NEW YORK — When the case settled in May, both sides went quiet. The terms were sealed. Neither Blake Lively nor Justin Baldoni’s representatives disclosed what the agreement contained or what, if anything, changed hands. What remained unsealed was the bill.
On June 30, Lively’s attorneys filed a petition in the Southern District of New York asking Judge Lewis Liman to order Baldoni and his company Wayfarer Studios to pay $8.04 million in legal fees and litigation costs. The number is not damages; those were left off the table in the settlement entirely. It is the cost of the lawyers who kept Lively in the fight for a year and a half, a cost her team argues Baldoni should bear after his $400 million defamation countersuit collapsed before reaching a jury.
The petition is the next chapter in a dispute that began in December 2024, when Lively filed a complaint alleging that Baldoni, who directed her in Sony Pictures’ adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel “It Ends With Us,” had sexually harassed her during production and then orchestrated a reputation-management campaign to damage her public image when she raised concerns. Baldoni denied both claims. The legal exchange that followed produced $400 million in counterclaims, multiple rounds of federal court filings, a wave of industry-rattling disclosures, a federal judge’s dismissal of many of Lively’s specific allegations in April, and eventually a private resolution in May whose terms remain hidden behind a confidentiality agreement.
What the sealed settlement could not close was the fee question. Judge Liman established in June that Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios were responsible for Lively’s legal costs stemming from the failed defamation countersuit, a ruling that determined who pays without naming an amount. The June 30 petition names the amount.
Lively’s lead attorneys, Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, characterized the billing records in terms that turn a fee petition into something closer to an argument about proportionality. Their court filings described Baldoni’s litigation strategy as “scorched-earth,” a phrase that carries legal weight in this context, not just rhetorical force. Under the statutory framework that established fee liability, the conduct of the losing side is relevant to whether a fee award is reasonable and what amount a court should grant. By characterizing Baldoni’s approach as maximally aggressive, Lively’s team is building a record that supports the full $8.04 million rather than a reduced figure a court might arrive at after scrutinizing billing records for excess.
Those billing records will now be scrutinized. Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios had not filed a response to the petition as of its filing date. Fee petitions in complex federal litigation routinely generate detailed objections: challenges to hourly rates, disputes about how many lawyers worked specific tasks and for how long, arguments about which legal work falls within the fee-shifting statute and which does not. Whether $8.04 million survives that process intact is, at this point, an open question.
The underlying dispute offers context for the figure’s scale. Lively was represented throughout by two prominent New York litigation firms working at rates those firms command in federal court. The case spanned roughly seventeen months, involved multiple court filings, at least two significant motions argued before the federal bench, depositions, and a settlement negotiation, in addition to the California civil rights proceeding that preceded the federal lawsuit. A fee petition in the range of $8 million, for litigation of that complexity and duration, is consistent with what courts have approved in comparable entertainment-industry cases.
What it is not, her team has stressed, is money Lively received from the settlement. The April dismissal narrowed her case considerably, and the sealed resolution produced no public acknowledgment of wrongdoing and no disclosed payment to Lively. Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s attorney, has previously characterized the resolution as a validation of his client’s position. The fee petition offers Lively’s attorneys a public arena, after months of sealed proceedings, to argue otherwise.
The $8.04 million ask also arrives in an industry context that has been watching how this case plays out. Lively’s dispute received sustained attention partly because it illustrated what is at stake for a complainant who chooses to raise on-set harassment allegations against a director with resources to mount a nine-figure legal counterattack. Her return to the Met Gala in May was read by industry observers as a deliberate signal that she intended to stay visible. The fee petition may function as a similar kind of signal: that the case’s consequences are not finished.
Reuters reported the filing on June 30, citing court documents from the Southern District of New York, where Judge Liman has presided over the dispute since Lively filed her federal complaint.
What Judge Liman does with the $8.04 million petition has not been determined. Whether he awards the full amount, scales it back after a contested briefing schedule, or orders a hearing to examine the billing records line by line remains unclear. The process will be quieter than the litigation that preceded it. The number ensures it will not be invisible.
