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- [00:00]
Narrator/Host
Focus features in Blumhouse Obsession.
- [00:03]
Co-host/Guest
When I have a crush on a
- [00:04]
Narrator/Host
guy no one knows, be careful.
- [00:07]
Reeves Wideman
I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the entire world.
- [00:10]
Narrator/Host
Who you wish for? Obsession is 96% fresh on rotten Tomatoes.
- [00:16]
Reeves Wideman
I love you so so so so much.
- [00:19]
Narrator/Host
It's blood soaked nightmare fuel.
- [00:21]
Reeves Wideman
What kind of spills you put on her?
- [00:23]
Narrator/Host
You have been warned. Obsession. Rated R under 17 animated without parent only theaters May 15 with special engagements in
- [00:32]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Campside Media.
- [00:35]
Co-host/Interviewer
Thanks everyone for coming back to Infamous this week. We just wanted to say thank you for listening to our show. We are so appreciative and if you want to hear one of our narrative scripted series that goes over several episodes, scroll back to the Rich Utah Wives and their Scams Part one in your podcast player. We think you'll like it. This week we're going to talk about a story that's really been in the news with all its twists and turns and and it's been reported that it's all over now, but we're hearing that is not actually the case. So let's get to it.
- [01:11]
Host/Interviewer
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Infamous, a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. So you may have seen that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the former co stars turned combatants, settled much of their legal dispute just before it was about to go to trial. This is their big fight over It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover novel turned blockbuster film. They really hate each other, if you don't remember the details. The former Gossip Girl star accused a little known guy, Justin Baldoni, of sexual harassment, all claims of which were later dismissed. But the whole thing ratcheted up into a much messier fight with Blue Blake accusing Baldoni of a smear campaign, Baldoni fighting back with a $250 million libel lawsuit, and the pair duking it out between their very expensive lawyers. It's become, as one of the greatest writers of our generation called it, the greatest Hollywood shitshow of all time. And we'll be speaking to that writer, Reeves Wideman, who wrote a fantastic story for Vulture all about it later this episode. But with this settlement, Blake and Baldoni seem to have diverted a crisis of going to trial and having even more embarrassing texts and voicemails come out. According to reports, neither of them got any money as part of the settlement with a source close to the matter. Very curtly saying anyone purporting to confirm the terms of the confidential settlement at this point is misleading you. More information about this confidential settlement will be on the court's document docket in the coming days. Okay. Baldoni's side, meanwhile, was said to be ecstatic with the wrap up. But even if they've avoided going to trial, it has just been so not good for either of their careers. And we've learned about the inner workings of some of the richest people in Hollywood. Their conversations with their agents. Oh, God. And with each other. It is fascinating and reveals a lot about how the powerful talk to each other. But it is not clear if either of the reputations will recover. We'll get to all of that in a second. But first, I want to take you back to when Blake and Baldoni's relationship began. This is when Blake was just a humble leading lady talking to her director, Justin Baldoni. Here's a voicemail she left before they began shooting the movie.
- [03:42]
Blake Lively (voicemail)
Hey, I hope you're so well. Just wanted to connect, just to put something on your radar. So between us, like, this is so premature for me to even share this with you. All good. All good stuff. Headline is great. Good, great stuff.
- [03:59]
Host/Interviewer
So that's the preamble and now she's starting to talk about how great it would be if Justin would push the production dates of it ends with us.
- [04:07]
Blake Lively (voicemail)
And I've been, you know, really, really under it. I don't talk to him like I talk to you. So I haven't told him, like, how stressed I've been with not having a baby. Nurse still don't have one, by the way. Found someone and she's only available for like five days. Like, I know that our schedules are scheduled. I'm not trying to move anything. But like, if by chance you're like, oh, my God, if I could go two weeks earlier, that would actually be great. Then amazing. Selfishly, what I would love about that is that, you know, Ryan and I have also been really stressed about spending a month apart. And, you know, I just so not. None of it's your problem. That's what I'm talking to as a friend at this point more than anything. But anyway, I told you in four minutes what I could have told you in 30 seconds. Okay. I hope you're well. Send my love to your family who don't know me. Take care.
- [04:56]
Narrator/Host
Bye.
- [04:56]
Host/Interviewer
So that's how things started, but it's not where they ended. Here to talk about how it ends with us led to the knockdown drag out fight to end all Hollywood fights is Reeves Wideman. Reeves wrote an incredible piece for New York magazine, Vulture, about Blake and Justin. And the title amazing is quote, regretting us how the feud between Blake Lively And Justin Baldoni led to a $300 million trial that could torch both of their careers. So, Reeves, welcome to the show.
