Defamation as a Crisis Strategy: What the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni Case Reveals

You've likely heard the headlines.

Breaking news. A federal judge in New York dismisses Justin Baldoni's lawsuit against Blake Lively. Now it ends with us. Director and star filed that $400 million lawsuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and their publicist alleging extortion and defamation. Lively's attorneys just said in a statement, today's opinion is a total victory and a complete vindication for Blake Lively, along with those that Justin Baldoni and the Wayfarer parties dragged into their retaliatory lawsu, including Ryan Reynolds.

Yes, a judge threw out a $400 million defamation lawsuit filed by actor and director Justin Baldoni. The defendants, of course, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, the New York Times, even her publicist. The ruling a total dismissal. Every defamation claim gone. But this podcast is going to share with you a thought not to get completely distracted by the legal headline, but as your friendly neighborhood crisis manager, I'm going to tell you not to get distracted by the legal headline. This wasn't just a court case and a court ruling. This was a reputational chess move and the court happened to call checkmate on Baldoni. But who really won or lost the game? Let's talk about weaponizing defamation and what this win for Lively and is it a win still won't fix anyone involved. Hey there. Welcome to the PR Breakdown. I'm your host Molly McPherson, and each week I like to break down the headlines we see and pull out a PR life lesson about the importance of communication. In this episode, let's talk about what happens when people weaponize defamation law as a crisis response tactic. Heads up. It rarely ends well, especially in the digital age where truth travels so quickly and privilege protections travel even faster. I know so many people are talking about the legal headline, but I still want to focus on the PR headline or the subhead. I want to look at what happens when legal action and PR strategy get tangled and why defamation claims, especially from public figures, almost always end up making things worse. Now, if you're a public facing person, either in politics, publicity, an influencer, you're online, a local business owner, you're someone whose reputation could cost you if you lose it. And you've asked in the past or you think you may ask in the future, should I sue for defamation? This is your episode and at the end of this episode, I am going to give you a resource that you can use over and over again. But more on that later. Let's start with the facts of the case. Let's just start with some basic facts. I'm not going to spend too much time here because you've all heard about the story. Justin Baldoni accused Blake Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and others of conspiring to destroy his reputation through false allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation. He filed the suit after Lively made formal complaints to the California Civil Rights Department and later filed a federal lawsuit in New York expanding on her claims from last December. In response, Beldoni sued for defamation. But this week the court ruled that Lively statements were protected by litigation privilege. Reynolds also protected he relied on Lively's version of events. And the New York Times also protected under the fair report privilege. What's left is a sliver of a claim about interference with contracts that Baldoni may refile. But the court case is now dead. Now let's go behind the headlines. This wasn't just a legal counterpunch. It was an effort to claw back control of a narrative that had already gone public. Who am I talking about? Well, both parties, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. There's a lot of legal maneuvers going back and forth and that happens a lot in these high profile cases. Now, if you've been following this story, you know that it starts last August at the release of the movie It Ends With Us, which also simultaneously released with Ryan Reynolds Deadpool movie. The duo's dual movie released should have been a big moment for the couple, a big reputational moment for this a list couple. But it wasn't. It went south spectacularly. Both premieres were delayed due to the writer strike, so they both happened to sink together in August. August typically is a news desert of a month, but it also gives opportunity for events to happen because there isn't competition with other stories out there, other premieres. So it actually worked out in their favor. But what did not work in their favor was the negative sentiment. There was a lot of negative buzz around the movie because there were a lot of negative whispers behind the scenes. I'm not going to go too deep into those. There is plenty of Internet content for you to untangle. I mentioned that I wrote an article for Forbes as a contributor back then highlighting the social media crisis of it all. I noticed right away that things were not going well for Blake Lively. And I was also spotting what they were doing with the press. There were a lot of strategic titles in People