Maybe it really has ended.
In a dramatic turn, a federal judge in New York has tossed out Justin Baldoni and Wayfarer’s entire $400 million defamation and extortion lawsuit against actress Blake Lively after determining that her allegations of sexual harassment on the set of the film It Ends With Is were legally protected and therefore immune from the suit.
The voluminous complaint, filed at the beginning of the year, named a host of others, including Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds.
“Today’s opinion is a total victory and a complete vindication for Blake Lively, along with those that Justin Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties dragged into their retaliatory lawsuit, including Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Sloane and The New York Times,” Lively’s lawyers Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb said in a statement. “As we have said from day one, this $400 million lawsuit was a sham, and the Court saw right through it.”
Judge Jewis J. Liman of the Southern District did, however, leave the door open for Wayfarer and Baldoni’s legal team, led by Bryan Freedman, to filed an amended lawsuit relating to contractural obligations.
Gottlieb and Hudson have their own plans for moving forward, and said they look forward to the next battle in court toward “seeking attorneys’ fees, treble damages and punitive damages” against Baldoni and his Wayfarer partner Steve Sarowitz, they continued.
Among other findings, Liman wrote, “Even if they turn out to be unneeded, an employee can insist on protections at workplace for sexual harassment without being accused of extortion. If an employer accedes, it cannot later claim to be a victim of the employee’s wrongful threats.”
And in regards to a hotly contested document Lively allegedly never signed assuring that she would promote the film, Liman wrote, “There also is no allegation that Lively had a contractual obligation to promote the film; if not, there is no basis to assume that the value that she conveyed in terms of her willingness to promote represented anything other than a fair trade for the Wayfarer Parties’ willingness to use her cut.”
More to come.