- [05:33]
Reeves Wideman
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [05:35]
Host/Interviewer
So, as we just heard from that voicemail, things between Blake and Justin started friendly at first. Can you tell me a little bit about these early interactions? You poured through lots of court documents. I mean, I cannot even imagine how much reading thousands of pages.
- [05:52]
Reeves Wideman
Yeah, well, there was a lot to pour through, and I think it was definitely interesting coming into this, mostly just knowing how rancorous and bitter this had become to sort of see that at the beginning, it was, in a lot of ways, like any kind of new relationship. In some ways, you're sort of flattering each other. You're trying to figure each other out. You're trying to sort of, kind of subtly take advantage of certain things or assert yourself, but at the same time, same time, like, you know, you had a director and an actor, you had two co stars in a romantic movie that had to figure out how to sort of like each other. So you can see in the way they're talking to each other. And I think this is very common all over the world, but maybe in. In Hollywood in particular, you're being nice to people to their face. And then pretty quickly, you could kind of see in some of the text messages that they were each sending to others. Not being so nice when you're not talking to someone's face.
- [06:52]
Co-host/Interviewer
Right. Blake Lively writing to Justin Baldoni saying, thank you for your collaboration. I'm really proud of what we're doing. Baldoni, I mean, basically sucks up to Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, and he kind of sends what you wrote, what amounted to a mash note. I asked Blake for your number well over a month ago, and I've wanted to text you for a while, but my good old nerves got the best of me. I guess this is just an awkward text to say I'd like to be friends.
- [07:17]
Host/Interviewer
I mean, you said this is how people talk in different industries. But I do have to say that this is really the way people talk in Hollywood. It's not really the way people talk when they're, you know, in engineering at a big research university. Like, there's a degree to which these text messages, all the emails, everything has given a window into the etiquette of how you have to act and the bowing and scraping that was going on. When did this start going wrong?
- [07:48]
Reeves Wideman
It turned sour pretty quickly. Blake Lively signs on to this movie in December of 2022. For the first few months of 2023. There's generally you're exchanging these, these polite notes, collaborating on the script. There's of course arguments and whatnot, but they're sort of in the vein of creative arguments. It was sort of In April of 2023, about a month before they were scheduled to start shooting, that things started to go wrong. There's a now infamous moment where Blake Lively had sort of rewritten a scene. She sent it to Justin Baldoni, didn't quite get the response that she wanted, invites him over to her apartment in Manhattan to talk about it, and oh, Ryan Reynolds is there to compliment Blake's script. And then a couple hours later, her good friend Taylor Swift shows up to also complement the script. But again, that was in kind of the creative zone. Around that same time, Baldoni started to do a couple of things. Each side would look at it differently. That started to make Blake kind of uncomfortable. Or at the very least like, okay, hold on a second, maybe I'm not sure I'm vibing with this guy at a minimum.
- [08:58]
Host/Interviewer
So. But what about the role of the nudity and the fact that she was not okay with the way that that was being portrayed in the script or what she was being asked to do? I mean, it is true that ahead of time, Hollywood actresses need to say like, this is how far I'm gonna go. It is a thing that across the spectrum, I think a lot of women are nervous about because they're like, I don't wanna be pushed into something later by this director. I said, this is where my line is. I'm showing. I don't know what she said, like side boob, but only if it's clear I'm still wearing like a loose fitting shirt.
- [09:32]
Reeves Wideman
You know, a bikini though, can only be seen in a bikini.
- [09:35]
Host/Interviewer
Side boob with a bikini. Right, exactly. So these things have to be really metic. Negotiated. And she felt he was taking advantage of that. Or you think that was sort of spurious. The idea he was.
- [09:46]
Reeves Wideman
I think Justin Baldoni put himself in a really bad position by being the person who owned the rights to this wildly popular book, who decided that he was not only gonna direct the movie, but he was gonna star. His character is very problematic. That's sort of the whole plot of the movie. So, you know, in some ways, I think if everyone could go back and he could decide to be the director or the actor, it might have gone a little better. But there were just all of these things where it wasn't one thing. There was the discussion about the nudity. There was one Point where Baldoni, in the most generous way to describe it, is a boneheaded move, decided to call Blake's personal trainer and ask him how much he thought Blake weighed, because there was a scene in the script where he was going to have to lift her. Blake had just given birth to her fourth child. She had expressed some discomfort about her weight. I think there's a way to sort of innocently believe that he was genuinely concerned about back problems that he had. But to do it that way and for it to then get back to Blake, there was just this sort of series of compounding things that led her to just kind of not. Yeah. Not feel comfortable around this guy, who, again, was not just the director, was someone who she had to have chemistry with as her co star in this movie.