magazine. There was something afoot. No one knew exactly what was going on until December, late December 2024 when Lively filed the civil complaint and it swept up Beldoni. She accused him, her co star and director on It Ends with Us of sexual harassment and a coordinated smear campaign. Her team subpoenaed phone records from Beldoni, his publicist, a producer, and even his crisis manager, spanning more than two years of communication. Now, some of that data had already surfaced in filings. There is speculation that a PR professional, Stephanie Jones, accessed one of those phones and handed key messages to Lively's team. I think that's a very believable narrative. And even though that part hasn't been confirmed in court, it is a part of the broader narrative and one that I personally find believable. Bottom line, Lively went public with very serious claims, and she had receipts to back them up. Beldoni was effectively canceled within 48 hours of this complaint being filed because it also happened to sync with a big story in the New York Times that really put Baldoni in a bad light. He was dropped from his agency, the one he shares with Lively and Reynolds. The awards were being rescinded. Some people were coming out online in support of Lively, but I think at the time, most people did not know what to make of it. I had my opinions. I've linked all of the content that I've made about this case since last October. So you can refer to them in the show notes. Also, you can refer to them in my substack. So Baldoni responds with a lawsuit. And as we found out this week, it didn't land legally, but in the cliche court of public opinion. The act of defiance, I believe reframed him not as someone who's guilty and retreating, but as someone who is willing to push back. In crisis, PR friction matters. If your name is already being dismantled step by step in the headlines, filing a suit, even a losing one, can slow the narrative down. That's what Baldoni gained by putting his story out there at a time when. When Lively was attacking him, it started the content and the commentary, and there was overwhelming commentary favoring Baldoni. I think he lost a lot of traction from a PR perspective this week, but I think a lot of that goodwill remains now, what it means for all three of the players. Let's just talk about the reputational impact for everyone involved. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, well, they had a win in court, but this was no clean win. The accusations, the lawsuits, the subpoenas, none of that disappears with a ruling. The story's already out, and the court ruling doesn't erase the public's memory. They've regained momentum, yes, definitely, but the shine is dulled. People have already made up their minds. There may be some people who maybe think less negatively about Reynolds and Lively. But I would be hard pressed to find a lot of people out there, at least content creators, who are going to come out and say, Whoa, I was 100% wrong about Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. Oh, man, it was all about Justin Baldoni. If you find those people, let me know, because I want to find those people, because I would love to see what they have to say. I think most people are going to keep their minds in the same place where it was initially either in August or definitely in December for Lively and Reynolds. They are a couple known for brand management and likability. But this whole ordeal left a mark. How likable can you be when you're dropping stories in the press against a person? How likable are you when Beldoni is stuck in the basement during a premiere? How likable are you when all of these stories come out about you and how you treat people and they're starting to get a lot of traction online? How likable are you when you have to resort to so much PR strategy to get your story out there? Now, as for Baldoni, he lost the suit, but he showed he wasn't going to let a story be written about him without a response. That alone in the world of reputation management can matter. If Lively made a strategic move to go public, Baldoni made a strategic move to push back. It didn't work out in court for him, but it does complicate the narrative. And sometimes complexity is all a public figure needs to stop the freefall. Okay, I'm going to break in here because at the time of this recording, Blake Lively just posted to Instagram. I'm reading from her stories, so it's not in her main Instagram feed or grid. It's in her stories. Last week, I stood proudly alongside 19 organizations united in defending women's rights to speak up for their safety. Like so many others, I felt the pain of a retaliatory lawsuit, including the manufactured shame that tries to break us. While the suit against me was defeated, so many don't have the resources to fight back. I'm more resolved than ever to continue to stand for every woman's right to have a voice in protecting themselves, including their safety, their integrity, their dignity, and their story. There are protections out there. Check out some of the incredible organizations below for resources and information. With love and gratitude for the many who stood by me. Many of you I know. Many of