The legal drama surrounding “It Ends With Us” continued to mount over the weekend.
On Dec. 20, Blake Lively filed a legal complaint against Justin Baldoni, her co-star and director on the film “It Ends With Us,” accusing him of sexual harassment on the set of the Netflix drama and waging a retaliatory smear campaign against her with the assistance of a crisis PR team.
On Saturday, the Daily Mail reported that Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, planned to file a countersuit as soon as courts reopened on Jan. 2. The suit would be filed by Baldoni, his business partner and Wayfarer Studios Chief Executive Jamey Heath, as well as Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan, the publicists named in Lively’s complaint. It would accuse Lively’s team, led by publicist Leslie Sloane, of waging a smear campaign against Baldoni by planting negative stories about him and the working conditions on “It Ends With Us” in the press.
Without specifying a timeline for filing the countersuit, Freedman confirmed the plans to Deadline on Saturday. “It is going to shock everyone who has been manipulated into believing a demonstrably false narrative,” Freedman said.
On Saturday, Sloane preemptively denied the claims reportedly in the countersuit. In a statement to People magazine, she said that she had not planted any stories about HR complaints on the set of “It Ends With Us” and claimed that in fact she was informed of the complaints by someone with close family connections to Baldoni’s PR team.
“It’s clear that Mr. Baldoni and his Wayfarer Associates are suggesting that I originated press stories about HR complaints on set, which is false,” she said.
Sloane and Freedman did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
In the 80-page complaint, filed in California, Lively accused Baldoni of creating a “hostile work environment” on the set of “It Ends With Us,” a drama about domestic violence, by allegedly doing things like improvising physical intimacy in scenes with Lively and pressuring the actor into performing more nudity than originally agreed upon. Lively claims that when she raised concerns about the conditions on set, Baldoni’s team orchestrated a smear campaign on social media. The complaint included dozens of damaging text messages that seemingly showed Baldoni coordinating with his publicity team to undermine Lively’s credibility and bolster his own.
Adapted from a novel by Colleen Hoover, the film follows Lively’s character, a young woman who is physically and emotionally abused by her husband, played by Baldoni. Its release in August was largely overshadowed by rumors of a feud between Baldoni and Lively, and by negative chatter about Lively on social media.
Since filing the complaint, the “Gossip Girl” star has received an outpouring of support from friends and collaborators in the industry, including her “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” co-stars and director Paul Feig.
Meanwhile, Baldoni has been dropped by his agency, WME. And others are trying to distance themselves from the “It Ends With Us” controversy. On Tuesday, Baldoni’s former publicist Stephanie Jones filed a complaint in New York Supreme Court accusing his PR team of undermining her in a coordinated effort to deflect blame for the alleged smear campaign against Lively.
