Blake Lively has come out far short of the nearly $8 million in legal fees the It Ends With Us star sought in her now settled bitter dispute of alleged sexual harassment, online smearing and more with Justin Baldoni. Yet, lawyers for the actress are insisting she is the winner in the big picture and point to Rebel Wilson‘s ongoing legal fights as proof.
Declaring that “Lively and Baldoni have waged fierce battle against each other in court,” Judge Lewis Liman today awarded Lively “$363,245.40 in attorneys’ fees and $44,206.35 in costs.”
That’s about $7.2 million less than Lively was looking for, and hoping for out a previous Liman decision back in June.
In a rebuke to the Gossip Girl alum, her legion of lawyers and PR team, the line item order from the NYC-based judge (the brother of Doug Liman FYI) notes “the number of hours for which Lively seeks reimbursement is unreasonable.” Getting to the heart of a matter he once called “a feud between PR firms,” Jude Liman added Wednesday: “Media relations were not integral to defending the defamation claim brought against Lively,. Accordingly, time spent on media relations and press coverage is not compensable.”
When it comes to media relations, Lively’s lead lawyers Esra Hudson and Michael Gottlieb quickly put out their take on the award — as one would expect in a case conducted as much if not more in the court of public opinion as it was in actual courtrooms.
“Justin Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties lost their meritless retaliatory $400 million lawsuit, which two different courts held was designed to stifle public criticism and silence Blake Lively and others,” Hudson and Gottlieb said in a statement Wednesday. “This first-ever award of fees and costs under this California law is historic, and demonstrates that there are real consequences of bringing retaliatory lawsuits. As we have said from day one, Blake Lively’s case was never about money – it was about accountability.”
“As the recent news in the Rebel Wilson/Amanda Ghost case demonstrated, Blake Lively’s lawsuit exposed an industry of secret online smear campaigns that largely target women, and unsurprisingly involve the same players,” the lawyers say, putting a spotlight on the ongoing action in LA Superior Court over what went on during the 2023 making of Wilson’s directorial debut The Deb.
While Wilson scored a court win Down Under last month in accusations she defamed Deb actress Charlotte MacInnes in claiming MacInnes was sexually harassed by Deb producer Ghost and then colluded with Ghost to cover up what took place, a LA legal action over The Deb has onc again called out a very similar cast of characters to some of the Lively vs. Baldoni brawl’s main players.
In filings this week, Camille Vasquez (vet of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard legal saga) and other lawyers for Ghost and other Deb producers cite crisis PR boss Melissa Nathan and her team, as well as former Wilson lawyer Bryan Freedman in another tale of disparaging websites and other online attacks. Wanting to know more about where posts calling Ghost “the Indian Ghislaine Maxwell” and, if you didn’t pick up on where the first insult was going, a “a con artist, a thief and a pimp,” the producers attorneys are seeking further discovery.
In this case, the filings contain screen grabs of text messages and other communications that seem very …lively.
How that will all play out for Wilson, Nathan and the rest is a work in LASC progress
Refocusing on Blake Lively, her lawyers Hudson and Gottlieb go on today to shift away from the chum change awad their client received and try to shift to their idea of the bigger picture. Praising her and by implications themselves over the year and a half since Lively first filed her initial sexual harassment and retaliation complaint in late 2024 against Baldoni and his inner circle with the California Civil Rights Department, they add: “She lifted the curtain for other victims, and set the precedent for others to come forward and expose similar conductThis result demonstrates that the legal system is not as easily manipulated as social media, and still functions as a force for accountability.”
After an eleventh-hour settlement in May between the IEWU co-stars just before what many assumed would be a messy and star studded trial, Lively and her lawyers had argued that California’s 2023-introduced Protecting Survivors from Weaponized Defamation Lawsuits Act (aka Civil Code Section 47.1) permitted her attorneys fees and significant damages. Judge Liman agreed, but nowhere near as much as they wanted him to.
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