The It Ends With Us premiere infamously featured a lack of Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively together, a move THR reports was done at the behest of Lively.
What happened at the It Ends With Us premiere?
According to a new report on their ongoing legal issues, THR notes that Lively and Baldoni not ever being around each other at the premiere of the film was no accident. According to them, Sony informed Baldoni that Lively and her team would not “allow” Baldoni to attend the premiere at all.
While that was the initial request, a settlement was later negotiated, resulting in Baldoni infamously walking down the carpet by himself. This was followed by the main cast of the film, and was one of the starting points of social media beginning to whisper that there were issues between Lively and Baldoni.
After the premiere, Lively and Baldoni’s tensions continued to flare, with THR reporting that Lively asked Sony to have Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios submit letters to the PGA (Producers Guild of America) stating that Lively had done work on the film, which Baldoni and Jamey Heath did, noting that they were doing so under duress to their lawyers.
Lively also reportedly asked Sony to have Baldoni’s “film by” credit removed from a secondary poster attached to the promotion of the film. Baldoni would later go on to sign a waiver agreeing to have the credit removed.
Lively’s initial complaint alleges that Baldoni created a hostile work environment
All of this stems from a formal complaint that Lively made against Baldoni in December. In it, she states that things got so bad during the filming of It Ends With Us that an all-hands-on-deck meeting was called in response to her claims of a hostile work environment. During the meeting, Lively asked that Baldoni stop showing her nude videos or images of women, that he stop mentioning his pornography addiction to her, that Baldoni stop discussing sexual experiences in front of her, and that he also stop mentioning Lively’s weight.
The complaint also claims that an agreement was made between production company Wayfarer Studios and the cast in which the promotion of the movie would focus “more on [Lively’s character’s] strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” However, Lively claims that Baldoni would renege on that and instead spoke in interviews about the film’s serious story.
Lively also claimed that Baldoni and his PR manager, Melissa Nathan, discussed ways to start a social media campaign to harm her reputation. The filing by Lively includes 22 pages of texts between Baldoni’s publicist and Nathan, in which they discuss wanting to have Lively “buried.”
(Source: The Hollywood Reporter)