you I don't. But I will never stop appreciating what or advocating for you. B and then she has a link to these associations. I'm going to say this right off the bat. She did not write this. And the reason why I can tell is because there is a. There are two spaces after the period, and she doesn't do that in a lot of her posts. That's something that's usually the hallmark of someone who's older. So her publicist, Leslie Sloan, probably wrote this for her. However, the message is a strong one and one that she likely obviously believes in. It's a good statement. This is good pr. This is good pr. Without naming Justin Baldoni, she found another way to label him as someone who manufactured a campaign against her. It's. It's interesting. It's. It's a smart PR move, There's no doubt about that. But the question is, do we believe it? This is prison. She could feel this way. I mean, who wouldn't feel this way about safety? It's a good statement. And every female actress, I think every female and, and I think many people of all genders would agree with this and agree with that feeling that every woman, well, really every person has a right to have their voice in protecting themselves. That includes their safety and their integrity and their dignity and their story. It's a human right. Not just a woman's right, but it's a human right. But this is just my personal opinion here. I still think they did the same thing to Justin Baldoni. I really do. Now, it's not to absolve Justin Baldoni from everything that happened on the set. Nobody knows truly what happened from the set. But we cannot omit the lively Reynolds factor of what they did to Beldoni. There were other ways to manage this. They are the ones who started the legal proceedings. And this is why, when you go legal, it is always, almost always, a PR disaster. Let's look at defamation lawsuits and why they fail and why they fail so often. Let's pause here for a quick look at defamation, an important clarification, because a lot of legal terms get tossed around online, especially when tensions are high in a PR reputation crisis. But this is an area that comes up in my work all the time. Perhaps not at a lively Baldoni level, but I have dealt with numerous, numerous clients who come to me because of legal issues that they are currently in or they want to make, and they need my advice, and they need my advice for how to manage it. So if you're someone in the online space, if you're an influencer, if you're a name, if you're someone in the public space, let's talk about this because it's important. Here's what you need to know. Defamation 101. Defamation is the umbrella term. It means someone made a false statement about you, presented it as fact, shared it with someone else, and it hurt your reputation. For all my journalism majors out there, let's go back in time. Let's go back to college. New York Times versus Sullivan in 1964. Did you get this correct in your journalism ethics course in college? It was a landmark US Supreme Court case establishing the, quote, actual malice standard for defamation suits involving public officials. The court ruled that public officials must prove that false statements were made important with knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth. So this court case expanded press protections. Why that matters is because there's a lot of court cases against the press. Now, I know what you're thinking, but Molly Baldoni versus Lively isn't about the press. Well, it was, if you remember what's getting lost in the headlines. The New York Times was also involved. So maybe now in journalism ethics courses, they may ask the question about New York Times versus Beltoni. Not likely. But they'll be discussing it ad nauseam on TikTok, TikTok and social media. But let's just talk about defamation in general, because this term does get tossed around a lot. And when you think of people in the public eye, it's usually against a press outfit as opposed to another person. But in my world, in crisis management, so often people come to me because they want to file defamation cases against people saying things about them, and it becomes my job to listen to them, then explain what it takes to win a defamation case. So I'll share this. You generally have to prove four things. One, the statement was false. Two, it was communicated to a third party. Three, the person who said it was at least negligent. And four, it caused real harm to your reputation. That number four is a tricky one. You have to prove that it caused real harm to your reputation. You cannot place a dollar amount on your feelings that they were hurt or that someone said something bad about you and now you're pissed off. Which is usually the reason why people bring up legal with me. Because someone said something and they want to do something about it and they want to go legal because they think that is the more powerful punch that you can make against someone. And I happen to think that this Beldoni lawsuit, even though he lost it, it was tossed. Right Now I think it caused a lot more damage. Now let's revisit your college journalism Ethics quiz where you had to explain the difference between libel and slander. I'm going