Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s courtroom drama continues after their face-to-face July 31 deposition showdown in New York City. To the dismay of Badloni's team, Lively has once again secured a win.
On Friday, Aug. 8, Judge Lewis J. Liman granted Lively’s motion to strike a 292-page rough draft of her deposition transcript from the court docket. Meaning that they agreed with her claim that Baldoni’s team filed it publicly “with no plausible legal reason to do so” other than to fuel a press narrative.
“The Wayfarer Parties’ attachment of the entire, nearly 300-page deposition — after citing only two pages of it in the Letter — served no proper litigation purpose and instead appears to have been intended to burden Lively (and as a result, the Court) and to invite public speculation and scandal,” Judge Liman wrote in his order, per PEOPLE.
“The conclusion is inescapable that the Wayfarer Parties filed gratuitous amounts of irrelevant pages so that, if Lively moved for continued sealing of the irrelevant pages, the Wayfarer Parties could then use Lively’s response for their own public-relations purposes," the judge continued. "The Court has not only the power but also the responsibility to step in."
According to filings earlier this week, Lively’s lawyers accused Baldoni’s camp of treating her testimony like a PR stunt, leaking details about the deposition almost immediately to TMZ and the Daily Mail, including what time it started (10:13 a.m. ET), what she wore, and who was in the room. They argue those leaks created a skewed public narrative that Lively arrived with an oversized entourage, while Baldoni came alone with his lawyer.
In reality, they say, Lively sat across from Baldoni himself, along with Wayfarer executives Jamey Heath, Steve Sarowitz, Melissa Nathan, Jennifer Abel, and eight attorneys representing the Wayfarer and Wallace parties, two of whom questioned her directly.
“Consistent with their goal of creating a media circus around Ms. Lively’s deposition, it also appears that the Wayfarer Defendants immediately leaked details… to the tabloid media,” wrote her attorney Esra Hudson.
Hudson called the public filing of the full, uncorrected transcript “a manufactured excuse to force the transcript into the public domain as fodder for the Wayfarer Defendants’ media campaign.”
Baldoni’s lawyers have pushed back, questioning why Lively would want to conceal her own testimony “in an action in which she is the plaintiff” and insisting she’s provided no evidence of a leak.
They also claimed Lively “admitted” the only smear campaign she had personal knowledge of involved someone else, which her team calls cherry-picking.
In a statement to PEOPLE after Friday’s ruling, a spokesperson for Lively said they are “pleased with the outcome of her deposition and now look forward to deposing Justin Baldoni and each of the co-defendants in short order.”
They added, “Deposition testimony is confidential for good reason — it’s evidence in a legal proceeding and is subject to objections and evidentiary rules. Juries aren’t just handed deposition transcripts to read at home, and instead they listen to testimony that is presented at trial under a judge’s supervision.”
Lively filed a sexual-harassment and retaliation complaint against Baldoni in December, accusing him of misconduct on the set of It Ends With Us and orchestrating a smear campaign, allegations he has denied. In June, Judge Liman dismissed Baldoni’s $400 million countersuit against Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds. Both stars are expected to testify when the case goes to trial in March 2026 in New York.