Blake & Ryan Want A Protective Order To Cover Texts With Other Celebs
She’s hoping to leave her “dragons” out of this.
Ever since It Ends With Us premiered in the fall of 2024, the movie’s cast has been embroiled in drama. And it sounds like the public dispute won’t be ending anytime soon. After co-stars Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively filed damning lawsuits against one another, a judge set their court date for early 2026.
On Jan. 27, 2025, New York federal judge Lewis J. Liman ruled that Baldoni and Lively’s case will be taken to court on March 9, 2026. While that is still quite some time away, the judge set an initial conference between the actors’ teams for early February 2025, during which the attorneys will address complaints about the publicity the lawsuit has received prior to trial. This comes five days after Lively’s team requested a gag order on Baldoni’s lawyer, who had been making several public comments and leaked footage from It Ends With Us.
As the heated battle continues throughout 2025 and into 2026, here’s a timeline of the whole situation.
August 2024: Fans Notice Tension
Before anything litigious went down, Baldoni and Lively’s behavior leading up to the It Ends With Us premiere was sending up red flags. Several people began to notice the movie’s two lead actors strangely weren’t doing any press together. Speculation about a rift exploded after the premiere red carpet event, where Baldoni did not take any photos or interact with any of his cast members.
Dec. 21, 2024: Lively Files A Legal Complaint
On Dec. 21, the New York Times published the legal complaint that Lively had filed against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment on the film’s set and orchestrating a smear campaign against her during the movie’s promotion. Ten days later, Lively officially filed a lawsuit on these claims against Baldoni and his PR team.
Jan. 16 2025: Baldoni Sues Lively
A couple weeks after Lively’s suit, Baldoni shot back with one of his own. In his Jan. 16 filing, Baldoni accused Lively of defamation, claiming that she was intentionally misrepresenting his actions in her lawsuit.
Feb. 1, 2025: Baldoni Creates A Website With His Timeline Of Events
At the start of February, Baldoni shared a massive dump of screenshots of redacted emails and text messages to a website he created in an attempt to prove his side of the story. A few days later, Lively’s lawyers subpoenaed all of Baldoni’s phone records, claiming that the website Baldoni and his lawyer Bryan Freedman created left out important context.
"We will now receive all of the 'receipts' that, unsurprisingly, are nowhere to be found on Mr. Freedman’s website," the statement read. "And like Ms. Lively, those 'receipts' will have their day in court."
Freedman responded to the subpoena: "This massive fishing expedition demonstrates that they are desperately seeking any factual basis for their provably false claims. They will find none."
Feb. 18, 2025: Lively Amends Her Complaint To Include 2 Unnamed Co-Stars
After Baldoni’s website went live, Lively’s legal team added significant claims to her formal complaint, most notably mentioning that Baldoni made other women on the It Ends With Us set “uncomfortable,” and two other actresses in the movie are prepared to testify against him, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“These victim-witnesses have given Ms. Lively permission to share their communications in the Amended Complaint as they are laid out, and they will testify and produce documents in the discovery process,” a spokesperson told the publication.
THR speculated these unnamed actresses may be Jenny Slate and Isabela Ferrer — the only other female leads besides Lively in the movie — but that has yet to be confirmed.
March 6, 2025: Blake & Ryan Request Protective Order For Private Texts
During a March 6 hearing, Lively and Reynolds’ legal team team asked for a protective order over concerns that Baldoni would “leak” messages between Lively and her A-list friends. “There is a significant chance of irreparable harm if marginal conversations with high profile individuals with no relevance to the case were to fall into wrong hands,” the couple’s attorney, Meryl Conant Governski, said during the virtual court hearing, per Page Six.
“There are 100 million reasons for these parties to leak information because the PR value is greater than complying with the court’s orders,” she continued. (The public has already seen some texts between Lively and Baldoni, in which she referred to her A-list supporters as her “dragons.”) The couple’s team is seeking an “attorney’s eyes only” category for sensitive information, which would include texts and Lively’s medical records.
In response, Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, agreed that Lively’s medical records should remain private. However, Freedman took issue with the notion of protecting celebrity texts. “What the other side is asking for because there is celebrity, because there is powerful people in the industry … somehow there is a different law that applies to them,” he said during the hearing, per Deadline. Freedman also said that he had “gone to great lengths to not mention third parties by name,” per Page Six.
Judge Lewis J. Liman has not decided the case yet, but he did say that the court is “strong in terms of protecting the rights of the public,” per Page Six. According to Deadline, Liman also called the case “a feud between PR firms.”
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