- [11:08]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah. And after that whole how much does Blake Lively way, I'm worried about my low bone density, somehow Lucy Damon, Matt Damon's wife, heard about the story and texted Blake Lively about it and said, sorry, but what the actual fuck? He's dead.
- [11:25]
Reeves Wideman
Yeah. And there were texts from Blake complaining about this at the time. You know, it's not like she. She dropped out of the movie as a result, but it was just kind of the first crack in getting her to think, oh, who's. Who's this guy that I've signed up to make a movie with?
- [11:39]
Co-host/Interviewer
Being an actress on set, especially if there's sex scenes and nudity and your director is both the actor and the director and owns the rights, that's a very complicated little power dynamic there. It can be vulnerable. But I. I don't know that this would have been a problem if Blake really liked and respected who she was working with. You know, I don't get the sense that she liked or respected Baldoni. When I go through this, I feel like she thinks that she's kind of better than him, which she is in some ways, in regards to her fame level and her acting career and her level of friends.
- [12:12]
Reeves Wideman
Yeah, I mean, the power dynamics are really scrambled here. Like, in theory, Baldoni is in charge, but at the same time, the movie depends on Blake Lively's star power to be successful. And so you can see pretty clearly how that would end up leading to butting heads. I mean, there are certainly accusations that have been leveled at Blake both throughout this saga and before of, you know, bullying to get her way. You sort of see that throughout the production of this movie of her, you know, the generous way of putting it, as she asserted herself like, she's the star here. She's a woman in a movie that is about a woman is for women generally like that is the audience for Colleen Hoover books. So in some ways it's not unreasonable that she would have asserted herself there.
- [13:01]
Host/Interviewer
There's even this voicemail, Justin Baldoni leaving a voicemail for Blake sort of explaining that he is to what she has to say and that he feels bad that in the past people on movie sets haven't taken her seriously. So let me play some of that.
- [13:19]
Narrator/Host
There's one thing that I do need to say which is I am so sorry you have been through what you've been through with these other filmmakers and producers or whoever the people were that you worked with. It just me off those that I'm just still kind of blown away that this is the industry that we're in and that you've experienced that as a woman. And I know I don't need to say it, but that's not at all gonna be or will be. Hopefully it's not been the experience with me.
- [13:54]
Host/Interviewer
I guess the overall question though is did Blake Lively take an inch here and then a mile? You know, she's an actress, she can make some suggestions, but then she's really rewriting the script. She's really to get consensus around her and change the nature of the project in some ways. And he obviously doesn't like that.
- [14:22]
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- [15:26]
Host/Interviewer
What they did to your family. You're lucky to make it out alive.
- [15:29]
Reeves Wideman
Streaming on Peacock these men are going to come after me.
- [15:33]
Co-host/Interviewer
Taking them out is my only chance.
- [15:35]
Narrator/Host
Put a bullet in her head from the co creator of Ozark.
- [15:39]
Host/Interviewer
Looks like a family was running drugs.
- [15:41]
Reeves Wideman
Execution style killing. It's rare for the Keys. Any leads on who they might have been running for? The cartel killed my family.
- [15:48]
Co-host/Interviewer
I'm gonna kill them.
- [15:50]
Blake Lively (voicemail)
All of them.
- [15:50]
Narrator/Host
MIA Streaming now only on Peacock.
- [15:57]
Co-host/Interviewer
Okay, so we start shooting. What starts happening on set.
- [16:01]
Reeves Wideman
You know, there's problems literally on day one. The first thing that happens is that some paparazzi photos leak from the set. They show Blake Lively in what a large portion of the Internet described as frumpy outfits. There had been a controversy to begin with. Blake Lively's about a decade older than the character in the book. So there was already this controversy about her casting and her look. And then she and Baldoni have this meeting on the second day of production and he ends up teary. At one point it gets emotional about what this should be. So there's already kind of this tension. Later that night, one of the producers of the film, who again to like complicate all the power dynamics, is one of Justin Baldoni's best friends, a guy who has never really produced a movie before, ends up knocking on Blake's door of her trailer to try to have another meeting about these outfits and what they're going to do about the fact that the Internet is all upset about this. The versions of events here start to veer in different directions depending on who you're talking to. But everyone more or less acknowledges that Blake was in the trailer getting her body makeup taken off. She was topless. He came in, there was kind of a like, hold on a second, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Like, look the other way. And then at some point, you know, Blake's talking to him while he's supposed to have his back turned, and he's suddenly turned around, like looking at her in the mirror. And she at one point later says to him, like, look, I know you weren't trying to like cop a look or whatever, but it obviously an uncomfortable moment. You get just these series of events. There were a few times when Baldoni had commented to Blake that she looked hot in a particular outfit, or he told Jenny Slate that she looked sexy in a sort of leather pants that she was wearing. And again, these are these kind of gray area moments where Baldoni is saying, I am the director of this movie trying to get my actresses to kind of lean into a certain kind of aesthetic, which is part of what we're doing. But I think in the context of everything, both Jenny Slate and Blake Lively just felt uncomfortable around him. There Was a birth sequence where Blake Livey is filmed giving birth. And there were questions about how much clothing she would wear. Justin Baldoni casted a friend of his as the doctor sitting at the end of the bed. There were all these things where it's just like if you take any of these and kind of isolation, it's a bad decision. Everyone kind of apologized at any given moment. But you can also feel how this stuff just happening over and over again. You can sort of again see in the text messages just how much this was kind of wearing on Blake Lively. Jenny Slate, as well as just kind of a bad experience.
