Blake Lively is pushing back against being labeled a “mean girl” ahead of her upcoming court battle with Justin Baldoni.
According to a report from the Daily Mail, the actress is asking the court to block certain news articles from being shown to the jury during next month’s trial. She argues that the pieces portray her negatively and could influence how jurors view her.
Lively believes the jury would “draw adverse conclusions about her character” if those articles are included. The filings claim the stories frame her as both a “bully” and a “mean girl.”
Among the articles in question are a 2009 piece in which Lively used the term “tranny,” as well as a 2014 story about her controversial wedding to Ryan Reynolds, which took place on a southern plantation.
She is also opposing Baldoni’s plan to call Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa as a witness. Flaa conducted a 2016 interview with Lively that resurfaced during backlash tied to It Ends With Us in 2024.
In court documents, Lively’s legal team wrote: “Ms Flaa’s testimony ‘about her interview with Ms Lively’ will inevitably echo her numerous public statements describing Ms Lively as ‘rude’ and exuding ‘mean girl energy’.”
© GettyThe trial between Lively and Baldoni is scheduled to begin May 18 in federal court in New York. Lively has accused Baldoni, her It Ends With Us co-star and director, of retaliating against her with a “smear campaign” after she raised concerns about alleged on-set sexual harassment.
A judge recently dismissed 10 out of Lively’s 13 claims, including all allegations related to sexual harassment. However, the retaliation claims are still set to be heard by a jury.
Over the weekend, Lively’s attorneys submitted multiple filings in an attempt to exclude what they say is irrelevant evidence. This includes several news stories that Baldoni’s team argues resurfaced “organically” in 2024 during the film’s release controversy.
Lively’s lawyers contend that introducing these articles is an effort to “smuggle into evidence a combination of gossip (and) rumor… while misleading the jury into believing that their curated laundry list of old events must have played some role in the overwhelmingly negative shift in public sentiment against Ms Lively in August of 2024”.
They also stated: “Despite no supporting evidence, defendants appear intent on exposing the jury to a laundry list of negative media stories about Ms Lively, despite having any competent evidence linking those stories to the events in this case”.
© GettyAccording to the filings, the reports, which Lively’s team refers to as “Gossip Articles,” are meant to support claims that she is a “mean girl” or a “bully.”
Her attorneys argue that allowing them would amount to “character assassination” and is designed to “paint Baldoni as the victim.”
They made a similar argument against Flaa’s testimony.
Flaa’s 2016 interview with Lively went viral again in summer 2024, during a wave of criticism aimed at the actress. In one widely discussed moment, after Flaa congratulated Lively on her pregnancy, Lively responded by congratulating Flaa, despite the journalist not being pregnant.
© AFP via Getty ImagesFlaa has since described the interview as “traumatizing” and said it nearly led her to leave journalism altogether.
Lively’s legal team argues that including this testimony would unfairly reinforce the “mean girl” narrative and is “wholly irrelevant” to the case.
They added: “Whatever marginal relevance her testimony might conceivably have is substantially outweighed by the significant danger of undue prejudice to Ms Lively by Ms Flaa coming into court to paint her as a “bully” and a “mean girl.””
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