Ryan Reynolds seeks dismissal of Justin Baldoni's lawsuit, says It Ends With Us star can't sue him over ‘hurt feelings’
Ryan Reynolds seeks dismissal of Justin Baldoni's $400 million lawsuit, asserting that Baldoni's claims stem from ‘hurt feelings’
Ryan Reynolds filed a motion to dismiss Justin Baldoni's $400 million lawsuit against him and Blake Lively on Tuesday. In the court documents, his legal team argued that the It Ends With Us director cannot sue the Deadpool star over “hurt feelings.” The filing also states that the 48-year-old actor called the filmmaker a “predator” because he genuinely believed him to be one.
Ryan Reynolds says Justin Baldoni can't sue him over ‘hurt feelings’, files motion to dismiss It Ends With Us star's lawsuit
“But, the FAC [First Amended Complaint] alleges no plausible facts that suggest Mr. Reynolds did not believe this comment to be true; instead, the relevant FAC allegations suggest that Mr. Reynolds genuinely, perhaps passionately, believes that Mr. Baldoni’s behavior is reflective of a ‘predator,’” the court documents read, according to Fox News.
Following the successful release of It Ends With Us last year, Lively sued her co-star, Baldoni, accusing him of sexually harassing her on set and running a smear campaign against her to destroy her public image. The 41-year-old actor countersued her and Reynolds in a defamation lawsuit.
In his lawsuit, Baloni's legal team accused Reynolds of using the Deadpool character “Nicepool” to mock him, berating him for allegedly fat-shaming Lively and calling him a “sexual predator.” However, in the motion filed Tuesday, the Free Guy's lawyers said that it did not amount to defamation if Reynolds believed Baldoni was truly a predator.
“The entirety of Mr. Baldoni’s case appears to be based on Mr. Reynolds allegedly privately calling Mr. Baldoni a ‘predator,’ but here is the problem, that is not defamation unless they can show that Mr. Reynolds did not believe that statement to be true,” Reynolds' lawyers, Mike Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, said in a statement to the outlet.
While Reynolds' filing did not deny he used “Nicepool” to mock Baldoni, it said that the latter's “thin-skinned outrage over a movie character, the satirical ‘woke’ Nicepool, does not even pretend to be tied to any actual legal claims,” according to the court documents obtained by TheWrap.
“Instead, the motion states, “it falls into the [First Amended Complaint]’s general allegation of ‘hurt feelings,’ which in reality is nothing more than a desperate effort to advance the same curated ‘bully’ image that the Wayfarer Parties created and disseminated in the retaliation campaign they launched against Ms. Lively in August of 2024,” the documents add per the outlet.