- [18:43]
Host/Interviewer
You know, we did an episode about this case a while ago, and in that episode I was maybe harsher on Justin than I should have been because we didn't have all the information back then. But I would maintain that really what you have here is Justin, you know, is being a little weird as he admits one of his insecurities is that he's sort of socially insecure and he's not really sure what to say in a given moment, which is, you know, is. It creates a dissonance because he's so good looking that you think somebody who would be that handsome would be really socially astute. So nobody really believes that maybe he's just this neurotic, insecure guy underneath it. And then one after another, all these things that are on the line of creepy to really not okay. I do have to say one of the things you put a point on in your story, which I had forgotten, is that Jenny Slate totally backs up Blake Lively in this. And so you have to not only think Blake Lively is a frivolous person and really self involved, you know, Mother of Dragons and trying to create all this chaos, which all may be true, but also that Jenny Slade is a bad reporter of the truth. You have to also believe that.
- [19:59]
Reeves Wideman
And in real time, you see the text as this all is happening. She reports, she goes to the producers. So again, there is definitely a way to judge the seriousness of all this. But you cannot just say, oh, Blake Lively overreacted to this. This was a situation where, as we reported in the piece, one of the producers of the film at one point says to this Sony executive, like, think we need to replace Justin. It got to some point where people who have been on movie sets before, many, many times have, I'm sure, honestly probably seen crazier shit than all of this. Were kind of like, we have a problem that we need to address.
- [20:36]
Co-host/Interviewer
So the production stops for the writers strike. And during that time Blake basically gets Justin Baldoni to sign an agreement about how he'll behave when they come back to set. I mean, what was in that agreement?
- [20:50]
Reeves Wideman
Yeah, I mean, this ends up becoming sort of a document that's somewhat in dispute. The purpose of it becomes in dispute. After the strike ended, Blake Leith's attorney sent this 17 point sort of. They call it a return to work list of protections. As all parties sort of agree they were sort of reasonable protections. Some of the stuff, you know, which again, Baldoni's side says in their defense was already in place. It says there will be an intimacy coordinator. There was an intimacy coordinator from the beginning. There are other things where it would kind of say, you know, that no one's gonna walk into Blake's trailer while she's nude. They had apologized for that already. You know, like, there were kind of these ways in which it really formalized stuff that had been dealt with in an ad hoc, kind of casual way from Baldoni's perspective. It was again, kind of like, we may have done a few, like, dumb things. We think these are exaggerations. We don't think that. That by signing this, we are saying that we did all of this stuff, but we want to make this movie. We need you to come back. We agree that we're not going to do any of this stuff going forward. So we're going to sign this document. And so from that moment, there were, I think, five or six weeks left of filming. Everything went smoothly. There are text messages between Blake and to Jenny Slate saying, don't worry, come back to set. You won't have to hug anyone. It's going to be okay. But the tension was there. And with the signing of that document, whatever power dynamic was vague before is now kind of clear that Baldoni began to feel like, uh, oh, you know, she's gonna hold this document over my head. I kind of have to give her whatever she wants or I'm gonna get canceled.
- [22:32]
Co-host/Interviewer
Once they finish shooting, Blake Lively kind of wrests control over the edit. And Justin and Blake essentially have a bake off to see whose edit is gonna win. I mean, Lively hosts a screening of her edit where she invites Matt Damon and his wife and Ben and then his wife Jlo at the time. And Matt Damon said he would watch the movie and encourage Blake to make her next one with his company instead, saying, we're kind of like a cult, but a really nice one. And Blake jokes that she already had a name for a documentary about her experience on. It ends with us called Lights Cult Action which is a reference to Justin's Baha' I faith. And then, you know, Ryan Reynolds also kind of gets in on it and it seems to get really petty. He has a Deadpool movie that comes out at the time, and there's a character in it who, to me, bears a striking resemblance to Baldoni. This character, Nicepool, he has his hair in a man bun, a sunny disposition, and a persistent wokeness that blinds him to his faults. And at one point, he declines to join a fight because he has low bone density, which obviously sounds like an echo to the concern over doing the lift of Blake Lively. When Nicepool mentions Lady Pool, he says, you know, she just had a baby too. You can't even tell. Before insisting it's okay for him to say that because I identify as a feminist. So that feels like the most epic movie subtweet. If we're still using that phrase, I
- [23:58]
Reeves Wideman
would assume that, that Blake and Ryan thought that this was going to be an inside joke that would never come out, but it, it did and, you know, came back to bite them a little bit.
