A federal judge in the Southern District of New York ordered Justin Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties to pay Blake Lively's legal fees on Friday, June 12, 2026, just over a month after the two sides reached a no-payment settlement in the It Ends With Us defamation saga, TheWrap reported. Judge Lewis J. Liman signed off on Lively's fee-shifting request but denied her parallel attempt at punitive and treble damages, leaving the dollar figure of the fees to be calculated in a subsequent submission.
Lively's legal team issued a written statement on the docket once the order landed:
Today's ruling makes it clear that Ms. Lively brought her claims in good faith, that there was no evidence she acted with malice.
Baldoni's lead attorney Bryan Freedman responded with his own framing of the win the team did secure on the underlying substantive claims:
We fought and won against a coordinated effort built on allegations of sexual harassment, retaliation and a smear campaign that never happened.
The fee-shifting hook is the part of the order that turns the case into a precedent reference for the rest of the entertainment-industry defamation bar. Judge Liman grounded the ruling in California Civil Code Section 47.1, the state's anti-SLAPP fee-recovery provision for sexual-harassment and assault-related defamation defendants. The statute requires a plaintiff who brings a defamation suit against statements made about sexual harassment or assault, and then fails to prevail, to pay the defendant's fees, unless the defendant's statements were made with malice. Liman found, on the record before him, that Lively cleared that bar.
The sequence of the It Ends With Us litigation explains the unusual posture of the fee award. Lively filed her initial complaint in December 2024, accusing Baldoni of on-set sexual harassment and of running a coordinated public-relations smear campaign against her after she raised the concerns. Baldoni filed a $400 million defamation suit against Lively and her team in response, and a separate $250 million libel suit against The New York Times for its reporting on the underlying allegations. Liman dismissed both of Baldoni's filings in 2025, and earlier this year also dismissed ten of Lively's thirteen claims against her co-star and director, including the sexual-harassment and defamation lines.
The May 2026 settlement is the procedural fact that makes the Friday order legally clean. The parties reached a no-payment settlement days before the case was scheduled to start trial, which resolved the substantive claims still standing but left the fee-shifting question open for a separate motion. Lively's team filed the fee-shifting motion immediately after settlement, and the Friday order is the resolution of that motion. The settlement structure means neither side surrendered its underlying narrative about the case, which is why both Lively's team and Freedman's response on Friday read as substantive-victory statements rather than concession language.
The damages component of the ruling is also worth reading in detail. Lively had sought punitive and treble damages in addition to the fee-shifting, and Liman declined that piece of the motion. The denial is consistent with the California anti-SLAPP statutory framework, which authorizes fee-shifting in the dismissed-defamation context but does not extend to additional punishment of the failed plaintiff absent a finding of bad faith. By holding the fee award and rejecting the damages add-on, Liman drew a clean statutory line that other district courts in the circuit will likely follow.
What sits ahead is the size of the check. Lively's lawyers Esra Hudson and Michael Gottlieb will now submit the fee breakdown, including hourly rates and the hours worked across the eighteen-month run of the litigation. Liman will rule on a per-line basis on which charges Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties owe and which are excluded, and the final order is expected by the end of summer. Industry observers tracking the precedent expect the underlying fees, before any line-item reductions, to land in the eight-figure range, which would be the largest reported anti-SLAPP fee-shifting award in the It Ends With Us era of celebrity defamation litigation.
