After 24 hours of dismissal motions, accusations of doubling crossing, stay denials and more, the multi-pronged legal trench warfare between It Ends With Us stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has gone Def Con One – at least according to Bryan Freedman.

“Ms. Lively’s recent motion to dismiss herself from the self-concocted disaster she initiated is one of the most abhorrent examples of abusing our legal system,” the eminently quotable litigator said after the Gossip Girl alum filed paperwork in federal court on March 20 to get the matter tossed in federal court.

Joining her hubby Ryan Reynolds, the New York Times and PR boss Leslie Sloane in wanting out of Baldoni’s $400 million defamation and extortion complaint, the sexual harassment and “astroturfing” relation claiming Lively and her Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips lawyers assert the Jane the Virgin vet is actually prevented by a 2023 California law from going after her.

No one is talking settlement right now, and, as of today, the media fever dream case is still set to go to trial in NYC on March 9, 2026.

To that, with language right out of America’s current culture wars, Freedman, who is representing Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, its executives plus publicists Melissa Nathan, Jennifer Abel and “hired gun” Jed Wallace, rejects the very premise of Lively’s effort to get out the case.

“Stringent rules are put into place to protect the innocent and allow individuals to rightfully defend themselves,” the Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Menendez family attorney says. “Laws are not meant to be twisted and curated by privileged elites to fit their own personal agenda,” Freedman went on to say, of the situation that blew up legally when Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights department on December 20 and the tidal wave of suits that followed. “As we said in response to Mr. Reynolds’ same cowardly measures, we will continue to hold Ms. Lively accountable  for her actions of pure malice which include falsely accusing my clients of harassment and retaliation. Her fantastical claims will be swiftly debunked as discovery moves forward, easily disproved with actual, evidentiary proof.”

This morning, which saw Judge Lewis J. Liman deny Vision PR founder Sloane’s request to hit pause of discovery, Freedman also responded to Deadline on why after dark on Thursday his clients provided a litany of no-frills answers to Lively’s amended complaint instead of outright seeking dismissals of their own.

“We strategically made decisions to file answers to these complaints,” the Liner Freedman Taitelman + Cooley LLP co-founder stated. “This is not because we do not have grounds to file motions to dismiss but because in this day of courts giving wide discretion for leave to amend, we are not interested in providing them with a chance to learn just how poorly their legal theory has been drafted and a road map on how to correct it.”

Freedman added: “We would rather lock them into their deficiently drafted complaints and thus, force them to proceed through the case with lawsuits that are replete with glaringly legal and factual problems. Ryan and Blake are going to have to dance with the one that brought them here and if they expect us to help educate them on how to do this properly then they are going to the hardware store for milk”.

As in almost all things in this sprawling matter, Livley and Reynolds’ side vehemently disagree.

“The late night flurry of answers — instead of motions to dismiss — reveal that the Baldoni, Steve Sarowitz and Wayfarer defendants know that they have no legal arguments remotely capable of dismissing our complaint,” a spokesperson for the actress said to Deadline. “They have instead accepted that Ms. Lively’s complaint states valid legal claims that they could not muster a single reason to dismiss. Meanwhile, every person and entity the Baldoni-Wayfarer team sued has moved to dismiss their meritless PR stunt.”

As the Lively vs Baldoni dismissal wars expand, Thursday also saw a new lawsuit enter the fray.

Already suing Baldoni, Nathan and Abel, veteran publicist Stephanie Jones is now being sued back by her former VP Abel and ex-client. In a Christmas Eve defamation and breach of contract suit, the Joneswork founder claimed “Defendants Abel and Nathan secretly conspired for months to publicly and privately attack Jones and Jonesworks, to breach multiple contracts and induce contractual breaches, and to steal clients and business prospects.”  

In her own filing yesterday, Abel characterized Jones with an extremely backhanded compliment, as “long known within the public relations industry for her disarming Southern twang, brass-knuckle tactics, and high turnover of clients and employees,” Centering for the most part on Abel’s sudden August 21, 2024 pink slipping by Jones, after Abel had announced she was leaving to go out on her own, the countersuit claims her rights under California’s labor laws.

On point, it was Jones and her chief of staff taking possession of Abel’s work phone and laptop under what the latter calls false pretense that set off a digital destructive chain of events “As a result, Abel lost access to her iCloud (including all her text messages, photos, and contacts), bank accounts, utilities, insurance, and virtually every other sensitive account,” the Abel, Baldoni filing claims. “By contrast, Jones now had unrestricted access to everything stored on Abel’s phone — her text messages, emails, personal photos.”

Those communications are of course the smokin’ gun of sorts in this whole shebang.

Showing up in Lively’s CRD complaint and the December 21 NYT expose ‘We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine’ the texts and emails, which call Baldoni “pompous” among other things, appear to reveal the alleged online smear campaign Crisis PR maven Nathan and Abel put together to preemptively take down Lively. The mindset, as both sides have pretty much copped to, was to have the skinny on Lively unleashed online before the actress unveiled alleged conduct by Baldoni on the Sony distributed and August 2024 premiering IEWU.

In a now delated online post from late December after Lively filed that CRD, Abel admitted a protective package was put together and “although we were prepared, we didn’t have to do anything over the top to protect our client.” She added: “No negative press was ever facilitated, no social combat plan, although we were prepared for it, as it’s our job to be ready for any scenario, but we didn’t have to implement anything, because the internet was doing the work for us.”

Never one to give a rival the last word, Freedman Friday went after Jones and everyone else on the other side.

“It is undeniable that Stephanie Jones initiated this catastrophic sequence of events by violating the most basic of privacy rights, as well as any remaining trust her clients held,” he said.

“No stranger to stirring up crisis scenarios for departing clients, Ms. Jones maliciously turned over communications from the phone she wrongfully took from her own partner to her cohort Leslie Sloane, immediately after Jones was terminated for cause by Wayfarer due to her own wrongful behavior,” Freedman goes on to claim. “Stephanie Jones, founder of Jonesworks, has a well-documented history of highly questionable conduct in the workplace, which the Lively parties would have seen with even the smallest amount of online research, yet they walked right into Ms. Jones’ ploy of bitter revenge against her most-trusted employee at the expense of her own long-term client.”

“We will not stop until our clients are cleared of all wrongdoing and compensated for the vast damages that they have incurred.”

If you got this far, you know that last statement could pretty much come from either side. You also know it is something we are sure to hear more heading towards next year’s trial.