Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds Are Ari Emanuel’s “Ride Or Die”; Endeavor CEO Gives Power Couple Full-Throated Support In Justin Baldoni Battle

deadline.com:

Ari Emanuel has long been known to consider loyalty a top virtue and last night the Endeavor CEO came out unabashedly for Team Blake in the convoluted and sprawling  conflict between the It Ends With Us star, Ryan Reynolds and former WME client Justin Baldoni.

I’ve known Ryan and Blake for over a decade,” Emanuel said at a taping of the Freakonomics Radio Live show Thursday night. “They’re really incredible people,” he added. “In Hollywood, they have been incredibly successful.

People work with them, they’ve never had any bad mojo out there or treated people badly. They are charitable – we help them with their foundation – they’ve given tons of money away.” Franchise superstar Reynolds signed with WME in 2014, with Gossip Girl alum Lively inking with the agency in 2015.

Baldoni began being represented by WME in 2019. Bluntly calling what allegedly went down during production of the Sony distributed IEWU and the online smear campaign that Lively says Baldoni, Crisis PR chief Melissa Nathan and their minions subjected her to “a fucked up, bad situation,” the TKO exec also told host Stephen Dubner that it was he who personally dumped the Jane the Virgin vet from WME on December 21. “I fired him,” Emanuel proclaimed of Baldoni’s pink slipping from his then agency, as Deadline reported, one day after Lively filed a sexual harassment and retaliation complaint with California’s Civil Rights Department. “She felt that she was not being protected,” Emanuel stated of Lively and concerns the actress seemingly expressed repeatedly during IEWU filming, “She complained and then these people tried to go after her.