Justin Baldoni’s Lawsuit Against Blake Lively Gets Tossed by Judge

In a pivotal legal case that has been the talk of Tinseltown in recent times, a federal judge has given the green light to Justin Baldoni to throw the lawsuit at Blake Lively over It Ends With Us literally out of court. The twist of events comes in the wake of and back bickering among the stars, which started when Lively last year accused Baldoni of a case of sexual harassment and his subsequent retaliation.

In response to the lawsuit filed by Lively and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, the star of the film along with the production company, Wayfarer Studios, has filed a massive $400 million counterclaim. They contended that the morally impaired pair have damaged his name and dignity since they falsely accused him of sexual harassment and tried to extort money from him. Yet, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Liman terminated those allegations on Monday – at least for now.

Aside from denying Baldoni’s case, the judge also gave a lesson on the law of defamation, reasoning that a statement made in the course of a lawsuit shall not be a ground for a defamation case, so Lively could not be dragged to court for anything contained in her own lawsuit. Moreover, as to the matter of the attempt of extortion, the court held that Baldoni’s allegations were opinion, in other words, that he said Lively tried to take the control of the movie away from him and on the other hand, threatened not to promote it weren’t of such a nature as to constitute extortion under Cal law.

The third point of the judgment was Lively’s non-promotion and non-acceptance of advertising materials. In the course of the court hearing, the defense lawyer was quite useful in revealing that there was no legal duty on Lively to promote or sign off on the movie’s marketing stuff, and this information was detrimental to Baldoni’s infringement of copyright claim.

Despite the foregoing, it might not be the end of the legal battle. Lively’s team is granted the opportunity to make a new or changed statement for the case if they wish to redefine their allegations to include possibly losing out on a contract.

But as of now, Blake Lively can, in any case, mark one down as a victory in a public and a very messy legal battle.