Blake Lively will have her legal fees paid by Justin Baldoni but isn’t entitled to additional damages for harm caused by his defamation claims, a court found Friday.
Under the settlement reached last month, Baldoni waived his right to appeal the court’s order last year dismissing his $400 million lawsuit against Lively, opening the door for the actress to recover her legal costs and pursue damages under a California law intended to shield sexual harassment victims from retaliatory defamation claims.
That law, the court said, “does not create an end run around the entire set of carefully crafted federal procedural rules designed to protect the rights of the parties.”
“It instead establishes a narrow exception to the usual litigation process for a specific and limited kind of relief,” wrote U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman in the ruling. “Compensatory and punitive damages do not fall within that exception.”
The judge found there’s no evidence that Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer advanced allegedly defamatory assertions with malice.
The order decides the last legal issue in the case after Lively and Baldoni reached an 11th-hour settlement to avert a headline-splashing trial over alleged sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us. Now, the court will asses how much in legal fees she should be paid, with her lawyers submitting a breakdown of their hourly rates and how long they worked on the case.
The bill could reach into the seven figures considering the pedigree of lawyers Lively had on her legal team, led by heavyweight litigators Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson.
Under the California law Lively asserted, the actress moved for attorneys’ fees, plus treble and punitive damages, for harm caused by Baldoni’s defamation claims. The law, which went into effect in 2024, is intended to shield sexual harassment and assault victims when they report misconduct as long as they had a reasonable basis for their claims.
