Lively/Baldoni Lawsuit Part 2
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Anonymous
The Blake/Jones/ Sloane side lost every one of their motions. But sure, that’s a bad day for Baldoni. |
Anonymous
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Blake has been getting some bad headlines for people who aren’t paying that close of attention. It’s making it seem like Justin has won defamation claims against Ryan Reynolds, which a lot of people will just infer from the headlines that Ryan lied about him. Other headlines are saying Baldoni scored a victory in court.
It’s much more nuanced for people who are following the case, but most people aren’t. |
Anonymous
It isn’t nuanced at all, the Blake/Jones side lost all of their motions that were decided by Liman over the past two days. As many of us said at the time, those Rule 11 motions were not going to be granted, and were a bad move strategically. |
Anonymous
That simply is not the case. Most of the decisions were mixed. I read the decisions before reddit and was shocked how all the reddit headlines spun this as Baldoni winning everything. The judge sanctioned Wayfarer for for filing frivolous claims, almost all of them except the one against Ryan Reynolds, which reddit spins as "Judge rules the claim against Reynolds was totally valid, Baldoni won!!!" (But it wasn't valid, it was dismissed; the judge is just saying it didn't meet the high bar of being completely frivolous). The judge thoroughly explained how Wayfarer lied to the court in filing claims against Sloane (I thought Baldoni fans thought this was a terrible thing when Vanzan did it?), but she didn't file the right technical motion. He denied her motion without prejudice. She just needs to file a different type of motion to get her attorney's fees. I'm sure she will, and will probably win. Some of Jones' claims were dismissed and some weren't. The only total loss was Jones' motion to amend her complaint, and that was more due to bad lawyering and the statute of limitations. In fact the basis of the decision was Jones had enough information of Nathan's culpability that she should have sued her for defamation from the onset. (I actually think Jones should appeal because she clearly did request any information about media contacts which would include the Business Insider article, but whatever). |
Anonymous
What? The court found for Lively on all of the Rule 11 claims except the one concerning the defamation claim against Reynolds. Liman formally reprimanded Freeman and Baldoni's other attorneys for making "frivolous" and "factually baseless" claims. He declined to grant sanctions but the legal finding is almost entirely in Lively's favor, and this is a key ruling because it puts Baldoni's lawyers on the back foot with Liman moving forward. It also could set up a finding of spoliation against Baldoni that would have major negative consequences for him. Totally bizarre to call a motion that you one 90% of a "bad move strategically." That was a clear win for Lively. |
Anonymous
Thank you. I thought I was either going crazy or couldn't read. I only read the Rule 11 decision but it's a clear win for Lively, I couldn't figure out why everyone kept calling it a win for Baldoni. The judge was extremely critical of the Baldoni/Wayfarer attorneys. It's hard to tell if people pushing the narrative that Baldoni had a good day in court yesterday are PR plants or people who have bought a PR campaign to convince them of that. Either way, it's totally made up. So weird. |
Anonymous
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Ryan’s animated film that he shot in 2023 has just been delayed again to 2027 because of this case. Who wants to bet it never sees the light of day. If a studio thought it would turn a profit they’d get it out. Two delays is bad. The world looks very different for Ryan Reynolds in 2023 and it’s gonna look in 2027.
