Justin Baldoni Loses “Highly Personal & Intimate Information” Court Battle With Blake Lively; “Risk Of Disclosure Is Great,” Judge Warns Both Sides…

Trying to plug leaks, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have succeeded in what can be shown to whom in their legal conflict with Justin Baldoni, at least for now.

“The parties have levelled accusations of theft of trade secrets and the disclosure of confidential sensitive information against one another,” a pragmatic Judge Lewis J Liman noted in a ruling issued Thursday with some degree of understatement almost a year before the start of the trial between the It Ends With Us stars in May 2026.

The Court’s model protective order is not sufficient for the needs of these cases,” the federal judge added, issuing most of the Attorney’s Eyes Only protection that A-listers Lively and Reynolds sought for the discovery process.

Unless you’ve been stuck in space with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams the past four months, you’d know this has been a high-profile matter since Lively filed her sexual harassment and retaliation compliant against Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios and other with California’s Civil Rights department on December 20.

At a long March 6 hearing over what the scope of any protective order should be and who should be allowed to look at discovery evidence, Liman called the gist of this whole thing “a feud between PR firms.” Certainly, in what is now a multi-lawsuit battlefield with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in potential damages, reputations and careers, Team Blake and Team Baldoni have both weaponized the court of public opinion as much as the courts themselves to varying degrees.

Now, that’s to be expected in a case that features PR heavyweights such as Leslie Sloane (Team Blake, and a defendant) and Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel (Team Baldoni, and also defendants) in the mix, along with the New York Times. In her CRD complaint and New Year’s Eve suit against Baldoni and his inner circle, and in a subsequent amended complaint, Lively has insisted that an astroturfing smear campaign was activated against her last summer by Nathan and Abel as a measure to blunt any accusations of misconduct the Gossip Girl veteran could make public against the Jane the Virgin alum leading up to the It Ends With Us film’s August 2024 release.