Does it finally end here? No– it doesn’t.
With the ongoing legal-battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, it seems as though more fuel has only been poured into the fire as Lively has taken another step into this celebrity duel by hiring former CIA agent, Nick Shapiro, who has become a hustling PR and crisis management expert.
Shapiro was with the CIA under the administration of former President Barack Obama from March 2013 to May 2015. With his transition into joining the “Team Blake” department, he is said to be giving advice on the legal communication strategy for the ongoing lawsuit. However, the public doesn’t seem to quite believe in the credibility of a former federal worker getting hired to pick-up the pieces of a Hollywood PR crisis.
While there is no official record of Baldoni’s reaction to this new chapter into their battle, it seems fans have leaned more towards “Team Baldoni” as they react to this news.
This all started back in December 2024 when Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, claiming that Baldoni had left a toxic work environment as they were in production filming their 2024 Colleen Hoover adaptation of her literary work, “It Ends With Us.”
Days later into the month Baldoni would counter back as he denied all of her allegations, and sued libel lawsuits against The New York Times for reporting Lively’s allegations, accusing them of their cowardice to the whims of Hollywood’s elites, which in this case is apparent to be Blake Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds.
To keep up with this, apart from being a supportive husband in this legal case, Reynolds’ involvement sparked after Lively revealed in an interview with E! News that he played a part in rewriting parts of the now iconic rooftop scene, when he shouldn’t have had any partaking in it at all as it would be against production’s system. Not to mention his not-so subtle mockery of Baldoni in developing the “Nicepool” character in his “Deadpool & Wolverine” movie.
From then on, we have reached this point where tensions are only arising. While a trial has been set for March 2026, we can only expect that these two teams will continue to have it head to head against each other. We can only hope that justice will prevail as the truth will eventually come to reveal itself in due time.
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