Well, that was fast: Within hours of being hit (along with his fellow producers at Wayfarer Studios, and multiple publicists they'd reportedly hired to help manage the story surrounding them) in a lengthy sexual harassment complaint from Blake Lively, It Ends With Us director-star-producer Justin Baldoni has been dropped by his representation at WME. That's usually the dead canary at the bottom of the coal mine when it comes to a Hollywood performer getting ready to have a pretty bad time; the decision was reportedly (per Deadline) made in the immediate aftermath of Lively's complaint becoming public.
If you haven't read said complaint, it is, as they say, a doozy, running to 62 pages, and alleging two separate levels of bad behavior on the part of Baldoni and his co-producer on the film, Jamey Heath. The first layer concerns their conduct on the set of It Ends With Us, with Lively accusing her director/co-star of a whole cavalcade of inappropriate behaviors, including physical boundary crossing (including improvising moments like biting her lip during on-camera kisses, without talking through things beforehand), repeated comments about Lively's weight and appearance (including allegedly interrogating her personal trainer about her weight, and crying that she wasn't looking "hot" enough in photos), and some stuff that just sounds outright weird, like allegations that Baldoni claimed to be able to talk to the dead, and said he'd spoken to Lively's father, who died in 2021. ("It was off-putting and violative for Mr. Baldoni to claim a relationship with her recently deceased father.")
The other layer of allegations kicks in after the film was completed—which only happened after, in the wake of last year's strikes, Lively basically said she wasn't coming back to finish the movie unless a number of changes were made to how things on the set were run. That produced a multi-point agreement between Lively and Wayfarer (which Baldoni co-founded, adding another level of complication) that included agreements like the inclusion of an intimacy coordinator on set, much tighter controls on who could have access to the set while Lively was filming nude scenes, and a prohibition on, say, abruptly showing Lively nude videos of anyone's wife in the process of giving birth. (It came up, apparently, after Lively stated she didn't want to be nude for a birth scene in the film.) It also included a non-retaliation clause that said Lively couldn't be targeted for bringing up these issues, either during filming, or during the film's promo tour. Which Lively is now asserting Baldoni violated by launching, with several publicists, a campaign to discredit her, supposedly kicked off after Baldoni realized that neither Lively or her husband Ryan Reynolds was following him any more on social media, and trouble might be brewing.
Those accusations make up the second half of the complaint, and quote from thousands of pages of texts, emails, and other documents that Lively subpoenaed in the months since the film's release. Some of the details in the texts, largely between Baldoni's publicists, seem deliberately vague—including one where crisis consultant Melissa Nathan writes (responding to an assertion that Baldoni wanted to feel that Lively "can be buried"): "We can't write it down to him. We can't write we will destroy her… Imagine if a document saying all the things he wants ends up in the wrong hands." But there is much talk of friendly journalists, planting stories, and manipulating social media sites like Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. For their part, Baldoni's lawyer says all of these communications were just planning and strategizing, and called Lively's complaint a "desperate attempt" to improve her reputation, and accused her of retaining her own PR consultant to plant damaging stories about Baldoni in the press.
Anyway: Baldoni has now been dropped by his agency. (Both Lively, and Reynolds, remain WME clients.)
