The Ryan Reynolds lawsuit that drew headlines in 2025 was a $400 million countersuit filed by actor and director Justin Baldoni, who accused Reynolds, his wife Blake Lively, and their publicist of orchestrating a campaign to seize control of the film It Ends with Us and destroy Baldoni’s reputation. A federal judge dismissed the claims against Reynolds on June 9, 2025, and the entire dispute between the parties ended in a settlement in May 2026 with no money paid to Lively or Reynolds.
Why Reynolds Was Named as a Defendant
Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios filed the countersuit on January 16, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where it was consolidated with Lively’s harassment case under Judge Lewis J. Liman. The complaint listed causes of action including defamation, civil extortion, breach of contract, invasion of privacy, breach of implied covenant, and tortious interference with contract.
Reynolds was not part of the film’s cast or crew. Baldoni’s theory was that he acted in concert with Lively behind the scenes. According to the filings, Reynolds and Lively “exaggerated benign interactions” to build a false narrative of sexual harassment, then used that narrative to “instill terror” in the Wayfarer parties and take control of the project. The complaint also alleged Reynolds knew the smear-campaign narrative was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
One specific allegation involved Baldoni’s talent representation. The countersuit claimed Reynolds pressured Baldoni’s agent at WME to drop him as a client at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere. WME denied it, saying the representative was not even at the premiere.
The Nicepool Claim
A distinctive piece of the case against Reynolds focused on a character he wrote and played in Deadpool & Wolverine: “Nicepool.” Baldoni’s legal team argued the character was a deliberate mockery of Baldoni, pointing to the man bun, dialogue referencing intimacy coordinators, and a line about identifying as a feminist.
In January 2025, Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman sent a litigation hold letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger and Marvel president Kevin Feige demanding preservation of all documents related to the character’s development. Reynolds’ legal team later dismissed the claim as “thin-skinned” complaints about constitutionally protected parody.
Reynolds’ Motion to Dismiss
Reynolds filed a motion to dismiss on March 18, 2025, through his attorneys at Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The motion rested on several arguments. Calling Baldoni a “predator,” the filing said, was constitutionally protected opinion. Reynolds himself, his lawyers argued, had no formal role in It Ends with Us and was acting only as a “supportive spouse.” The countersuit, they wrote, was about “hurt feelings” rather than actionable legal claims.
The motion also alleged Reynolds and Lively had been named as defendants because Wayfarer co-founder Steve Sarowitz had “promised to spend up to $100 million to ‘ruin’ Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds.”
Lively filed her own motion to dismiss on March 20, 2025, invoking California Civil Code Section 47.1, a statute that protects people who report sexual harassment from retaliatory defamation suits.
The Dismissal
On June 9, 2025, Judge Liman dismissed the countersuit. On the defamation claims, he found that Lively’s sexual harassment complaint was legally privileged, and that Baldoni had failed to show Reynolds, publicist Leslie Sloane, or The New York Times “would have seriously doubted these statements were true based on the information available to them.”
On the civil extortion claim, the judge ruled that Lively’s demands for workplace protections amounted to “legally permissible hard bargaining or renegotiation of working conditions” rather than wrongful extortion. He wrote that an employee can insist on protections against sexual harassment without being accused of extortion, and that if an employer agrees, it cannot later claim to be the victim of wrongful threats.
The defamation and extortion claims were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could not be refiled. The judge gave the Wayfarer parties until June 23, 2025, to file an amended complaint limited to contract-related claims. Baldoni chose not to do so. Freedman said this was a deliberate strategy to preserve appeal rights, explaining the team believed it had “a better chance of winning on appeal based on a dismissal of the first complaint rather than a subsequent complaint.” Final judgment was entered on October 31, 2025.
Lively’s legal team called the outcome a “total victory and a complete vindication” for everyone who had been “dragged into” the countersuit, including Reynolds and Sloane.
Sanctions Against Baldoni’s Legal Team
On March 27, 2026, Judge Liman issued a formal reprimand against Baldoni’s lawyers under Rule 11, which lets courts sanction attorneys for filing frivolous claims. The judge found that lawyers from Liner Freedman Taitelman & Cooley and Meister Seelig & Fein had asserted claims that were “legally frivolous and factually baseless.” Four parties in the countersuit had no basis to sue for civil extortion, he ruled, and there was no “conceivable basis” for contractual relationship claims between Lively and several individual plaintiffs.
The judge declined to impose monetary sanctions, reasoning the sanctionable claims had not imposed a burden beyond what was already required to address the legitimate parts of the case.
How the Dispute Ended
By the spring of 2026, only three of Lively’s own 13 claims against the Wayfarer parties were still standing, and jury selection had been set for May 18, 2026. Before trial, the parties settled. On May 4, 2026, lawyers for Lively and Wayfarer Studios announced the resolution in a joint statement acknowledging that the film “is a source of pride to all of us who worked to bring it to life” and that “concerns raised by Ms. Lively deserved to be heard.” The specific terms were not made public. Lively received no financial compensation.
On June 5, 2026, Judge Liman granted Lively’s motion for attorney’s fees related to defending against the dismissed countersuit, again citing California Civil Code Section 47.1. He found she had made her sexual misconduct complaints “without malice,” which justified the fee award. He denied her request for additional compensatory or punitive damages, ruling the statute did not create “an end run around the entire set of carefully crafted federal procedural rules.” The dollar amount had not been set as of June 2026. Baldoni’s attorney characterized it as “limited attorney fees for a single claim.”
Freedman said Baldoni’s right to appeal the dismissal of the countersuit was preserved but could not formally proceed until the attorney’s fees motion was fully resolved.