There won’t be a red carpet or an after-party, but Wednesday will be one of the most watched premieres in Blake Lively’s and Justin Baldoni’s careers.
That’s when the actors will both appear in person at a New York City courthouse for the first time since their legal battle — one of Hollywood’s messiest in years — began in December 2024 after Lively filed a complaint against Baldoni alleging sexual harassment and retaliation on the set of “It Ends With Us,” their 2024 film.
The court-ordered settlement conference, which will take place at U.S. District Court in Manhattan, is a last-ditch effort to get the actors to a resolution ahead of their scheduled May 18 trial, after discovery in the case has dragged everyone from Taylor Swift to Sony Pictures executives into the fray.
At the settlement conference, which is closed to members of the media and the public, Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave will try to get the two parties to begin settlement discussions in the case, which has brought a conflict from the set into public view.
“This is a really critical leverage point,” NBC News legal analyst Misty Marris said. “A lot of what the judge will point to in this particular case is the public spectacle of it all.”
The case has reverberated through Hollywood, exposing private texts among A-listers and uncomfortably candid studio business conversations that normally remain behind closed doors, as well as subjecting Lively and Baldoni to the broader culture war around sexual harassment.
According to Parrot Analytics, which tracks public sentiment via social media mentions and video comments, Lively had a positive sentiment of 81% in March 2023, shortly after her casting in “It Ends With Us” was announced. By Jan. 31 of this year, that sentiment had dropped to 10.6%. Positive sentiment for Baldoni dropped from a high of 62.5% in March 2024 to 8.7% by Jan. 31.
Lively has alleged that the decline of her public image is at least in part due to a smear campaign that Baldoni’s team orchestrated after she spoke up about sexual harassment, an allegation his lawyers have denied.
Lively, who was much better known than Baldoni before the case, has more to lose as it drags on, according to crisis PR expert Eleanor McManus.
“She’s taken a huge reputational hit,” McManus said. “And now she’s seen by a lot of studios as a lightning rod.”
Some of the damage has come from private communications and depositions that were unsealed as part of the lawsuit Lively, 38, filed against Baldoni, 42, who was also the director of “It Ends With Us.”
In a deposition unsealed last month, Sony Pictures’ executive vice president of production, Andrea Giannetti, confirmed that she referred to Lively as a “f---ing terrorist” after she learned that Lively threatened to quit the film if a 17-point list of changes she wanted was not executed. Sony Motion Pictures Group President Sanford Panitch called Lively “epic level stupid” in an email exchange with his colleagues on Aug. 21, 2024.
“It’s quite ironic because she has a huge hit movie headed to $300M-plus,” Panitch wrote. “And probably will never work again, or not for a while.”
Lively has, in fact, closed a film deal since then, to star in and produce “The Survivor List” at Lionsgate, a project announced in August that is still in development, the studio confirmed.
“Blake is focused on her family and the trial, but she’s continuing to work,” said a source close to Lively. In addition to her acting career, Lively also has the beverage brand Betty Buzz and the hair care company Blake Brown Beauty, both of which plan product launches in coming months, the source said.
A representative for Baldoni declined to comment on his career plans.
The biggest headlines in the case have come from the court’s unsealing communications with other celebrities, including Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, who pushed their agency, WME, to advocate harder on Lively’s behalf with Sony executives.
Some of Lively's messages with Swift, a world-famous pop star, were also made public.
