Blake V Justin: Sexual allegations and talking to the dead

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0:35Shaun Kent:BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Fame Under Fire from BBC Sounds with me, Anushka Matandadauti. In this episode, we're tackling one of the most talked about civil lawsuits. That's Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, its CEO, Jamie Heath, and many others involved in the production of the movie It Ends With Us. Now, when it comes to misinformation, clickbait, ragebait, and keyboard warriors generally talking crap, this case has it all. What you're getting today is a factual breakdown of what's actually alleged. The public legal battle between It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni is headed to a courtroom.

1:18They essentially want this case to happen just in the courtroom, not in the court of public opinion. This is a very serious legal matter, not Barnum and Bailey's circus.

1:28Shaun Kent:Then all the questions you have for an intimacy coordinator but are too embarrassed to ask, it's okay, I'll do it. We are talking to the woman who wrote the rulebook on how to have safe, fake sex, and she's brought props. If there's simulated sex, you know, it really helps to not necessarily have genitalia touching. So we start with cushions like this. It's a lap cushion in the shape of a banana. Just a warning, there'll be graphic sex references throughout this episode. As always, if you've got questions, send them to me on social media or on WhatsApp at 0330678114. That's 0330678114. And don't forget to subscribe and turn on your push notifications so you never miss a thing.

2:06Shaun Kent:Joining me now is our resident criminal defense attorney from South Carolina, whose birthday it is tomorrow. Welcome, Sean Kent. Thank you so much. Happy birthday to me. Yeah, happy birthday to you. How old do you turn in, 30? 51. on. Today we're going to age a few years because we're going through the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni lawsuit, which is like 139 pages long, because why would it be any shorter? I want to get into this. We got this requested while we were doing Diddy so many times. It's one of the most talked about civil lawsuits at the moment. The docket is longer than the Diddy trial, even though he was up against the federal government there.

2:36Shaun Kent:They file a lot. But Sean, I just want to get this key question out of the way for our new listeners. What is the difference between a civil lawsuit and a criminal lawsuit? There's a bunch of complicated differences, but the simplest way to put it is in the civil lawsuit, you're looking at losing your money and the criminal lawsuits you're looking and they're not lawsuits and the criminal complaints you're looking at losing your freedom. And then the other big difference is the burden of proof. When we say burden of proof, the person who is accusing you. So in Diddy's case, it was the United States of America accusing him.

3:13So to win their case, they had to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. So there was just no doubt. So when you're trying to put somebody in jail, you need a higher burden of proof. On a civil lawsuit, Blake must prove her lawsuit by a preponderance of the evidence, which basically means, did this stuff, was it more likely or not that it actually happened? So she has a lower burden than if she was trying to put Justin in jail. So those are the two big differences.

3:40Shaun Kent:OK, so Blake filed this lawsuit, this complaint, this civil complaint in December 2024 and then an amended version in February 2025. It's against Justin Baldoni, Jamie Heath and Wayfarer Studios and others who worked on the film. Her allegations include sexual harassment, retaliation, defamation and others. Now, we've reached out to Justin Baldoni and his lawyers, who are also the lawyer for Jamie Heath, for a statement and they referred us to Baldoni's legal documents where all the claims are denied. Their lawyer, attorney Brian Friedman, called these claims false, outrageous and intentionally salacious and said Lively sought to control the film and her public image.

4:17Shaun Kent:Now, Sean, before I jump into the factual allegations of this lawsuit, I want to talk a little bit about how they started. They kick it off with a quote from Justin Baldoni, who's being sued, his TED talk that he gave. Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life? to hear their ideas and their solutions, to hold their anguish and actually believe them, even if what they're saying is against you? And will you be man enough to stand up to other men when you hear locker room talk, when you hear stories of sexual harassment, when you hear your boys talking about grabbing ass or getting her drunk, will you actually stand up and do something so that one day we don't have to live in a world where a woman has to risk everything and come forward to say the words, me too?

5:06Shaun Kent:Now, the reason I brought that up is because last week we spoke about the Drake lawsuit where he's suing Universal Music Group. And they kick that lawsuit off, Drake's lawyers do, with a quote from Lucian Grange, who is the CEO of Universal Music Group. You work on civil lawsuits as well. You're a broad attorney, so you do criminal defense, civil lawsuits. Are you now writing things knowing that they're going to be read by the public? And do you think that's why these quotes are being included? What's the purpose of that? Absolutely. And that quote, you know, with everything we do, whether it's a trial, whether it's a lawsuit, almost always want to have a theme.

