Blake Lively Wants Justin Baldoni to Pay $8.04 Million in Legal Fees
Blake Lively is seeking just over $8 million in attorneys' fees and litigation costs from Justin Baldoni, the latest development in a legal battle that has stretched on for more than a year and a half since the actress first accused her It Ends With Us co-star and director of sexual harassment.
What's Being Requested
According to a motion filed Monday night, Lively is seeking $7,495,526.87 in attorneys' fees and $539,514.01 in litigation costs and expenses, for a total of $8,035,040.88. The filing covers legal work performed between January 2025, when Baldoni first filed his $400 million defamation lawsuit against Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, and June 2025, the deadline the court set for amending the dismissed complaint.
Lively's attorneys, Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, said in the filing that some of their billing rates reached as high as $2,187 per hour. The motion argues that the case's unusually high public profile drove up costs substantially, citing thousands of indexed and syndicated media articles along with extensive discovery — more than 7,000 documents produced by Lively, with tens of thousands more produced by Baldoni's production company Wayfarer Studios and other third parties.
The Legal Reasoning
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman ruled that Lively was entitled to recover attorneys' fees under a 2023 California law designed to protect those who report sexual harassment or discrimination from retaliatory defamation suits. At the same time, Liman denied Lively's separate request for damages.
In the new motion, Lively's lawyers framed the fee request as central to deterring future retaliatory litigation. "This gross abuse of the legal system was not meant to win in court — its aim was to retaliate against Lively by falsely branding her a liar, intimidating witnesses and the media, and discouraging others from speaking out," the attorneys wrote.
Gottlieb and Hudson also released a separate statement Tuesday addressing the broader significance of the ruling. "Thanks to this landmark decision, those considering using a lawsuit as a weapon of intimidation have been put on notice that there are consequences for doing so," they said. "The value of this ruling is in the precedent it creates, the accountability it imposes, and the protection it provides to those who may one day find themselves facing similar retaliation for speaking the truth."
Baldoni's Side
Bryan Freedman, the attorney representing Baldoni and Wayfarer, has previously downplayed the significance of Liman's fee ruling. "Ms. Lively was only awarded limited attorney fees for a single claim as part of a case that lasted only a matter of months, nothing more," Freedman said earlier this month, noting that 10 of Lively's original 13 claims were dismissed before the case settled.
Freedman went further in disputing the underlying allegations. "Notwithstanding that all of her sexual harassment and defamation claims were thrown out by the court, Ms. Lively then pivoted to exploit a California law that was established to protect real victims in what proved to be a fruitless mission to obtain damages," he said. "Once again, she failed."
Representatives for Baldoni did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new fee motion. Baldoni and Wayfarer have until July 13 to formally respond to the request, after which Judge Liman will determine the final award amount.
How the Case Got Here
The legal saga began in December 2024, when Lively filed a complaint accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment during the production of It Ends With Us and of orchestrating an online smear campaign against her after she raised concerns. Baldoni denied the allegations and filed his $400 million defamation suit against Lively and Reynolds in January 2025, alleging the harassment claims had been fabricated to seize creative control of the film.
The defamation suit was dismissed in its entirety in June 2025 after a judge ruled that Lively's original allegations were protected by litigation privilege. The two sides ultimately settled their remaining claims in May 2026, just two weeks before the case was set to go to trial in New York. No money changed hands as part of that settlement, but it preserved Lively's ability to pursue her motion for attorneys' fees.
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