- [24:10]
Co-host/Interviewer
So Blake Lively's cut ends up winning out. It is the one that gets released. It scores better with test audiences. They choose to go with it.
- [24:20]
Reeves Wideman
Well, actually not to cut you off, but it actually scored worse. One of the, like, the ironies of this is test audiences, focus groups, who knows whether they're the ultimate judge of anything but. But her cut scored below Baldoni's. But it was within a threshold that then kind of left things up to the discretion of the studio to weigh in. And, you know, you'll hear people now say, oh, Blake's cut was better. Blake's cut was better. But actually, at the time, the numbers very slightly gave the nod to Baldoni's cut.
- [24:59]
Co-host/Guest
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- [25:29]
Reeves Wideman
2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
- [25:34]
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- [25:35]
Host/Interviewer
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- [25:37]
Reeves Wideman
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- [25:38]
Host/Interviewer
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- [25:41]
Reeves Wideman
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- [25:45]
Host/Interviewer
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [25:49]
Reeves Wideman
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly barking at Zootopia 2, now available on Disney, rated PG.
- [26:00]
Co-host/Interviewer
So even though Blake Lively has won and her cut is the cut that ends up getting released, she's not happy because the movie has a big publicity problem. People are speculating about a fight between the co stars, and Lively is getting slammed online. When Sony puts together a report looking into the online sentiment after opening weekend, it finds a shocking disparity. 89% of the social media chatter is supportive of Baldoni, while just 4% is pro lively. That's not good for Blake.
- [26:32]
Host/Interviewer
So the movie is a huge success. Like, she does win out. Okay, maybe it's the worst cut, but she still wins out. You know, they're making $50 million in the opening weekend. It's going to be 350 million worldwide. I mean, it's pretty good. But Blake Lively says this stupid thing about, grab your girls, grab your florals, go see my domestic violence movie, which everybody is just like, what is wrong with this person? And there's all this hate coming at her online. And Ryan Reynolds starts to feel like he and his wife are getting hung out to dry. He even sends a message to his agent saying, the thing that I believe is both my wife and I are missing the most in this debacle is your rage. And he wants, you know, his agent's company to get Ari Emanuel, who is like the Jeremy Piven character in Entourage, to go full Ari right there. He's like, we're a listers. Why are we getting slammed online? Then suddenly, Blake figures out that there's this shadowy digital operation against her.
- [27:36]
Reeves Wideman
The publicity tour for this movie, to put it lightly, was a shit. It's really complicated to suss out exactly what led to what and what were the leading or overwhelming factors in anything. The thing that sort of set it all off, which was a choice on Blake's part, was she really did say, I'm not going to do publicity with Justin. I'm not going to show up to the premiere with him. I'm not going to do press events with him again, her co star, the director of the movie. And. And so pretty quickly, yes, people began to suss out that something was wrong. You know, Blake has kind of tried and her team has kind of tried to argue that this was totally manufactured. I just think that if you look at it, the Internet does what the Internet does. And people were, for whatever reason, bored in early August looking for someone to get mad at, and they found someone. At a minimum, Justin Baldoni hired people who have had a very public track record, for instance, of working for Johnny Depp. It was the crisis communications team that he hired in that case. There have been all kinds of speculation, accusations, some evidence of, you know, manipulation going on online in favor of Johnny Depp. There were obviously kind of corollaries that people were drawing between the kind of person who would defend him and why Justin Baldoni would definitely want that kind of person. And it's very clear when you look at the text messages and the emails that again, at least Valdoni and the people around him believed that there were levers they could pull to boost things, to suppress things.
- [29:22]
Co-host/Interviewer
What were they actually doing? Like, what do we know?
