Justin Baldoni dropped by agency following Blake Lively’s sexual harassment claim

Posted On December 22, 2024December 22, 2024

Justin Baldoni, the actor and director behind the hit summer romantic drama It Ends with Us, has been dropped by his agency following a lawsuit filed against him by co-star Blake Lively.

The move followed swiftly after news broke of the lawsuit on December 21st. Lively is suing Baldoni for sexual harassment that allegedly took place on the set of the film and for retaliation against her in the press. The court filing includes thousands of pages of alleged texts and emails between Baldoni and his PR team that Lively alleges are proof that they had engaged in a coordinated smear campaign against her. 

Following the suit, Baldoni’s agency, WME, which also represents Lively, dropped the actor-director as a client. According to Deadline, the decision was made at least in part because of the lawsuit, though the agency did not respond to requests for comments. 

Lively’s suit contains ten complaints relating to Baldoni’s behaviour on set and his alleged attempts to create negative press about her in retaliation. 

News about the tension on set surfaced around the time the film was released over the summer, especially when it was revealed that Lively and other members of the cast had informed Sony Pictures and Baldoni’s production company Wayfarer, that they would not appear with Baldoni at events.

The suit claims that after Lively complained about the director’s behaviour, Sony Pictures held a meeting in which Baldoni agreed to follow several ground rules for the rest of the production. They included “no more showing nude videos or images of women to Blake, no more mention of Baldoni’s alleged previous ‘pornography addiction,’ no more discussions about sexual conquests in front of Blake and others, no further mentions of cast and crew’s genitalia, no more inquiries about Blake’s weight, and no further mention of Blake’s dead father.”

Documents in the filing contain messages between Baldoni and a crisis public relations manager, Melissa Nathan, who he hired in August. In the messages, Nathan, who has also represented Johnny Depp and Drake, said (via The New York Times) that she and her team could “bury anyone,” and proposed to hire contractors to flood social media with “full social account take downs,” by starting “threads of theories” and generally working to “change the narrative.” She allegedly added, “All of this will be most importantly untraceable.” 

Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, has denied all the allegations, saying that they are “false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt.” He also alleged that Lively had brought the suit to “fix her negative reputation.”