This is per Deadline, reporting on Baldoni’s latest attempt to keep parties locked into his lawsuit, despite legal efforts to extract themselves. (At this point the Times and Sloane have both argued they shouldn’t be part of this fight.) In efforts to shoot down Reynolds’ own dismissal hopes, Baldoni’s legal team paints Reynolds as an active conspirator, working with Lively to exploit “Lively’s false insinuations to coerce the Wayfarer Parties”—i.e., Baldoni and his fellow producers on the movie—”To cede to them power and authority to which they were not entitled.” (There has long been an argument over how much creative input Lively and Reynolds had over the film’s final fate, including assertions that Lively commissioned an alternate cut of the film that Sony ended up using over Baldoni’s, granting her an executive producer credit.)
“Reynolds and Lively, along with the Sloane Parties,” the filing claims, “engaged in a coordinated effort to exaggerate benign interactions in service of a false narrative that Lively had been sexually harassed. They did so to instill terror in the Wayfarer Parties and leverage it to accumulate power.” Despite being Reynolds-focused, Baldoni’s latest filing doesn’t really get into specific actions the actor committed against him, instead lumping his decisions in with those of his wife. (Notably, it skips over the bit where Baldoni very loudly claimed that the Reynolds-played Nicepool character in last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine was based on him, possibly because someone finally sat him down and explained that seeing a deliberately irritating douchebag of a character and immediately going “Hey, that’s me!” is a bad look, regardless of whether that inspiration can be proved.)
Because this is the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni case, the back-and-forth between the parties almost immediately descended into accusations of “Who’s the better feminist?” Reynolds’ camp fired back a statement earlier today that “Unlike Mr. Baldoni, who built his brand pretending to be a man who is ‘confident enough to listen’ to the women in his life, Ryan Reynolds actually is that man and he will continue to support his wife as she stands up to the individuals who not only harassed her but then have retaliated against her.”