- [29:25]
Reeves Wideman
Unfortunately, we don't know as much as we'd like and maybe as much as we would have known if this had gone to trial. Certainly what we know is there are text messages from Baldoni's team where they are talking about the fact that, as one of them put it, Justin wants to know that Blake can be buried. There are text messages in response from another publicist saying, of course we can bury her. We just can't write that down for him in a document. And you look at those things and you're like, well, what do you think they were going to do from there? You know, on the flip side, there are text messages where you can see them saying, like, I can't believe how well this is going and how well the Internet is just doing our dirty work for us. There are texts where Justin is like, guys, I really want to make sure we're not using bots. There are all these anonymous accounts commenting. I think he and his team were trying to walk a line of obviously not wanting to get caught doing whatever they did. And I think you can look at sort of the stuff they texted about. You can see some of the expert reports that Blake's lawyers filed. They claimed to show the number of TikTok comments on videos was abnormal. The number of upvotes and down votes on certain content on Reddit was just something you couldn't really explain by just the fervor of the Internet. He paid this guy, Jed Wallace, that we don't know all that much about. And everyone I talked to about him didn't really seem to at least want to say what they thought he could do. Paid him $30,000 a month. Baldoni's team says all he was doing was watching what was happening on the Internet. I'd like to get paid $30,000 a month to just watch what was happening on the Internet and not have to do anything. So it's a little hard to believe that they weren't doing anything. And I think this gets to kind of some of the problem with Blake Lively's case was it was hard to really get to firm, hard evidence that he did stuff that definitively caused some of the reaction online, just. Just by itself.
- [31:29]
Co-host/Interviewer
We also should say, once again, that all of the sexual harassment claims that Blake Lively bought against Justin Baldoni were dismissed.
- [31:38]
Host/Interviewer
But the nature of her claim is that this is retaliation, and that was allowed to go forward, right?
- [31:44]
Reeves Wideman
Yeah, correct. Blake had reason to believe that what had happened to her might rise to the level of harassment. She was reasonable in thinking that she could report it. And so the alleged retaliation from Beldoni's side could go forward to trial.
- [31:57]
Host/Interviewer
It was supposed to be on May 18th in New York City. It's federal court, Right. So it's maybe where Diddy went to trial. It's in that downtown complex. And then, boom, they've settled, really right before they're gonna go into voir dire and pick the jurors. So they release a statement in which it says, basically, you know, it's great that Blake had her chance to sort of be heard, even though this didn't really go, you know, we've come to terms, all is good. And pretty much immediately after that, it comes out that no money changed hands. And pretty much immediately after that, stories start appearing. And I heard Blake's lawyer talking about, well, we may have settled this case. And by the way, it was, you know, tens of millions of dollars in legal fees at one point. You count up the number of people who are cc'd on some of these court records, and it's like. Like 30 or so lawyers. These firms are like, eleven hundred dollars an hour. So what the hell is that, though, that Blake is still, it seems, trying to litigate, and she's saying there is still one piece of this where Justin could be personally liable. And by the way, they make the point that the judge had removed Justin's personal liability for the big case that was settled. So as I'm reading this, I was like. Like, is she trying to get the message out that actually she's still going after Justin personally and this case is not over?
- [33:32]
Reeves Wideman
It's complicated. I'm gonna get the exact words wrong. But, you know, I think Baldoni's side claimed a resounding victory, and Blake's side claimed total victory in the supposedly equal settlement. So someone is either lying or wrong. Unless somehow this is the first case in history where both sides got exactly what they wanted, and they're such Cooperative people, of course. Yeah. Look, I take Blake at her word to a degree about saying this was never about the money. She and Ryan Reynolds, they have plenty of money from all kinds of different streams. She was not suing him to make herself whole. This was about making a point, a point for herself. I think you could see the ways in which winning a case like this, this could benefit her in the long run. But I think I take it sincerely that she felt she was wronged and wanted to try to rectify that for herself and other people who end up thinking that they're being beaten up online. If she thought her chances were very good of winning, she could have gone to trial, but she didn't. Her lawyers were expressing confidence, but it was also going to be hard to totally prove this case. And I think at best it was a toss up. And so for both sides, obviously, I think was a real incentive to not take the stand, to not have several weeks of daily tabloid coverage about every part of your life. So her lawyers are now saying there's a relatively new law in California where she brought her initial complaint. It's designed to prevent people who are accused of sexual harassment from then immediately filing a defamation claim to sort of browbeat someone who's trying to report harassment. She's basically arguing Baldoni, after she filed her complaint, hired this really hard nosed pit bull lawyer out of Los Angeles who filed a $400 million defamation suit against Blake, against Ryan Reynolds. He at one point filed it against the New York Times, which had written a story about this. Their basic allegation is that that itself was inappropriate, that that was furtherance of the retaliation. So the claim that's going forward, I believe is not anything really to do with, not anything that come before. It's sort of this more narrowly targeted. They're still calling it retaliation. And they've argued that Baldoni's lawyers continue to wage this retaliation campaign. It's possible she gets some legal fees. It's possible. It's somewhat significant. The legal fees, as we've talked about, are significant in this case, but it won't be the victory she totally sought from the beginning. And ultimately, you know, while Baldoni is sort of personally liable because he filed the case, it's really his lawyers and the decisions that they made that I think are as much on trial.