to share with you my mnemonic, my memory hack, to remember the difference between libel and slander. And this goes back to my freshman year of college. I've never forgotten this. When you think of libel, the first three letters of libel is lib. The same three letters that spell library. Libraries have written and published material, but it goes beyond a library. But think articles, social posts, emails, even images. If it's fixed in some permanent form, it's liable. And when public figures sue for libel, they have to meet a higher bar. They must prove actual malice, that the person knew it was false or didn't care whether it was true. This is the whole piece about Ryan Reynolds. It's very, very hard to prove what Ryan Reynolds was doing. You know, it's very difficult for Baldoni to prove that Ryan Reynolds was doing this to him. Now, slander, here is your memory aid. Slender is a statement that's spoken. Slander begins with S. And it's also a damaging statement that's said out loud to someone else that causes harm. Unlike libel, slander usually requires proof of actual harm. Hurt feelings don't count. You have to show it costs you something. Your job, your clients, your credibility, ticket sales, reputation, getting jobs again, you have to prove it. Now, another legal maneuver that comes up a lot in my work is a cease and desist. Usually when someone brings up lawyers with me or a legal maneuver, they always bring up a cease and desist and they can take on two forms. There's a cease and desist letter, and it's just that, a letter, it demands that someone stop a certain behavior or statements. And the reason why I tell people not to do it, I think 100% of the time is because it's not legally binding. It does put the other person on notice, but it also pisses them off and they turn it into a joke. If someone wants to send a cease and desist letter, in my world, what I tell them, what will happen is you will be mocked because of that letter. Because it's not legally binding. There's nothing that they can do with it at all. It's. Maybe you could, you could look at it as a first shot across the bow in a reputational dispute. It shows that you'll go legal on something. But 100% of the time, I've told clients, don't even bother. Now there is a cease and desist order. On the other hand, that's going to come from a court or agency, and that one is legally binding and must be obeyed. Now, I had a client recently where a cease and desist order worked because the other person did say things that were false, they posted things that were false and they were reckless and they were proven to be false. So it was very easy to put an order out there to say you have to remove everything. But the bottom line is this. If you are in a PR mess and you're thinking about legal action or you're being threatened with it, it is helpful to know the difference between a headline, a letter, a comment, and a lawsuit. What I typically tell people is, if a motion is driving your legal decision, take a breath, pause and think it out. Because it's usually the wrong course of action, which I tell them honestly 99% of the time, anyone who works with me and legal is added to the chat. They often get a big pushback from me. Because legal, in my opinion, only exacerbates a crisis. It only makes it worse. Only go to legal if there is a reason, like a legal reason, that you can show proof that whatever was said was malicious and it was harmful and you were damaged from it. Otherwise, you're just going to make things worse. And when they come to me, that's when I start asking questions. Is the statement actually false or is it just damaging? Can you prove it was annoyingly malicious? What do you really want? Do you want a retraction? Do you want them to chill? Do you want control? Do you want to push back? I mean, usually what it is is it's a punch. They want to hurt the other person as much as the person hurt them. And then I tell them, are you prepared for discovery, cross examination, and every message from your past to go public? That's something that Blake Lively is learning, particularly when it relates to Taylor Swift. And now the Taylor Swift part of her case got so messy as well. But most of all, how will it look when you sue someone for speaking out? Because if the accusation is tied to negative commentary and your first instinct is to retaliate through the courts, you've already lost the reputation battle, even if you win the legal one. In the case of Blake Lively here, she did. The law may be on your side, but public opinion rarely is. Now, let's zoom out a bit and talk about some of the cases out there. What you're hearing from me is that it is extremely hard to win a defamation suit in the U.S. that's why it's very likely that Justin Baldoni knew from the get go. His lawyer knew Friedman knew from the get go that they weren't gonna win this case. It's huge to win. It's really, really difficult to win a defamation suit in the US Especially if you're a public figure. Just ask Sarah Palin. In 2017, Palin sued the New York Times over an editorial that incorrectly linked her political action committee to the 2011 mass shooting that wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. The