In what could prove to be the final court ruling in the long-running legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni over \u201cIt Ends With Us,\u201d a federal judge on Wednesday awarded Lively about $407,000 in attorneys\u2019 fees and court costs stemming from a defamation claim in Baldoni\u2019s dismissed lawsuit against her.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman awarded Lively $363,000 in attorneys\u2019 fees and another $44,000 in court costs for defending against Baldoni\u2019s defamation claim. Lively had sought $7.5 million in attorneys\u2019 fees and another $540,000 in costs.<\/p>\n
The ruling follows Liman\u2019s decision in June<\/a> that Lively was entitled to recover reasonable attorneys\u2019 fees under California Civil Code Section 47.1, a law designed to protect people who report sexual misconduct from retaliatory defamation claims. At the time, the amount Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios, would have to pay remained undetermined.<\/p>\n In Wednesday\u2019s ruling, Liman found that while the billing rates charged by Lively\u2019s attorneys were \u201cnot unreasonable\u201d given the high stakes and complexity of the case, she was entitled to reimbursement only for work tied to defending against the defamation claim. He also found the number of hours for which she sought reimbursement was unreasonable.<\/p>\n The combined award amounts to about 5% of the more than $8 million in fees and costs Lively had requested.<\/p>\n Despite the reduced award, Lively\u2019s attorneys, Esra Hudson and Michael Gottlieb, called the decision \u201chistoric,\u201d pointing to what they described as the first-ever award of fees and costs under the California law.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we have said from day one, Blake Lively\u2019s case was never about money \u2014 it was about accountability,\u201d they said in a statement. \u201cThis result demonstrates that the legal system is not as easily manipulated as social media, and still functions as a force for accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n Baldoni\u2019s attorney, Bryan Freedman, also claimed the ruling as a victory, emphasizing that Liman had rejected the vast majority of the fees and costs Lively sought.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ruling is a significant victory for my clients and sends a clear message that, no matter how powerful you may be, the courtroom is not a place to take advantage of the law for your own personal gain,\u201d Freedman said in a statement.<\/p>\n The legal battle began after Lively filed a complaint <\/a>with the California Civil Rights Department in December 2024 alleging that Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios had orchestrated an online smear campaign against her in retaliation for complaints she made about sexual harassment during the production of \u201cIt Ends With Us,\u201d which Baldoni directed and co-starred in.<\/p>\n Baldoni denied wrongdoing and accused Lively of concocting false allegations as part of an effort to wrest creative control of the film. He and Wayfarer subsequently filed a $400-million lawsuit<\/a> against Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and publicist Leslie Sloane, accusing them of defamation and other wrongdoing.<\/p>\n Liman dismissed Baldoni\u2019s lawsuit<\/a>, finding that his claims against Lively, Reynolds and others were legally insufficient. He also dismissed<\/a> Baldoni\u2019s separate $250-million defamation suit<\/a> against the New York Times, finding that the newspaper\u2019s coverage was protected as a fair report of legal proceedings.<\/p>\n In April, Liman also dismissed<\/a> 10 of the 13 claims in Lively\u2019s lawsuit, including her sexual harassment and defamation claims, while allowing retaliation-related claims to proceed. Lively\u2019s attorneys said at the time that the harassment claims were dismissed largely because the court found she was an independent contractor rather than an employee, not because the court found that the alleged conduct did not occur.<\/p>\n Lively and Baldoni settled their remaining claims<\/a> against each other in May without either side receiving financial compensation, avoiding what had been expected to be a closely watched federal trial in Manhattan. The settlement preserved Lively\u2019s effort to recover attorneys\u2019 <\/a>fees under Section 47.1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In what could prove to be the final court ruling in the long-running legal battle between Blake Lively…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[14056,96177,3164,458,4529,10188,270112,146,85,46,270114,3195,270111,270113,270115,101115,2080,7117,13196],"class_list":["post-597282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-attorney","tag-baldoni","tag-blake-lively","tag-celebrities","tag-complaint","tag-cost","tag-defamation-claim","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-justin-baldoni-case","tag-lawsuit","tag-legal-fee","tag-liman","tag-other-wrongdoing","tag-ruling","tag-ryan-reynolds","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-wayfarer-studios"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597282","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=597282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}