Justin Baldoni has had to rethink “what is real and what matters” after his legal battle with Blake Lively.
The It Ends with Us co-stars had been locked in a legal dispute since December 2024, when Blake accused Justin — who also directed the film — of sexual harassment and coordinating a smear campaign against her, prompting him and his Wayfarer Studios to hit back with a countersuit against the 38-year-old actress and her husband Ryan Reynolds, accusing the Hollywood couple of defamation and extortion.
In April, the couple reached an out-of-court settlement, and now Justin has broken his silence in an Instagram video with his wife Emily.
He said: “We have not spoken publicly for the better part of the last two years.
“And it’s not because we haven’t had anything to say, because Lord knows we have, but it just felt like every time we went to make a video like this, we wanted to speak, something was telling us not to.
“It just didn’t feel like the right time.”
Emily — who married Justin in 2013 and has kids Maiya, 11, and Maxwell, eight, with the actor — added that they feel “immense gratitude for so many things, and so many people, and so many things that have happened to us”.
She said: “That gratitude doesn’t negate the injustice and the pain that we have also felt in the last few years.
“We’ve had to wrestle with so many things and try to understand so many things, like how could something like this even happen, let alone disguised as a fight for women?”
Emily claimed the family had “a lot of traumas” to “move through”.
Justin agreed: “There have been so many painful things that have been spoken to existence…
“We didn’t want to add to the noise, so we just wanted to let the justice system run its course.”
He added that their family has become “closer”, while they are also “more devoted and steadfast in our [Bahá’í] faith than we’ve ever been”.
He continued: “We are healing. And if you’ve ever been through something traumatic, you know that healing isn’t linear; it looks different every day, and we have had to rethink for ourselves what is real and what matters.”
Justin insisted “thank you do not feel like enough” for everyone who supported him during his legal battle.
He said: “So many of you had discernment, and you used your intuition, and you trusted that, and you have given your time to fight for us.
“Thank you does not feel like enough, but we’re here in large part because of so many of you and all of our friends and family, and one thing that we’ve learned is that when God presses the reset button and everything else is stripped away, that that’s when love shows up.”
Justin had his countersuit claims dismissed by a judge and in April, Blake’s sexual harassment claims were tossed out on jurisdictional grounds, leading to them reaching an out-of-court settlement, just two weeks before they were set to go to trial in New York.
Last month, a court ruling said Blake could only seek legal costs from Justin, but not damages under a Californian law designed to protect anyone making sexual misconduct allegations.
Justin’s legal team claimed they “won”, while Blake’s attorneys insisted she “is the prevailing defendant”.
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