Times later issued a correction, but Palin claimed the editorial defamed her and caused her reputational harm. The initial trial was in 2022, and the federal judge and the jury both ruled in favor of the New York Times. They found that Palin had not proven actual malice. However, it should be said, during jury deliberations, the judge announced his intention to dismiss the case and and some jurors reportedly learned of this before delivering their verdict, raising concerns about the process. Palin appealed, arguing that the judge's actions and exclusion of certain evidence improperly influenced the jury. Then in August 2024, the federal appeals court agreed, ordering a new trial due to procedural errors. And then the retrial began in April 2025. Now, I assume that most people were not following the Palin v. New York Times court case in April 2025 at the level of a Karen Reed trial, but they had the same arguments. And Palin's team claimed the Times willfully ignored the facts and the verdict that came out that the New York Times was not liable. Then there's a case of Brett Favre versus Shannon Sharp and former NFL punter and online person Pat McAfee. After they publicly commented on Favre's alleged involvement in a Mississippi welfare fraud scandal. Sharpe accused Brett Favre of stealing of, quote, stealing from the poor. Brett Favre called it defamatory, and the court disagreed and it was dismissed in 2023. But some people do win. Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard In 2022, Depp sued Heard over a 2018 Washington Post op ed in which she described herself as a survivor of domestic abuse. She didn't name Depp, but his team argued the implication was clear and damaging. It became a television media circus and there was a lot of accusations about manipulation with bots. The jury ultimately sided with Depp, awarding him $15 million in damages that was later reduced, but Heard also won $2 million in a countersuit. There is Dominion Voting Systems versus Fox News in 2023, and this one wasn't just a legal win, it was a media reckoning. Dominion sued Fox News for repeatedly airing false claims that its voting machines rigged the 2020, presidential dominion argued that Fox aired these claims knowing they were false. So in April 2023, Fox settled the case for $787.5 million. That's the largest publicly known defamation suit. And then lastly, we have Eugene Carol versus Donald Trump. The writer accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in the 90s and sued him for defamation after he publicly denied allegations and attacked her credibility. Jury found Trump liable for both sexual abuse and defamation, awarding Carol $5 million. And in a second defamation trial in 2024, she was awarded an additional $83.3 million. So there you have your examples. But bottom line, most defamation cases from public figures don't end in vindication. They end in exposure. The people who win either bring overwhelming proof and survive public scrutiny, or they settle before the trial to stop the bleeding. For every Depp or Carol, there's a Palin, a Farve, a Lively. You know, someone who tried to sue their way out of a crisis only ended up deeper in it. Yes, Johnny Depp may have won that court case, but where is he now? It exposed too much. And that's the pattern. And it's one that I believe leaders and communicators need to recognize early. But also, if you're someone whose livelihood depends on commentary, you need to understand the legal ramifications of legal filings, because if you file, they will become a headline. So what should communicators do if you're advising someone who wants to sue for defamation? Your job isn't to cheerlead. Your job is to assess risk, slow the panic. Ask the question that I ask. Are you trying to win a case or reclaim credibility? Because the moment you file a lawsuit, your story stops being yours. It becomes someone else's social media post. It becomes a content creator's heyday, because they're going to keep talking about it, and you're going to drag yourself through a lot of negative commentary. It's true that Baldoni's name is now tied to a failed $400 million lawsuit. There are retaliation allegations and a judge's rebuke. That's not exactly brand building. But he did fight back, and his story got out there. Lively and Reynolds, they won this round, but it's not a clean reset. The damage is done. The story is unfolding. But Lively and Reynolds, it would be impossible for them to ever come back to where they were prior to August 2024. The real takeaway here from someone who does this for a living, don't use the legal system to fix a PR problem. It's not a strategy, it's a threat. And threats don't build trust. If you're someone who is navigating this space, either as helping someone, whether you're at an agency, whether you're helping someone, or you might find yourself in it. I've created a fillable decision tree. It's one that you can use over and over again. Titled should you sue for defamation. It's available to paid subscribers on my substack. You can find the link in the show notes or just head on over to PRBreakdown Media. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Bye for now.