Originally appeared on E! Online
Blake Lively wants Justin Baldoni to foot her legal bills.
Three months after Baldoni’s $400 million countersuit against the “It Ends With Us” actress and her husband Ryan Reynolds was dismissed in a New York court, Lively’s lawyers suggested she “will seek a multi-million-dollar award” to recover costs in defending herself against what they called “frivolous” claims from her costar.
In court documents filed Sept. 7 and obtained by NBC News, Lively’s counsel said the 38-year-old is “entitled” to having her legal fees covered by Baldoni as the “prevailing defendant” in the countersuit, in which the director accused her and Reynolds of defamation.
In addition, Lively’s attorneys said she is also “entitled to compensation for all harm caused to her” by Baldoni and his team — including his Wayfarer Studios production company and his lawyer Bryan Freedman — after “vicious character attacks on Ms. Lively designed to damage her credibility.”
“The Wayfarer Parties — with and through their lead attorney, Mr. Freedman — brought and maintained claims that were not based on factual or legal merit,” Lively’s attorneys argued in their filing, “but instead a deliberate plan to discredit Ms. Lively and to harm her and her husband by suing them.”
Lively and her counsel are requesting that the court approve her motion to seek legal fees and damages from Baldoni “prior to, and separate from” her jury trial against the filmmaker, which is slated to start in March 2026.
Lively is suing Baldoni for sexual harassment, accusing him of creating a hostile work environment on the set of “It Ends With Us.” While Baldoni has denied the allegations, his countersuit was dismissed in early June after a judge determined that he failed to prove the couple had defamed him.
In a statement to E! News at the time, Baldoni’s attorney Freedman said that Lively’s “victory is false.”
“Ms. Lively’s own claims are no truer today than they were yesterday,” Freedman added, “and with the facts on our side, we march forward with the same confidence that we had when Ms. Lively and her cohorts initiated this battle.”
(E! and NBC News are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nbcconnecticut.com ’
