Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s attorneys trade snipes — as NYC judge warns them to tone it down in bombshell court battle: ‘They started it’

nypost.com:

their bombshell Hollywood court battle.Manhattan federal judge Lewis Liman instructed lawyers for both Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds and for Baldoni not to make “extrajudicial statements” that could sway potential jurors in advance of a March 2026 trial.“You’ve got a lot in front of the court that gives, I think, the public plenty to feast upon,” Liman said at the end of the first court hearing in the dueling litigation fight over alleged harassment on the set of “It Ends With Us.”He noted that he wanted to avoid the case devolving into “satellite litigation involving the statements of a lawyer.”The agreement came after Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, admitted that his squabble with Lively’s lawyer Michael Gottlieb over what each side has said to the media was childish.“Not to sound like a four-year-old fighting a four-year-old with ‘They started it,’ but in these kinds of cases, once someone says something it becomes fact: There’s no way to fight against it,” Freedman said.But he still insisted: “This was not started by us, your honor.”Lively, 37, sued Baldoni, 41 — who’s also her co-star and director of last year’s “It Ends With Us” — for $250 million, claiming he sexually harassed her while filming and launched a smear campaign when she spoke out about her alleged treatment.