The fallout from the bitter Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga has kept making headlines, even after both parties settled the legal dispute on May 4, 2026.
It began in mid-2024, when reports of on-set drama during the filming of It Ends With Us started leaking, before exploding into a full-scale controversy in December, when Lively took the matter to court.
Highlights
- In December 2024, Blake Lively sued her ‘It Ends With Us’ co-star, Justin Baldoni, for allegedly running a smear campaign against her.
- Newly released text messages showed that Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, pushed Sony Pictures Entertainment to back the claim months earlier.
- Despite publicly praising Lively, Sony executives’ private DMs showed that they did not think highly of Lively.
She sued Baldoni, alleging inappropriate conduct, harassment, and orchestration of a smear campaign. Baldoni countersued in January 2025 for defamation and extortion, seeking $400 million.
Now, text messages between Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, and talent agent Warren Zavala from August 2024 have been released, shedding new light on the debacle.
“Ryan Reynolds is a nasty piece of work, and these two bullied everyone,” one user wrote in response to the leaked chats.
Blake Lively faced severe backlash ahead of the film’s release and blamed it on Justin Baldoni
Over the last couple of years, lawsuits have exposed text messages from multiple parties, including Blake Lively’s conversations with her former best friend, Taylor Swift.
The newly revealed chats between Reynolds and Zavala appear in unsealed court documents, according to the Daily Mail.
The conversation came amid backlash against Lively ahead of the film’s release, which she claimed Baldoni manufactured with help from PR Melissa Nathan and Texas content creator Jed Wallace.
Lively faced heavy criticism at the time over several issues, but primarily for being “tone-deaf” about the gravity of a movie that dealt with domestic violence.
She was blasted for launching a hair care brand—Blake Brown—during the film’s promotion, naming themed cocktails after elements of the story, and rarely centering the realities of domestic violence in public interviews.
Reports of friction between Lively and Baldoni also began to surface around the same time, adding fuel to public outrage against her.
On August 14, Tony Vinciquerra, then-chair and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio that handled distribution and co-financed the theatrical release, made a statement praising Lively’s “passion and commitment to advancing the conversation around domestic violence” and expressed interest in working on “12 more movies” with her.
However, texts with Zavala showed that Reynolds was unhappy with the results and demanded that the studio claim the backlash was an orchestrated smear campaign.
Ryan Reynolds pressured Sony to back Lively’s allegations against Baldoni
The text chain, dated August 17, 2024, begins with Reynolds telling Zavala that Sony would “have to start advocating for her.”
“The studio messaging in the article didn’t carry in the way he had hoped,” Zavala said of a Sony executive, attempting to placate Reynolds. “My point was they need to dispute it to k**l it, not resolve it publicly.”
“They need to frame it the right way! This isn’t hard,” Reynolds argued back, and then typed out a draft for Sony to put out.
He wrote, “The sentence needs to start with: ‘Sony would like to acknowledge the predominant narrative around [It Ends With Us]... This is incredibly wrong and untrue. This is part of a systematic and coordinated campaign by a crisis PR team.”
He wrote, “The sentence needs to start with: ‘Sony would like to acknowledge the predominant narrative around [It Ends With Us]... This is incredibly wrong and untrue. This is part of a systematic and coordinated campaign by a crisis PR team.”
“This feels like they’re trying to thread the needle. They just need to f***ing go straight at this… They’ve let her hang on the marketing angle as well, which is unforgivable,” he went on. “This is a mess they got her into. They are not keeping her safe on every front.”
“Sony needs to step up for real… They have to stop bulls**tting us and get in front, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because these guys are doing this all with ZERO repercussions. Baldoni needs to see that an entire studio knows what he’s doing.”
Sony execs made multiple negative remarks about Lively in private DMs
Despite Reynolds’ best efforts, Sony never released his drafted statement. Moreover, text exchanges between Sony’s top brass, released in January 2026, exposed what the studio truly thought of Lively.
“She did it to herself,” Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, wrote about Lively in August 2024 after she insisted Baldoni be banned from the film’s New York premiere until she had cleared the press line.
“If she just let him come to the premiere, or didn’t make all the cast unfollow him or kick him off the movie, and did what everyone ever has done in show business for time and
memorial, which is to protect ‘the show,’ then none of the sleuthing would have happened,” he added, referring to netizens digging into the matter.
“The hair sale at the same time was epic level stupid. She wouldn’t listen. She knows better,” Panitch concluded.
Tahra Grant, Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer for Sony Pictures Entertainment, wrote, “She orchestrated all this drama in a totally unsavvy and amateur way
(and basically threatened…Sony) and now is mad it backfired on her.”
In a legal deposition taken by Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, Ange Giannetti, the Sony Pictures executive overseeing It Ends With Us, admitted to calling Lively a “f**king terrorist.”
Reynolds’ remarks drew contradictory statements from insiders
A source close to Reynolds told the Daily Mail that he had simply been trying to protect his wife.
“It is no secret that Ryan believed his wife was being targeted by a crisis PR team hired by Baldoni,” the insider said.
“This is the same crisis team that has been accused of these smear tactics in at least 5 other lawsuits, according to the NYT.”
The New York Times report, which relied heavily on earlier revelations by The Hollywood Reporter, said publicist Stephanie Jones, model Paige Jimenez, and three other women have accused Baldoni’s PR firm of running targeted campaigns.
Another insider retorted that Reynolds’ claim was baseless, as the PR team “had been on board for just six days.”
“These recently unsealed messages show Reynolds pressing Sony to not only publicly blame a newly hired crisis PR team for the backlash against Blake but also supplying the language he wanted the studio to use,” the source said.
“How could it have orchestrated a backlash that predated its involvement? Even a movie star cannot rewrite the timeline. Demanding that a studio repeat an accusation does not make it true, no matter how famous you are.”
In July 2026, Baldoni and his wife, Emily, finally spoke up publicly about the legal drama, saying that “many painful things” were “spoken into existence over the last couple of years,” and that they were now collectively healing from the trauma.
"Sony execs could see clearly," one user wrote