5:41I can promise you during his depositions, during his trial, they'll be bringing that quote back up to say, you said this, this is what you believe. And these are the things that went against it. This is the public face you put on. But you did this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

5:56Shaun Kent:The first allegation here is one of sexual harassment. We have included allegations of calling female cast members sexy, touching and hugging them and then becoming, quote, cold if they pull away, improvising intimacy that has not been coordinated and adding in graphic sex scenes. They specifically talk about this adding in of an orgasm on camera. And it says, quote, Mr. Baldoni insisted he had added them this orgasm on camera for Blake to do because he was making the film, quote, through the female gaze. He made a last ditch attempt after she said she didn't want to do it to keep one in where the couple orgasmed together on their wedding night, which he said was important to him because he and his partner climaxed simultaneously during intercourse.

6:40Shaun Kent:Mr. Baldoni then intrusively asked Miss Lively whether she and her husband climaxed simultaneously during intercourse. Now, the allegation is of sexual harassment. Baldoni's lawyers have previously told the BBC that the allegations made by Lively are categorically false. Does what I just read out meet the bar for sexual harassment? What a great question. And here's the easiest way. So indulge me if I try to explain this. There's something called hostile work environment. That is the umbrella. So when you're dealing with hostile work environment, you're trying to say the environment in itself is hostile.

7:12Now, to prove hostile work environment, you have to come into two subcategories. Either it's severe or something called pervasive pattern. First, you start with what's called pervasive pattern. If somebody has a protected characteristic, what that means is race, sex, age, disability, something like that. And they are saying that at work, the pattern at this workplace was so pervasively hostile that they kept doing little things. The examples you get is at the water cooler. Everybody are saying offensive jokes all the time. Everybody are saying racist jokes all the time. that the pattern at this workplace was so pervasively awful, we couldn't deal with it anymore.

7:56It created a hostile work. Now, it could be sexual, which is what she is saying. It could be racial. It could be all these other things. And so what she is saying and what you have just described is a situation that she said was so pervasive that you could not have a tolerable work environment so something needed to be done. The other one is something called severe. Severe is you just got to prove one situation so you can say it was not pervasive pattern. It was so awful that this one situation was of such a connotation that it makes it awful. What you may not realize that back in 1991 one of our current Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas was trying to be confirmed to be on our Supreme Court.

8:40A young lady by the name of Anita Hill who worked at the EEOC came out and said, he had sexually harassed me for years. As a matter of fact, one day he put a Coke can on my counter and it was one of his pubic hairs on the Coke can. And he talked to me about it. Exactly. The look you just gave is why I said that example, because that is a severe situation in which she could say it was so severe that anybody would have opened their eyes the same way you just did, Anushka. And it created such a hostile situation. And those are the two categories in which we try to determine if the workforce is so hostile that it can answer your question whether or not it could be sexual harassment.

9:17Shaun Kent:What about intent? Does that play into it? Absolutely. I love this topic. So first, the next thing they talk about with the elements is you have to prove that it is an unwelcomed sexual advance. OK, of course, as you just said. And of course, when we determine the unwelcome sexual advance, it is an objective and a subjective standard. Subjective is, what would a reasonable person in a similar situation have thought about what was happening between Justin and Blake? And then you go to the objective standard of what did Blake think personally? What did she think as a person in the situation? Because there is a disparity in power.

9:54Let's say, for example, a boss says, we were all joking. This was fun. Well, she works for him. An employee, she can say, it wasn't fun for me. you may have thought it was a joke, but for me, it was an awful situation. And so that becomes the hard part of these lawsuits is he will be saying, everybody was in on it. Everybody was dealing it. And that's usually what happens. Everybody was joking. She was joking with us. Here are the text messages back and forth where we were joking. And then the other person on the other side says, I wasn't joking. I was uncomfortable, but I didn't want to lose my job.

10:27It's a very complicated legal issue that seems simple, but it's more complicated.

10:31Shaun Kent:And they do go a long way in setting up what the power dynamics were and outlining that she was technically working for Justin Baldoni at the time. He was her boss. Just going back to that Clarence Thomas example, mostly because I'm traumatized, but also I want to know what happened. Did this set a precedent for these severe acts of sexual harassment? Why is that something you specifically brought up? This is when he was trying to become a Supreme Court justice. And by the way, and these were the confirmation hearings back in 1991. She was at the confirmation hearing. She talked about the fact that he would talk about his sexual prowess at the work environment.

