![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/d12e97200974b6dedfab2027c801d15eaf-justinbaldoni-courtupdate.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n This lawsuit still has surprises.
\n Photo: Bryan Bedder\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
What is the female gaze, and who possesses it? That\u2019s not for me to answer but It Ends With Us producer, director, and star Justin Baldoni, who had to wade through the mines of feminist language in a deposition back in October. Though we\u2019re still four months out from the never-ending It Ends With Us drama finally going to trial, a handful of new documents<\/a> have been unsealed in the ongoing case between his Wayfarer Studios and co-star Blake Lively<\/a>. The biggest revelation from this latest update: Baldoni told her he is circumcised before they even started working together.<\/p>\n Why were these people on the topic? Well, allegedly when Baldoni met with a then\u2013\u201cvery pregnant\u201d (his words) Lively to convince her to do the film, they discussed whether or not she would circumcise her fourth child. In the process, he told his soon-to-be co-worker (along with her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and a handful of other staff in the room) that he himself was circumcised. \u201cDid Ms. Lively ask you whether you were circumcised?\u201d her lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb asked Baldoni, to which the latter responded, \u201cDirectly, no.\u201d Not only does this imply there is an indirect way to ask, but it also reveals that perhaps this movie shoot was going to be troubled before it even began.<\/p>\n All we have to go off of is Baldoni and his PR team\u2019s deposition, with Lively\u2019s still sealed up, but the line of questioning mostly focuses on the extent to which the director and actor framed his reputation in the industry around being a male ally to women. Despite repeated insistence that things in the film were framed around the \u201cfemale gaze\u201d\u00a0(something Baldoni defines as something inherent to anyone who is female),\u00a0Baldoni came under pressure from both Lively and another co-star, Jenny Slate, for his language in the script and on set. In the first pass of the script, Baldoni included a sex scene in which Lily climaxes and Ryle does not \u2014 which he believed would be \u201cattractive\u201d to the female gaze \u2014 but according to his testimony, Lively argued against including it, saying she would be \u201cmortified\u201d if that happened to her in real life. Baldoni pushed back by citing an example from his own sex life.<\/p>\n Later, Baldoni says he managed to step in it again by telling Slate that she looked \u201csexy\u201d in a pair of pants the costume department provided her with for a party scene. Slate allegedly asked Baldoni if he would change his language in an interaction he mostly described as lighthearted. \u201cI don\u2019t have the exact words,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s like we are staying away from using those words to describe, you know, women\u2019s bodies.\u201d Gottlieb followed up by asking if her \u201cobjection to describing her wardrobe as sexy would constitute her female gaze on that particular situation\u201d\u00a0and whether Baldoni had \u201ca different gaze\u201d from his \u201cmale perspective.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s possible that I can have a different gaze as a male,\u201d Baldoni said in response. \u201cSo I\u2019m sorry, I don\u2019t know what you\u2019re asking,\u201d Sometimes you think you\u2019re going in for a routine deposition and you wind up doing Gender Studies 101.<\/p>\n What becomes clear throughout Baldoni\u2019s deposition is that his self-promotion of himself as a \u201cmale ally\u201d came back to bite him again and again as his behavior allegedly grew overly familiar, if not uneasy. Earlier in the deposition, Gottlieb asked Baldoni about the\u00a0\u201cculture of hugging\u201d on the It Ends With Us set. When Baldoni learned that people were uncomfortable with the hugging, he said he put a stop to it, switching over to a culture of \u201chigh fives\u201d and verbal compliments. Even at its most tame, whatever happened on that set always sounds like the worst work retreat of all time.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This lawsuit still has surprises. Photo: Bryan Bedder\/Getty Images What is the female gaze, and who possesses it?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[3164,458,146,85,46,100978,64534,83287,100977,3165,397,43,2080,13196],"class_list":{"0":"post-170445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-blake-lively","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-it-ends-with-lawsuits","14":"tag-it-ends-with-us","15":"tag-it-never-ends","16":"tag-jenny-slate","17":"tag-justin-baldoni","18":"tag-movies","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-ryan-reynolds","21":"tag-wayfarer-studios"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}