“I’m really sorry, I f*cked up,” Justin Baldoni admitted to his It Ends With Us co-star Blake Lively in a 2 a.m. April 2023 voice message after delivering a less than enthusiastic response to scene rewrite from the Gossip Girl vet. “I will admit and apologize when I fail, the Jane the Virgin alum added in the six minute missive. “I’m a very flawed man, as my wife will attest.”
Far from the first piece of private correspondence or communication between the co-stars and their various publicists unveiled since Lively filed a sexual harassment and retaliation complaint on December 20 with California’s Civil Rights department, today’s nearly two-year old and rambling voice message comes as a federal judge has penciled in a March 9, 2026 trial start date for the thespians’ bitter dispute.
“By Thursday, January 30, 2025, the parties shall submit a case management plan with deadlines which would enable trial to occur on that date,” Judge Lewis J. Liman ordered today of the trial start. A dispute that has spilled over a variety of lawsuits, including Lively suing Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, his PR bosses and others on New Year’s Eve, and Baldoni, who sued the New York Times for $250 million on NYE, suing Lively, Ryan Reynolds and their PR chief Leslie Sloane for $400 million in a January 16 defamation and extortion case.
All of which makes Baldoni’s very early morning words of 21 months ago almost prophetic, almost: “I’m gonna piss you off, probably, but I will always apologize and find my way back to center. I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I will, for sure, do better.”
In the zone flooding that this seemingly never ending assortment of filings and statements is, Judge Liman Monday also sought to fast track a boil on the almost assured to be consolidated cases by moving up a planned February 12 hearing on Lively’s January 22 move to have a protective order put on Baldoni’s main attorney Bryan Freedman to essentially muzzle him in the media for “in further unlawful retaliation against Ms. and that Lively, and demanded that he immediately cease and desist from making further defamatory, and retaliatory, statements relating to Ms. Lively.”
Today, Lively lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb wrote another letter to the judge over Freedman’s alleged “endless stream of defamatory and extrajudicial media statements” and seeking a halt to such.
The DC-based Willkie Farr & Gallagher attorney added of the combative Freedman: “there already is a serious risk that his misconduct is tainting the jury pool.” While it was Lively’s CRD filing that first brought a slew of text messages and emails by Baldoni’s PR soldiers Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel to everyone’s attention, Gottlieb said Monday that Freedman was exasperating “an arms race of selective public disclosures of text messages to the media.”
“The Wayfarer Defendants’ efforts are being financed by a billionaire who has pledged to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family,” Gottlieb went on to say of Wayfarer co-founder Steve Sarowitz, who is a defendant in Livelly’s filings, in the third such letter to the judge is just over as many days. “Mr. Freedman is using that money, his roster of current and former clients, and a blatant media and social media strategy to assassinate Ms. Lively’s character in advance of trial.”
Shifting from New York to Texas Lively and Reynolds (whose blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine has been dragged directly into this with a January 7 evidence preservation letter sent to Disney and Marvel over the Nicepool hypocritical character) opened up a likely new legal front in Hays County, Texas. That is where lawyers for Lively and Reynold put a filing in the docket desiring that Jed Wallace, the online subcontractor supposedly hired by Baldoni’s Crisis PR to turned social media against Lively, be ordered to sit for a deposition. Wallace and his Street Relations company “weaponized a digital army around the country, including in New York and Los Angeles, to create, seed, manipulate, and advance disparaging content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums” the Lone Star state filing proclaims.
Hard to tell if that voice message dropped by Baldoni’s team did their client any favors or confirmed Lively’s telling of events – with Reynolds and buddy Taylor Swift praising her rewrites to Baldoni’s displeasure and alleged intimidation. What isn’t hard to tell is that attorney Gottlieb and others on Team Blake are very concerned about the optics and impressions of their client and her Merc with a mouth spouse from the promised website from Freedman of such recordings, more IEWU BTS footage to counter Lively’s version of events on set and who was really conducting a “smear campaign” against who. “Neither the media nor public will have any way of knowing which communications Mr. Freedman has selectively omitted from disclosure,” Gottlieb wrote today.
“Moreover, what Mr. Freedman’s communications ignore—and likely are designed to obscure—is that Ms. Lively is in possession of numerous additional communications relating to her claims against the Wayfarer Parties,” Gottlieb goes on to write Monday a.k.a. FAFO.
Neither side responded to request for comment on the 2023 voicemail, the Texas filing, the moved up NYC hearing and next year’s likely trial date. If either Lively’s team or Baldoni’s team get back to us, this post will be updated.