Ryan Reynolds Wanted To “Accumulate Power” Over ‘It Ends With Us’ By Turning “Benign Interactions” Between Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni Into Sexual Harassment, Insists Baldoni

deadline.com:

Even before Blake Lively filed her sexual harassment and retaliation complaint with California’s Civil Rights department on December 20 last year, Justin Baldoni alleges that Ryan Reynolds had a major role in his spouse and Baldoni’s blood feud over what really happened during the making of It Ends With Us and ahead of the film’s summer 2024 release.

Now, in an April Fool’s Day opposition filing, IEWU director Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, exec and publicists are determined to block the Deadpool star’s desire to be dismissed from the $400 million and counting defamation and extortion case against Lively, Reynolds, publicist Leslie Sloane and the New York Times. “Reynolds and Lively exploited Lively’s false insinuations to coerce the Wayfarer Parties to cede to them power and authority to which they were not entitled,” a memorandum of law from Team Baldoni states of what allegedly went down. “Reynolds and Lively, along with the Sloane Parties, engaged in a coordinated effort to exaggerate benign interactions in service of a false narrative that Lively had been sexually harassed,” the filing in federal court adds with no shortage of prose. “They did so to instill terror in the Wayfarer Parties and leverage it to accumulate power.” The use of the term “terror” here by Baldoni’s team in what Judge Lewis J.

Liman last month succinctly designated as a “feud between PR firms” aside, Lively over her CRD filing and various lawsuits has long claimed that an astroturfing campaign was instigated against her online last year in the lead up to IEWU’s August release to preempt assertions from the Gossip Girl vet of misconduct on the part of the Jane the Virgin alum.