Blake Lively Claims Justin Baldoni Is Using 'Abuser's Handbook' Tactics

The actress and her It Ends With Us co-star have been at each other's throats since the actress filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment and fostering a toxic work environment.

Justin Baldoni denied the claims and recently filed a counterclaim in which he claimed she tried to hijack his production and used her connections to Reynolds and Taylor Swift to press him down.

Lively has slammed Baldoni for allegedly using manipulative tactics in his recent $400 million lawsuit against her and her husband, Reynolds.

In response to Baldoni's lawsuit, in which he claims, among other things, that the Hollywood power couple concocted schemes to kill his career, Lively's attorney released a statement accusing Baldoni of using an “abuser's playbook” in his new filing.

“This latest lawsuit from Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and its associates is another chapter in the abuser's playbook,” Lively's attorneys said. Daily mail.

They added: “This is the age-old story: a woman comes forward with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation, and the abuser tries to turn on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Assault. Reverse Victim Offender.”

Elsewhere in a statement, the “Gossip Girl” star's attorney said Baldoni's lawsuit is “retaliation” for her earlier lawsuit, in which she accused him of sexual harassment and fostering a toxic work environment on the set of “It Ends With Us.”

The statement claimed that Baldoni's production company, Wayfarer Studios, “chose to use the resources of their billionaire co-founder to issue media statements, launch frivolous lawsuits and threaten legal action to overwhelm the public's ability to understand that what they are doing is retaliation against the allegations for sexual harassment”.

Lively's lawyers continued: “They are trying to shift the narrative to Ms. Lively by falsely claiming that she seized creative control and alienated the cast from Mr. Baldoni. The evidence will show that the cast and others had their own negative experiences with Mr. Baldoni and The Traveler.”

The actress' lawyers said in a statement that the production company, Sony, “asked Ms. Lively to oversee” her part of the film, which they then “optioned for distribution and achieved great success.”

They continued: “Their response to the sexual harassment allegations: She wanted it, it's her fault. Their reasoning for why it happened to her: Look what she was wearing.”

The statement concluded: “In short, while the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy to attack the woman is desperate, does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively's complaint, and will not succeed.”

Baldoni filed a lawsuit against Lively on Thursday, accusing her of trying to get him out of the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's best-selling novel and using her connections to Reynolds and Taylor Swift to force him to accept some of her rewrites for the film.

According to Daily mailhe accused her of fighting for the production despite not reading the book until filming had long begun, yet she wanted to change many parts of the script.

In his filing, he noted that when the film entered pre-production, Lively allegedly asked for a “take-through” of the film's rooftop scene, in which her character Lily Bloom first meets his character Ryle Kincaid. time.

Baldoni said he was “reluctant” to let her “rewrite that key scene” but “agreed to look at what she had put together” only to find that she had changed the script “dramatically” from its original form.

When he put up “extremely mild resistance,” Lively allegedly “kept quiet for days” and later allegedly said in a text message that his reaction to her rewriting “didn't feel great to me” or to Reynolds and another person. who Baldoni describes as “another mega-celebrity friend,” later identified as Taylor Swift.

Baldoni also noted that in Lively's alleged kidnapping attempt, she went so far as to take him and his family to the basement after they arrived on the red carpet for the film's premiere because she “requested that he not attend.”

The lawsuit said, “Acting as if there was an 'escape' risk, security officers escorted Baldoni's group to the basement of the building.

“There they were in a temporary holding area surrounded by concession stands, with only folding tables and chairs arranged in a square,” the document continued.

Elsewhere in the filing, he claims Lively also made fun of his body and suggested he get a nose job, even as she “kept breaking character” and “talking as herself and not as the character Lily Bloom, which was extremely confusing to him.” .