Justin Baldoni vs. Blake Lively Lawsuit: Emails and Texts Unsealed

The emails and texts unsealed in Blake Lively’s lawsuit against Justin Baldoni show a production that had turned openly hostile long before it reached court: Baldoni telling his agent Lively was “setting me up for a trap,” Lively calling Baldoni a “doofus director” in messages to Taylor Swift, Sony executives privately labeling Lively a “fucking terrorist,” and crisis publicists discussing how to make her “feel like she can be buried.” A federal judge ordered the trove unsealed on January 20, 2026, after the parties filed the messages as exhibits to competing summary judgment motions in the Southern District of New York.

What Baldoni Wrote to His Agent and His CEO

In a December 30, 2023, text to his then-WME agent Danny Greenberg, Baldoni described the shoot as “a gigantic cluster f*ck” and said Lively’s refusal to use a body double for intimate scenes, while insisting one be used for him, was “just setting me up for a trap.”¹ He complained she was “rewriting the writer and Director” and predicted editing would become “a big issue.”²

A February 2024 message to Wayfarer CEO Jamey Heath went further. Baldoni wrote: “She had the nuclear bomb. If she doesn’t promote the movie she can leak that I’m a bad person or that she felt unsafe with me and ‘all the stuff’ she has on me. Then she’s the victim.”³

What Lively Wrote to Taylor Swift

Text exchanges between Lively and Swift, spanning the production and its aftermath, gave Baldoni’s team its most useful counter-material. In April 2023, Lively referred to Baldoni as “this doofus director” and a “clown” who “thinks he’s a writer now.”⁴ She asked Swift to praise a script revision to Baldoni without letting on that the ask had come from her: “Having the greatest living story teller unknowingly echo to him how much you love what we’re doing… will go such a long way.” Swift replied, “I’ll do anything for you !!”⁵

Baldoni’s lawyers pointed to those exchanges as proof of “social manipulation.” Lively’s team called them stripped of context, and in a July 2025 deposition Lively testified she had told Swift she did not have to read the material and did not want her to feel pressured.⁵

The messages also captured Swift reacting to a December 2024 People article about Baldoni: “I think this bitch knows something is coming because he’s gotten out his tiny violin.” She added: “He needs to be beaten by his OWN words.” In the same period, Swift told Lively her texts had begun to feel like “a mass corporate email” sent to “200 employees,” and said she missed her “funny, dark, normal-speaking friend.”⁶

What Sony Executives Said About Lively Internally

The most damaging material for Lively’s public image came out of Sony’s own emails and depositions. Andrea Giannetti, the executive vice president of production overseeing the film, admitted she had called Lively a “fucking terrorist” after Lively submitted her 17-point list of demands and threatened to leave the production if they were not met. Giannetti testified the studio complied because it had already invested roughly $28 million.⁷

After the film’s August 2024 release, Sony CEO Tom Rothman wrote that the public fallout was a “fucking disaster.” He added that while Lively did not “deserve” the backlash, she “did bring it all on herself by refusing to listen to advice… and by selling her products,” a reference to her haircare line promotion during the film’s rollout. Sony president Sanford Panitch called the product tie-ins “epic level stupid” and predicted Lively was “done for” and “unhirable.”⁸

What Lively and Reynolds Wrote to Their Friends

Lively emailed Ben Affleck on May 17, 2024, asking for feedback on the film. She described the experience as “the most upsetting” of her life and said the movie “nearly killed me.”⁶

Ryan Reynolds emailed Matt Damon, and in that exchange Damon joked that his production company, Artists Equity, is “kind of like a cult but a really nice one,” an apparent callback to Lively’s private description of Baldoni as being “in a cult.” Reynolds described the production as “one of the all time zingers on and off set” and called Baldoni a “sociopathic FAUXminist with almost no sense of boundaries or shame.” In an email to author Colleen Hoover, Reynolds joked that her illness was her “body ridding itself of any residual Baldoni.”⁹

After the unsealing, a representative for Reynolds said he “saw his wife fighting daily to stand up against sexual harassment in a private and respectful way, only to face retaliation for doing so,” adding: “If anything, Ryan feels like he wasn’t angry enough.”¹⁰

What the Publicists’ Texts Revealed

Lively’s core allegation was that Baldoni’s team hired crisis publicists to run an “astroturfing” campaign against her across Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. The publicists named in the case were Melissa Nathan of The Agency Group PR and Jennifer Abel, and discovery produced their own texts to each other.¹¹

Abel wrote: “He wants to feel like she can be buried.” Nathan replied that some plans could not be put in writing: “We can’t write we will destroy her.” After the film’s release, Nathan described the online reaction as “CRAZY good”: “The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don’t even agree with half of them.” Abel asked, “So are we in the clear now?! Did we survive,” and Nathan answered, “We survived… We’ve confused people. So much mixed messaging. It’s actually really funny if you think about it.”¹¹

How the Messages Reached the Court

Much of the publicist evidence came out of a separate fight over a phone. Abel had been a partner at Jonesworks PR, run by Stephanie Jones. In August 2024, Abel was pressured to surrender her personal phone at the Jonesworks office. Baldoni and Abel later alleged in a March 2025 lawsuit that Jones “double-crossed” Abel by refusing to return her phone number and gaining unrestricted access to her texts, emails, and photos, then handing the contents to Lively’s publicist Leslie Sloane without a subpoena.¹² Jones’s attorneys said the phone was company property and that the communications were produced in response to a lawfully delivered October 2024 subpoena.¹³

What the Judge Did With the Evidence

The messages fueled months of headlines, but they did not carry Lively’s case on the merits. On April 2, 2026, Judge Lewis J. Liman dismissed 10 of her 13 claims, including all sexual harassment, defamation, conspiracy, and false-light counts. The harassment claims failed because the court found Lively was an independent contractor rather than an employee and could not sue under Title VII, and the judge found that Baldoni’s suggestions for scenes involving sexual acts, given the film’s adult themes, did not create a “sexually objectionable environment.”¹⁴¹⁵ Three claims survived: retaliation under California law against the production entities, aiding and abetting retaliation against The Agency Group PR, and breach of the anti-retaliation provision in the Contract Rider Agreement.¹⁶

Baldoni’s $400 million countersuit against Lively, Reynolds, and Sloane went the other way earlier. In June 2025, Judge Liman found that the threats Baldoni described amounted to “legally permissible hard bargaining or renegotiation of working conditions” rather than civil extortion under California law. Baldoni chose not to amend, and final judgment was entered on October 31, 2025.¹⁷

The parties settled the remaining claims on May 4, 2026, weeks before trial. Wayfarer paid Lively nothing in damages.¹⁸ The joint statement acknowledged that “the process presented challenges” and that “concerns raised by Ms. Lively deserved to be heard.”¹⁹ In June 2026, Judge Liman ruled that Lively qualified as the “prevailing defendant” under California Civil Code Section 47.1 and ordered Wayfarer to pay her legal fees, but denied her request for treble and punitive damages.²⁰

1
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