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Anonymous
There were two Rule 11 motions. Reynolds motion was a total loss. For the other, Blake was denied the relief she sought. Those are both losses. You are totally misrepresenting the reprimand. The judge found that Freedman’s use of group pleading led to claims being extended improperly to certain plaintiffs because he didn’t distinguish among them. I believe that lawyers on both sides pointed this out as well at the time. In any case, those claims were already dismissed months ago, so we already knew the judge believed them to be deficient. |
Anonymous
| The Jones/ Sloane decisions don’t bode well for Blake either. |
Anonymous
You would probably enjoy the Sloane memorandum. The judge points out Vituscka swore he told Wayfarer's lawyers that Sloane never said Baldoni assaulted Blake *before* the case was filed, *as evidenced by a text message.* I remember arguing about it here and people saying that wasn't the case, despite the text evidence. Liman points out that it's telling that Wayfarer never disputed this. I actually think this is all telegraphing that Liman won't do anything big on spoliation. Wayfarer will skate by like they did on the Rule 11 motion. My guess is he will say something like Wayfarer should have been aware of impending litigation but moving to Signal is not enough to establish spoliation and that the Wayfarer parties should have turned off auto-delete, but that they can't infer that means there's evidence that was deleted. He will probably just say that Lively is allowed to imply to the jury that there may have been stuff on Signal that could have been deleted, which would be a soft win but something she could have done without filing the motion. |
Anonymous
Lively/Reynolds made multiple Rule 11 allegations. Liman treated them all together in one decision. In that decision, he declined to find a Rule 11 violation with regards to the defamation allegation against Reynolds, but he found violations on ALL other allegations. "For purposes of Rule 11, however, what makes the civil extortion claim sanctionable is that the factual allegations do not support a claim for relief by Sarowitz, Nathan, Abel or IEWUM against Lively or Reynolds. The four of them simply had no basis to sue Lively or Reynolds for civil extortion." "The Wayfarer Parties have not identified even an arguable basis in law or fact for any Wayfarer Party other than Baldoni and Wayfarer to assert these claims, as no other party was implicated in the contractual relationship." "But there was no conceivable basis upon which to allege the existence of a contractual relationship between Lively and Sarowitz, Nathan, Abel or Heath." A court reprimand is a sanction -- that is the sanction he chose to award. He declined to award money sanctions because he concluded that neither Lively nor Reynolds suffered repetitional damage as a result of the violations (dubious, and he doesn't go into detail on his thinking here, but my sense based on his other statements is that he believes the repetitional damage to parties is a wash in this case) and because the court didn't suffer a burden from the frivolous claims (because they were fully dismissed and the discovery and other proceedings associated with them would have happened anyway under the other claims in the case). That's not a loss. A motion like this is filed in service to their broader goals in the case. Here the goal was to highlight how Baldoni's lawyers have a history of lying and violating court rules. Liman agreed with them on those points. They can now reference this decision in support of other motions to reign in Baldoni's lawyers before and during trial. Any litigator would take this as a win. |
Anonymous
| ^reputational not repetitional |
Anonymous
I think it's a mix. I don't think people here are paid shills for Baldoni. I am sure Baldoni's team seeds narratives through preferred content creators which flows to reddit and then other places and the stuff that's pro-Baldoni gets upvoted because IEWL sub is filled with his stans. It feels completely inorganic, but a lot of it is just stans who want to believe. Without a doubt Lively seeds narratives too, but they're usually not as OTT or the posters who push them aren't as dramatic, so Lively's media campaign looks fairly traditional and Baldoni's is all clickbaity and phony sounding. |
Anonymous
Everything you cited supports what I just said — the judge really didn’t like Freedman’s group pleading because it extends the claims to all plaintiffs and all defendants making the claims over broad. This isn’t an accusation of lying — it’s an accusation of sloppy drafting. The claims were already dismissed at the time the Rule 11 motion was filed so the motion was intended not to solicit further criticism about the already dismissed claims but to get attorney’s fees for Blake. It failed in that objective. |
Anonymous
Yeah I just ran out of time to read things. But it's obvious he didn't rule against Sloane, just denied attorneys fees. That's especially unsurprising given Liman's middle of the road approach to the entire case. Regarding the spoliation motion, the details will matter. Specifically whether Lively will be permitted to highlight certain facts, like the timing of the team's decision to move to Signal, or inferences that could be drawn from references in text messages to other communications. For instance, there is a text message where either Abel or Nathan references a conversation between Jed Wallace and Jamey Heath regarding the tactics Jed was using on social media (in response to a concern from Baldoni that they were using obvious bots). Heath said in his deposition that he had no memory of that conversation and that he never really knew or understood what Wallace was doing. The decision on spoliation could shape how Lively is permitted to present these facts and what arguments her lawyers can present to the jury. Even if the decision on the spoliation motion is not an explicit jury direction, giving Lively's lawyers leeway in implying what may have been communicated in destroyed communications could be very damning. |