denies his allegations that she attempted to take creative control and used Taylor Swift and Ryan Reynolds as her ‘dragons’ in backing her script rewrites.
Baldoni’s lawyer has now issued a furious response to her team’s statement which read: “This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim Offender.”
It also went on to say that ‘this latest lawsuit from Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, and its associates is another chapter in the abuser playbook’.
The defamation lawsuit was obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com and shows Bryan Freedman’s fiery comments.
He dubbed them ‘revoltingly false sexual allegations’ against his client, via Deadline.
Freedman said: “After my clients filed a comprehensive lawsuit packed with almost 200 pages of undeniable facts and documentary evidence which crushed their false allegations of a smear campaign by providing doctored communications to the New York Times, Blake and her legal team have just one heinous pivot left, and that is to double down on the revoltingly false sexual allegations against Mr. Baldoni.
“The mere fact that Ms. Lively feels that she can publicly destroy Mr. Baldoni’s reputation in an attempt to devastate his future career and then deny him or his team their own ability to defend theirselves against her is preposterous.
“Mr. Baldoni never once publicly attempted to call Ms. Lively out for her own many wrongdoings during filming, he kindly addressed all her concerns during filming in the correct manner despite the fact that he wholly disagreed, he himself was committed to do things differently and to keep the peace as she specifically admitted to in her own lawsuit.”
He concluded: “We will not only continue to defend our clients against Blake’s power, privilege and all out lies, but we will now fight even harder for the voiceless in the DV community who are unfairly suffering while she continues to push on her own self-serving and selfish vendetta in the media.”
As Baldoni’s publicists, Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel were also at the heart of the initial filing by Lively, and they too released a statement.
Nathan and Abel shared the impact of Lively’s complaint on their lives, writing in a statement that Lively spoon fed ‘The New York Times with doctored, out of context and edited text messages in an effort to paint herself as a victim set off a chain of events that has been harmful beyond measure’ which have resulted in the pair receiving ‘death threats, abhorrent abuse and vile anti-Semitic slurs’.