- [36:28]
Host/Interviewer
So why do you think this case captured the imagination so much? Is it just because it's so, in a way, it's so literary, like each person is one kind of character to the public, but then another person in the private. And then there's just so many twists and turns of who's up, who's down. Or do you think it really taps into this deep feeling that people in Hollywood are terrible?
- [36:53]
Reeves Wideman
I think there were a lot of elements here. People love drama. They love drama on the Internet. And this had it from the very beginning, before we knew anything about the allegations behind the scenes, before we knew about the smear campaign. It was just this weird drama. It was also this thing where the pendulum swung back and forth so swiftly from, you know, during the press tour. Blake's the bad guy. She's the one grabbing her florals and saying all this dumb stuff to, oh, no, no, she's the victim. And then very quickly, Baldoni's lawyers were so aggressive in their response, releasing more and more text messages and emails, Some of these messages that showed them being kind of lovey dovey early on, you know, then it really swung back in Baldoni's direction. I found just kind of anecdotally talking to people in real life, person to person. A lot more people are sympathetic to Blake and women, I think, especially that I've talked to about this. But online, it really was very pro Justin. And I think also the dribbling out of the court documents. I think whatever you think of his claims and his perspective on this, I think his legal team did a pretty masterful job of dribbling out bits and pieces of news in a way that our sort of modern media ecosystem, TikTokers, YouTubers, Instagram reelers, whoever they are, would read every filing that Baldoni's lawyers filed as if it was just the next break in some case. And so it just, it became the story that continued to sort of offer good content. I was actually talking to someone who is one of the more prominent YouTubers following this case, and she was kind of like, look, the world is dark and terrible in a lot of ways. Nobody died in this case. It's kind of fun to immerse yourself and enmesh yourself in a petty drama that at the end of the day, everyone's still rich and beautiful and things are okay.
- [38:55]
Co-host/Interviewer
All right, well, thank you so much, Reeves, for joining us.
- [38:58]
Host/Interviewer
And everybody pick up Reeves's book, Billion Dollar the Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Newman and WeWork, which is a fantastic book.
- [39:07]
Reeves Wideman
Thank you both.
- [39:12]
Co-host/Interviewer
So after talking to Reeves.
- [39:13]
Blake Lively (voicemail)
Yes.
- [39:14]
Co-host/Interviewer
Even after all that, we still had some on questions about Justin Baldoni, his religion, the Baha' I faith, and his company, Wayfarer Studios. So before we go, we want to give You a capsule history on that from a writer named Amy Kaufman, who wrote a big story about Justin Baldoni for the LA Times. You'll hear Vanessa talking to her.
- [39:36]
Host/Interviewer
So Justin Baldoni is born in Los Angeles. His dad runs this entertainment marketing companies, but actually they decide to move to rural Applegate Valley, Oregon. So he's raised in a double wide there, and it's a very conservative town, it's a blue collar town, and he can't fit in. And, like, says that he was harassed by the other boys when he was young, and then he became, like, addicted to pornography just to, like, get rid of his boredom and his insecurities. And yet at the same time, he's part of the Baha' I faith, so he's not allowed to have premarital sex. And he says that his girlfriend at Cal State Long beach actually, like, initiated sex with him without his consent. And this really made him anguished. So how do you see the Baldoni we know today with that person? Do those things square up?
- [40:32]
Co-host/Guest
I was pretty surprised at how forthcoming he was about some of the sort of, like, embarrassing sexual experiences he had in the locker room in high school. Some of the older boys gave him the nickname Balbohner. So I think, you know, he's positioning himself as someone who is coming into the world of adolescence as inexperienced and, like, wanting to be faithful to his Baha' I beliefs, but also feels tempted by pornography and all these. These things you mention. And so when he starts his company, Wayfarer, making socially conscious content, it's upholding some of the views of the Baha' I faith. It almost felt to me reading it like, this is like proof of concept. If I can put good content out in the world, maybe it will, like, help me prove to myself that, you know, that I can stick to these beliefs that I've always been taught I should uphold.
- [41:32]
Host/Interviewer
So you bought it? I mean, you basically bought it.
- [41:35]
Co-host/Guest
No.
- [41:37]
Host/Interviewer
Okay.
- [41:37]
Co-host/Guest
No, I did not buy it. I mean, if anyone who has seen Justin Baldoni's how long is it? Way too long staged proposal to his wife Emily, 27 minute video where he has hidden cameras and choreographed flash mobs. You know, when a dude is telling you all the reasons they love you, but it's all about the ways that you have made them feel? Not like, what's special about you. That was the energy it was giving.
