Blake Lively wants Justin Baldoni to pay millions of dollars for filing a frivolous defamation suit against her, in a test of a California law aimed at protecting sexual harassment victims who speak out.
Lively has accused Baldoni, her director and co-star, of sexually harassing her on the set of “It Ends With Us” and of retaliating against her for complaining about it by launching an online smear campaign. Baldoni responded with a $400 million defamation lawsuit in which he accused Lively of attempting to destroy his career with false allegations.
Judge Lewis Liman handed Lively a significant victory in June, when he dismissed Baldoni’s lawsuit. A trial on her allegations is on track for next spring in federal court in New York.
In a motion filed on Monday, Lively’s attorneys argued that she should be awarded multiple millions of dollars to cover her attorneys’ fees and costs. She will also seek treble damages for her economic, emotional and psychological harms as well as punitive damages for abuse of the court system.
Lively is relying on the Protecting Survivors from Weaponized Defamation Lawsuits Act, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2023. In her motion, she states that the law “ensures that individuals who experience sexual harassment or retaliation are able to share their experiences with courts, agencies, the press, and others, without fear of being sued for doing so.”
The law provides immunity from defamation lawsuits to accusers who have a “reasonable basis” to file a sexual harassment complaint, and do so “without malice” — that is, without knowing the claim to be false. Lively’s attorneys argue that those criteria have been met.
Though he dismissed Baldoni’s complaint, Liman did not make a ruling on whether the California law applies to the case.
Baldoni’s attorneys have argued that it does not.
“Lively fabricated her allegations of sexual harassment, either wholesale or by exaggerating benign (and not harassing) interactions in a concerted, malicious effort to seize control of the Film and later to restore her reputation after a well-publicized series of marketing missteps that sullied her reputation,” Baldoni’s attorneys wrote in a filing earlier this year.
They have also argued that in order to find that the California law does apply, Liman would have to essentially short-circuit the trial by ruling on disputed factual matters. They also argue that the law deters litigants from making good-faith arguments, and therefore it “impermissibly chills the exercise of the rights guaranteed by the Petition Clause of the First Amendment.”
Lively’s team wants an order for damages followed by, if necessary, a hearing to determine the amount.
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