A federal judge granted Blake Lively a partial victory on Friday in a legal motion that followed her settlement with Justin Baldoni’s production company, granting her attorneys fees but denying her request for additional financial penalties.
Last month, Ms. Lively settled her retaliation claims that stemmed from the making of the 2024 movie “It Ends With Us,” as both sides were gearing up for a contentious and high-profile trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan. She received no financial compensation as part of the settlement, but the agreement allowed her to pursue a payout through a different legal avenue.
Citing Mr. Baldoni’s unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against her last year, lawyers for Ms. Lively sought to leverage a two-year-old California law adopted to prevent the weaponization of defamation suits to intimidate those who make harassment complaints. Ms. Lively had claimed she had been the target of a retaliatory online campaign, run by Mr. Baldoni and his associates, after complaining of sexual harassment on the set of the movie.
Lawyers for Mr. Baldoni denied that Ms. Lively was entitled to receive fees under that law, and have long argued that she had twisted innocuous interactions into harassment allegations in an effort to assert control over the making of the movie.
The fees granted by Judge Liman are for her lawyers’s efforts to defend against the defamation suit that Mr. Baldoni and his associates filed against Ms. Lively, which accused the actress of lying about her experiences on the set. That suit was dismissed about five months after it was filed, while Ms. Lively’s own retaliation case proceeded for another 11 months.
In a 47-page order, Judge Liman found that Ms. Lively’s case did fulfill the criteria of the law, which requires that the accuser made sexual misconduct complaints “without malice.”
Judge Liman wrote that in responding to the actress’s request for fees, Mr. Baldoni and his associates had provided no evidence that Ms. Lively had made her accusations with malice.
“Allegations are insufficient on their own to demonstrate that statements were in fact made with malice,” the judge wrote. “That determination requires some evidence.”
Ms. Lively was hoping that the judge would order treble damages — meaning any figure would be tripled — and punitive damages, which are listed as possible penalties in the California law. But the judge found that through the particular legal procedure that Ms. Lively was following, she could only ask for fees, not damages.
Michael J. Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, lawyers for Ms. Lively, said the decision made clear that she had made her claims in good faith, and that their client was pleased that the decision would now serve as an example of how the California law creates “a path for survivors to hold accountable those who weaponize online attacks and retaliatory lawsuits to intimidate and silence survivors.”
The statement also suggested that Ms. Lively may pursue damages through a different procedural mechanism. Asked for clarification, a spokeswoman said that Ms. Lively is “legally entitled to seek further damages” at the “time and place of her choosing.”
Bryan Freedman, a lawyer for Mr. Baldoni and his company, said in a statement that “Ms. Lively was only awarded limited attorney fees for a single claim as part of a case that lasted only a matter of months, nothing more.”
Framing the overall outcome of the case as a victory, he added: “We would not hesitate to stand up for the truth again.”
The judge’s decision may be the beginning of the end for one of the most talked about Hollywood legal disputes in the years after the #MeToo movement. The legal battle has lasted a year and a half and contained more than 1,000 legal filings. In their settlement agreement, both sides agreed not to appeal Judge Liman’s ruling on the request for fees.
But it is likely that there will be legal wrangling over the attorney fees that Ms. Lively is owed — a process that is often subject to objections from the other side over whether the figure requested is reasonable.
The judge’s ruling suggested there was work ahead. “The Court makes no findings or holdings at this juncture with respect to the appropriate measure of fees for the subject of this motion,” he wrote.
At the time that Ms. Lively sought a dismissal of Mr. Baldoni’s defamation lawsuit, she had seven lawyers signed onto her filings. The team included Mr. Gottlieb, a high-profile attorney whose clients have included Drake and the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists.
After the settlement was announced last month, there was a short-lived projection of harmony between the two sides. In a joint statement, the parties said, “We acknowledge the process presented challenges and recognize concerns raised by Ms. Lively deserved to be heard.”
Soon after, both sides started framing the outcome as a win. Lawyers for Mr. Baldoni’s production company framed the remaining issue as procedural and low stakes. Lawyers for Ms. Lively presented it as an opportunity where any payout was secondary to a mission of deploying a relatively untested law intended to protect sexual misconduct accusers.
Ms. Lively first sued Mr. Baldoni in late 2024, alleging that after she came forward with accounts of sexual harassment on the set, she became the target of a public relations campaign to seed and amplify negative content about her online.
She said in the suit that during the making of the movie, Mr. Baldoni — who was both her co-star and director — inappropriately commented on her appearance, discussed his personal sex life and announced on set that she had never seen pornography. Lawyers for Mr. Baldoni said that the encounters amounted to awkward comments or discussions appropriate for filming a movie about a romantic and sexual relationship.
Judge Liman dismissed Ms. Lively’s sexual harassment complaints but allowed retaliation claims against companies associated with Mr. Baldoni to proceed to trial.
After those claims were settled, the fees and damages that Ms. Lively sought related to alleged reputational damages and lost jobs and business opportunities stemming from the January 2025 defamation lawsuit. The suit, her lawyers say, “stoked the flames of public sentiment” against her.
Lawyers for Mr. Baldoni and his associates have said they had every right to defend themselves — first through what they have described as a standard public relations effort and then through what they called their “constitutional right” to bring grievances in court.
Judge Liman’s ruling is one of the first judicial efforts to apply a law that, even in California, the state where it was enacted, has had few use cases. Mr. Baldoni’s lawyers noted the scant precedent, and argued that the federal judge should not wade into new territory before allowing California courts to hash out important legal questions.
“That is a reason to tread cautiously, not to avoid treading at all,” Judge Liman wrote in his order. “Indeed, this Court lacks the authority to abstain from addressing issues squarely presented to it simply because those issues are difficult or novel.”