- [42:08]
Host/Interviewer
What about the Baha' I faith? Part of it. There's like 170,000 Baha' I people in the US so, you know, it's not a huge amount, but still, you know, that's not nothing. And it's still very conservative in some ways. Women can't be on the religion's highest governing body, the Universal House of Justice. Same sex marriage is not recognized. Alcohol and recreational drugs prohibited. Gossip even is forbidden. I mean, is he devout, do you think, or is this something where he ends up getting a lot of business opportunities by hooking up with people who are Baha' I and having them fund his creative ideas?
- [42:54]
Co-host/Guest
I mean, both. I think outwardly he's very devout. You know, his entire friend circle is Baha' I. Individuals like Rainn Wilson, also a member. Andy Grammer, a singer, is one of his close friends. And his business partners, as you mentioned, are also in the faith. And in this article, a lot of the folks who worked at Wayfarer said that if they weren't members of Baha', I, they felt sort of othered, and that he would talk about it so much that they felt like maybe tacitly pressured into being a part of this, or at least, you know, endorsing it as something positive. So the guy who has really bankrolled Baldoni's legal proceedings against Blake Lively is Baha'. I. And the way that he and Justin met was because this guy, Steve Sarewitz, wanted to make a documentary about the origins of the Baha' I faith that Wayfarer was involved with. So, yeah, it mixes in different ways. And I think the projects that Wayfarer was making that weren't explicitly a history of Baha' I faith in a documentary still showcase the values that the faith had.
- [44:05]
Host/Interviewer
And so what about his directorial debut, Five Feet Apart? Tell me a little bit about the story behind that and the claims that have been made.
- [44:14]
Co-host/Guest
Five Feet Apart was about two young adults with cystic fibrosis who could not be within five feet of one another because of their illness. And a lot of Justin's content centered around people who had serious illnesses. Like he did a documentary series following people who were facing cancer and other other illnesses. So he seemed really interested in, like, mining this particular area of content and, like, inspiration and resilience were topics he was interested in. And with Five Feet Apart in his documentary series, one of the stories he spotlighted was of this guy with cystic fibrosis named Travis Flores. And Travis was trying to make a movie about his own experience with the illness and his friends in the community. And he called it 3ft distance. And basically he eventually ended up filing a lawsuit against Justin, saying that the idea for Five Feet Apart was stolen from his script. And Flores had a number of Lung transplants. He really had a difficult life. And those around him said that, you know, this lawsuit in the midst of all these very serious health struggles was like, a huge stressor for him, and he eventually ended up dying from CF at 33. And so nothing happened with the lawsuit. Of course, Baldoni's team denies that he had anything to do. It was just a coincidence, they say, that someone he had sort of profiled had a similar experience in the script. But it was, you know, it's like this guy who is Mr. Morality over here potentially stealing the story of a dying young man with cystic fibrosis is. Is not great for his squeaky clean image.
- [46:11]
Host/Interviewer
Were there other situations like that before this big kerfuffle with Blake Lively where maybe not as dramatic as the cystic fibrosis movie, but he was sort of called out as maybe not having that much creative flair?
- [46:33]
Co-host/Guest
Yeah. For the story, we spoke to a few people who either worked at Wayfarer or were associated with it through their various projects. A lot of people say that Justin wasn't necessarily this creative visionary who was, like, showing up and coming up with all these ideas. He put one of his Baha' I buddies in charge of the company, Jamie Heath, who's been involved in a lot of the Blake Lively proceedings. And so there was a mix of reaction from people who had experiences with Wayfarer. Some people were like, you know what? No, they did a lot of humanitarian projects. They did have good intentions. Justin really was like this. This guy who wanted to make the world better. And then there were people who were like, no, he was. He had had a podcast about being a male feminist, and he wanted to put all this warm and fuzzy content out into the world, but he didn't really have that many ideas, and he wasn't living the values he espoused. So he was a phony. So people are torn between those two narratives, you know, which has been echoed in the legal proceedings. Right. It's like, is he this evil guy who made Blake Lively feel uncomfortable on set and did not actually champion the women on set in situations where they were feeling really vulnerable? Or is this a guy who was the victim of, like, more wealthy and powerful celebrities in Hollywood, and Blake and Ryan are just on this power trip? So is it really Blake or is it Justin who's the villain in this? And it's like. Like, it seems they may both suck. Like, I don't.
- [48:08]
Co-host/Interviewer
Thanks, everyone. Hope you enjoyed that little interview with Amy to shed a bit more light on Justin, and we'll see you next week.
- [48:24]
Narrator/Host
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [48:42]
Host/Interviewer
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