11:03He asked her out on multiple occasions. He described his anatomy. All of this came out in the hearings. What ended up happening is it created a much bigger light on the disparity and sexual harassment in the workforce. People started talking about that. So these public hearings became very public. People ended up watching it. He got confirmed. People were not believing Anita Hill. Some people were believing Anita Hill. But as a result, in our political spectrum, a lot more women got elected and more people started paying attention to sexual harassment in the workforce. And that's why we have these laws that we have now that really go out of their way to determine what happens at work.

11:39Shaun Kent:I'm assuming he denied the allegations. No. Did he deny them? Absolutely. He completely denied the allegations. He said these were vehemently false. Then he's still a justice to this dead. A lot of people don't understand that story or they should. You're such a law nerd. I am such a dork. I love it. You press a button and it just comes out. It's amazing. I'm such a dork. But talking about the bar there, well, when this lawsuit came out, a lot of people picked up on the allegations around what was a birthing scene in the movie. It says, quote, Baldoni insisted to Miss Lively that women give birth naked.

12:13Shaun Kent:So it was not pre-agreed. She says in the script that she would be naked or simulating nudity in this scene. He says that his wife had, quote, ripped her clothes off during labor. He claimed it was not normal for women to remain in their hospital gowns while giving birth. Miss Lively disagreed, but she felt forced into a compromise that she would be naked from below the chest down. So it then goes on to flesh out that during this scene, it was an open set. An open set means that people can walk in and out. There were a lot of people on a movie set. It was also broadcast on the monitors. There was no nudity rider and no intimacy coordinator.

12:46Shaun Kent:It says, quote, Miss Lively was partially nude from below the chest down with her legs spread wide in stirrups and only a small piece of fabric covering her genitalia. She became even more alarmed when Mr. Baldoni introduced his, quote, best friend to play the role of the OBGYN who would be delivering the baby. Miss Lively felt that the selection of Mr. Baldoni's friend for this intimate role in which the actor's face and hands were in close proximity to her nearly new genitalia for a birth scene was invasive and humiliating. Once again, Justin Baldoni denies all of this, but a lot of people picked up on this when the lawsuit came out and they said, that is terrible.

13:22Shaun Kent:How could this be allowed to happen? She's in such a vulnerable situation. But my question to you is in the lawsuit, they keep saying this goes against industry standards and industry practices where you'd have a closed set. It wouldn't be broadcast on the monitors. Well, when you bring a civil claim, how much should we care about industry standards and industry practices? Are they legally binding or is it just a guideline? It's a guideline. It may not be legally binding, but it shows the practices and policies on how things should happen. Industry standards can become the norm. We file a lot of lawsuits saying, basically, you have violated your own policies.

13:59You have set these policies up for a reason. And now that you are violating them, you should be liable for everything that ends up happening. And this situation, she can remember we talk about the pervasive pattern. And this becomes interesting because this is on a shoot. She can say, this was my understanding of how things should be. This is what I signed up for. Because remember, one of the things you asked the question about that I thought was brilliant was the unwelcome sexual event. How does she prove that she did not invite this? She signed on for a movie. We all saw the movie. She was in the movie.

14:30So how is this unwelcome? Well, it's unwelcome because I didn't sign on for the stuff you just added flippantly. I did not sign on for the things that you just decided we should do. This creates the pervasive pattern. I was expecting this. I am a Hollywood actress. These are how things are happening. There should be an intimacy coordinator. There should be this person. We wear a certain outfit, so I'm not looked at as a sexual piece of meat, if you will. This is not a porn suit. This is a regular, but you just change it and put your purient interest in, and that's what has affected me, and that's what has become a pervasive pattern because it goes along with everything else that I've been claiming about.

15:10It's not just one act. It's so many. But she could almost make a claim, as you know now, that it was so severe that it traumatized me. It is the pubic hair on the Coke can. It makes people go, I can't believe that happened.

15:23Shaun Kent:Only on this podcast do we have the pubic hair on the Coke can, as a saying. That's going to become a thing now. Thanks, Sean. But I want to talk about some other accusations in the lawsuit. If we remember, we're looking at sexual harassment, retaliation, breach of contract. We've got two things here that I'll just read out to you. quote Mr. Baldoni engaged in other behaviors that were shocking on several occasions he told Miss Lively that he had spoken to her recently deceased father it goes on to outline that he said that he found 40 dollars in his pocket and this was because Blake had said that her father owned her money so he was taking it even further saying basically he communed with her dead dad who he never met another accusation is quote Miss Lively was not given proper lactation breaks by Wayfarer during filming that's the production company she's suing which sometimes stretched into six hours without a break.

