Five major updates in Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively defamation trial as co-stars' lawsuits go to court
While it'll be some time before Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni actually end up seeing their cases against each other go to trial, there's still a lot going on.
Their lawyers faced off in court earlier this month, though the date for their trial isn't until March 9, 2026.
If you're new to this, then here's the quick version: Blake Lively starred alongside Justin Baldoni in the movie It Ends With Us, while he was also directing the film and helping produce it.
Back in December last year, Lively filed a lawsuit suing Baldoni for sexual harassment and claiming he engaged in a campaign of 'social manipulation'.
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Baldoni hit back the following month by filing a countersuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and their publicist in which he accuses them of defamation and hijacking the production of It Ends With Us among other things.
Each side has denied the allegations the other has made about them, and there's been a few updates in the recent days.
Lively's subpoenas
It seems as though the real winners from this whole thing are going to be the lawyers hired to launch each salvo Lively and Baldoni's camps want to send at each other.
Deadline reports that Blake Lively's team has launched subpoenas against US mobile phone carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon along with AOL, Cloudflare Jed Wallace in order to try and get the full picture of what messages were sent.
Lively's representatives said that they'd sent the subpoenas as they claim that the information published on a website did not contain everything.
They said: "Ms. Lively has initiated discovery that will expose the people, tactics, and methods that have worked to ‘destroy’ and ‘bury’ her reputation and family over the past year.
"We will now receive all of the 'receipts' that, unsurprisingly, are nowhere to be found on Mr. Freedman’s website, and like Ms. Lively, those ‘receipts’ will have their day in court."
Baldoni's reps said sending subpoenas was an 'ordinary part of the litigation process', but hit out at what Lively's team wanted to obtain, saying: "They are asking for every single call, text, data log, and even real-time location information for the past 2.5 years, regardless of the sender, recipient, or subject matter.
"This massive fishing expedition demonstrates that they are desperately seeking any factual basis for their provably false claims. They will find none."
The extension
While the actual trial date is a long way off and currently set for March next year, Blake Lively recently requested to a court that they be granted an extension until March 5.
Her camp wants to file an amended lawsuit, and the deadline for doing so was February 14.
Lively's request to put the deadline back until next month was rejected, and she was instead granted four more days, meaning that February 18 will be her new deadline for the amended lawsuit.
Wayfarer's response
It's not only Lively's team that wanted an extension, as according to Law&Crime Network Baldoni's Wayfarer team had said they too wanted one as a result of the Los Angeles fires.
They reported that Wayfarer filed a letter saying they had 'no objection' to Lively's team having an extension, but accused them of having 'refused to consent to an extension of time' for Wayfarer.
Wayfarer claimed that on January 7, Lively's team attempted to 'serve a member of Baldoni's team while they attempted to evacuate' the fires 'with their small child'.
In the same letter, they said that if Lively got her March 5 extension then they wanted a deadline to respond of April 16.
The decisions and delays
While a judge extended the time Lively's team back to February 18 instead of the March 5 date she wanted, her team was also given extra time to file a motion to dismiss and now has until March 20 to do it.
With more time to submit her amended lawsuit and file to dismiss the suits against her the next month or so, she looks likely to be busy.
Beyond that, there'd still be a year to go between the March 20 deadline to file a motion to dismiss and the actual date they'd end up going to trial, though that is still subject to being moved around.
The Jed Wallace of it all
Earlier this month, Lively was the subject of a lawsuit from Jed Wallace, a crisis publicist who Lively's lawyers claim was hired by Baldoni's team and allege that his firm 'weaponised a digital army' against her.
He's the owner of PR firm Street Relations and faces the allegation that he used 'a digital army around the country from New York to Los Angeles to create, seed and promote content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums'.
In Wallace's lawsuit, his representatives claimed that Lively had 'no facts supporting the allegations' and is suing her for $7 million.
This whole thing seems likely to rumble on and on.
Topics: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Celebrity
Joe Harker