Justin Baldoni used a Wednesday video to break his silence in the Blake Lively attorney fee dispute, marking his first public statement in nearly two years after the case settled. He appeared with Emily and said the last stretch had been painful even as the legal fight tied to It Ends With Us moved out of court.
“So, we have not spoken publicly for the better part of the last two years, and it’s not because we haven’t had anything to say, because Lord knows we have,” Baldoni said. He added that “gratitude has saved us,” but not the “injustice and pain that we’ve felt for the past two years.”
Baldoni and Emily
Emily framed the moment as a release after a long stretch of silence. “And this feels like the moment,” she said, before describing “a lot of trauma for us to move through as a family.” Baldoni echoed that point, saying the past few years had been trying as the dispute worked its way through the courts.
The timing matters because Lively and Baldoni settled in May, weeks before the case was scheduled to go to trial. Baldoni had denied Lively’s claims and countersued for defamation, but that case was dismissed. The public reset came only after the court fight ended, not while it was still active.
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni
The settlement did not leave both sides in the same position. Lively received zero compensation, while a judge ordered Baldoni to pay her legal fees totaling $8 million. Baldoni and Emily still described the period as one shaped by “so many painful things that have been spoken into existence over the last couple years,” even as Emily said, “The truth and the facts have spoken for themselves.”
That mix of outcomes is the sharpest detail here. Baldoni is speaking after nearly two years of silence, but the financial hit on his side remains in place, and the settlement closed the dispute without any payment to Lively beyond the fee award. For readers following the case, the practical takeaway is simple: the litigation is over, the fee order is not, and the public record now has Baldoni’s first direct response since the settlement.
Baldoni ended by thanking the people who supported him when he had no voice, saying, “It’s our family. It’s our friends. It’s our community who’ve been there for us. It’s our faith.” He also said, “We are healing, and if you’ve ever been through something traumatic, you know that healing isn’t linear,” which leaves the story in a recovery phase rather than a legal one.
