The attorney for Justin Baldoni said on Tuesday that the on-set tensions and allegations of sexual harassment from Blake Lively against his client — “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni — stemmed from the “unfortunate fact” that Lively did not read the book the film was based on.
Bryan Freedman told Megyn Kelly that Lively, who filed a sexual harassment complaint against Baldoni on Dec. 20, “didn’t understand” some of the content of the film, which is based on the novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover. He did not provide evidence for his assertion that Lively did not read the “It Ends With Us” source material.
Freedman argued if Lively was “sexually harassed to such a degree,”as detailed in her New Year’s Eve lawsuit, “she wouldn’t [have] return[ed] to the film.”
Watch the full “Megyn Kelly Show” segment, which also featured a previously unaired voice note from Baldoni, below.
“The unfortunate thing is, she actually didn’t read the book and didn’t understand what the book was about,” he continued.
Lively objected to being shown pornography by Baldoni’s producing partner Jamie Heath — who is also named in her suit. Freedman said the footage shown was a “video of a home birth,” as it related to a birth scene in the film.
“That’s not pornography,” Freedman said, emphasizing that the film featured “a set of scenes that involve rough behavior and domestic violence and serious issues like that.” He added that if anyone felt “uncomfortable in any way on the film,” Baldoni “took responsibility for it.”
Freedman went on to say that he’s going to release “every single text message, every single document, everything on a website” as it relates to the case so the public can “come to their own conclusions and determine whether or not there was sexual harassment.”
He also repeated Baldoni’s standing argument that, contrary to Lively’s claim that Baldoni and his reps organized a smear campaign against the actress, she had orchestrated one against him.
Baldoni later sued the New York Times for defamation after they published the article “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” that shared Lively’s initial complaint.
In the aftermath of that report, Baldoni was dropped by WME, the agency which still represents Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, along with more professional fallout.
When asked to respond to Freeman’s remarks, Lively’s camp re-shared a previous statement from today, highlighting this portion: “A classic tactic to distract from allegations of this type of misconduct is to ‘blame the victim’ by suggesting that they invited the conduct, brought it on themselves, misunderstood the intentions, or even lied. Another classic tactic is to reverse the victim and offender, and suggest that the offender is actually the victim.”
Watch the full “Megyn Kelly Show” segment in the video above.
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