16:08Shaun Kent:The lack of accommodation for her need to express milk caused her to develop painful mastitis. To me, they sound more like endangerment or you said hostile environment before, maybe forced labor. Why is that not one of the things they've officially put on the lawsuit, but these are included? Remember, we talk about the protected characteristic that you have, sex, race, so forth. And so if she's being treated to a hostile work environment based upon her sex, she's a woman. A man would not be treated in the same situation. That goes under the pervasive pattern. Now, like you say, there are these accusations peppered throughout.

16:43Shaun Kent:And then there are the much larger instances that we went over, like the birthing scene. All of these, once again, Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, Jamie Heath, they deny all of this. Then we have the production strikes, the massive ones that Hollywood had for the writers and the actors that happens in June 2023. And it goes on for many, many months. Then in January 2024, they're coming back to set. It's over but Blake says I will only agree to come back to this workplace if there are a list of demands that are met and this includes things like no inappropriate touching not entering her personal space her trailer without asking her etc there's a whole host of them now in the lawsuit it says that she sat down with Justin Baldoni and Jamie Heath and Wayfarer Studios and went through this and they didn't object and they didn't question the veracity of her claims that's what's alleged in the lawsuit so they're back on set she's got this agreement the film is professional It says that in the lawsuit.

17:31Shaun Kent:It wraps up. They're done. They're promoting it. She's out there doing the press rounds, doing her thing. This movie is such an opportunity, such a responsibility when you're servicing a group of people who care so much about the source material. And I really feel like we delivered a story that's emotional and it's fun and it's funny and it's painful and it's scary and it's tragic and it's inspiring. And that's what life is. It's every single color. Now, then we get into the second chunk of this lawsuit, which is really about retaliation, defamation of character, and what is referred to as astroturfing, where they basically, she alleges that Justin Baldoni, Jamie Heath, and Wayfarer Studios systematically tried to destroy her reputation.

18:15Shaun Kent:So we have Wayfarer engaging Melissa Nathan, TAG, which is an agency, TAJ, Mr. Wallace, and Street Relations on behalf of Mr. Baldoni to launch a retaliation campaign against Ms. Lively. That's what they allege in the lawsuit. We know that they did start working together. That is a fact. Then in the lawsuit, it says that they are worried that the HR complaints that Blake had made, she'd go public after the release of the film and she'd get a lot of press and this would end up destroying Justin Baldoni's reputation. Now, through discovery, Sean, can you just explain what discovery is really quickly?

18:46OK, when you file a lawsuit of any kind, if I were to sue the BBC, if I was to sue you, once you file a lawsuit, everything is fair game. There are no secrets. There are no surprises. So in a discovery, you could ask me for everything. You can say, well, Sean, you will file the lawsuit against us. We want your text messages. We want your cell phone calls. We want your emails. We want to interview people who work with you. We want to talk to anybody who have ever made a thought about the BBC. And it goes the same way also towards you guys. So a discovery is the process where there are no secrets, where we know everything.

19:24And that's why people are always reticent to bring lawsuits, because we always advise them. When you break a lawsuit, be ready because nothing's offline. They can find out everything they want and they don't need private investigators. They get to ask you about it.

19:38Shaun Kent:So why can't you just delete everything? I know I've got a bunch of incriminating emails, so I just delete them. It's 2025. Is anything ever deleted? There are things in the cloud. There are things. And that ends up hurting. And don't forget, there's always a paper. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. no hydronated fats in the peanut butter, and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat.

20:12So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

20:21Shaun Kent:And so throughout the other large chunk of this lawsuit, we see a lot of text messages between people working on Justin Baldoni's PR crisis management team. We see what's called a scenario planning doc that was circulated by TAG, the agency. And in this, they refer to key messaging points. This is in the event that Blake decides to go public about what she alleges she suffered on the set. One of the messaging points, it says that Justin Baldoni has a, quote, stellar reputation and he's a women's advocate. So to push that message, to push the message that production members lost their jobs due to Blake Lively's takeover of the film and insisted upon involvement, including loss of budget due to rescheduling shoot days when Blake Lively refused to show up.

21:02Shaun Kent:And then it says, explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in Blake Lively's circle, like Taylor Swift, shout out to you, Taylor, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to quote, bully people into getting what they want. Now, we're looking at an accusation of defamation and retaliation. Is the act of planting stories, defamation or retaliation, if those stories could potentially be true? Is the planting the issue or would it be making up false claims? A lot of some pack of what you just said. And so let's get the first answer. Could it possibly defamation?