Sanctions For Justin?

(Probably)

Happy Father’s Day to us all! In honor of the day, we are staging our own parade of sorts. More of a victory lap really, in honor of Law and Chaos being completely right about the Justin Baldoni trollsuit against Blake Lively. And this parade won’t even cost $45 million and rip up the roads of our nation’s capital so a demented draft dodger can cosplay as a tinpot dictator.

In this bar exam hypo come to life, the two movie stars are suing each other over the fallout from It Ends With Us, the 2024 adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel of the same name. All parties agree that during filming Lively renegotiated a rider to her contract barring Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath from engaging in behavior which could legitimately be described as sexual harassment. All parties agree that Baldoni was ostracized by multiple members of the cast and excluded from some publicity events. And all parties agree that Baldoni, fearful that Lively would take some adverse action against him that would harm his reputation, hired an aggressive PR firm. There endeth the consensus.

Lively alleges that Baldoni engaged in a smear campaign to destroy her reputation, proactively discrediting her in case she went public with her allegations. Baldoni alleges that Lively colluded with the New York Times to defame him, and, with her husband Ryan Reynolds, to mock him and got him fired by his agent. On New Years Eve, each party sued.

The case wound up before Judge Lewis Liman of the Southern District of New York. As we’ve said repeatedly, Lively’s suit is real law, and Baldoni’s is a PR stunt attached to a $405 check to cover the federal filing fee. This is not to say that Lively is guaranteed to win her case! But it definitely means that Baldoni will lose his. As we said!

On June 9, 2025, Judge Liman dismissed Baldoni’s complaint against Lively, Reynolds, the Times, and Lively’s PR rep. In a scathing order, the judge rubbished Baldoni’s claim that he’s entitled to $400 million because Lively persuaded Sony to go with her cut of the film and Reynolds mocked him by portraying a fake feminist character with a man bun in the movie Deadpool and Wolverine. In short, none of the hundreds of pages of whining by Baldoni et al describes an actual tort. And in fact, with a couple of narrow exceptions, the conduct is so clearly not tortious that the court dismissed the claims with prejudice so they can’t be refiled in an amended pleading.

But that’s not the end of the matter. Some of Baldoni’s claims were so frivolous that Lively and Reynolds moved for Rule 11 sanctions against him and his legal team, headed by a California litigator named Bryan Freedman.

Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure obliges lawyers to ensure that documents submitted in court comply with minimal ethical requirements. They must certify that pleadings are “not being presented for any improper purpose,” that the legal arguments therein actually reflect the law or a “nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law,” and that the facts asserted either have or “will likely have evidentiary support” after discovery.

That is a very low bar to clear. And before moving for Rule 11 sanctions, a party must give the other guy notice and 21 days to withdraw or amend the offending pleading. Which Lively and Reynolds did.

Specifically, they argued that many of the claims in Baldoni’s complaint not only lacked merit but were so preposterous as to be frivolous as a matter of law. For instance, Steve Sarowitz, the founder of Baldoni’s production company Wayfarer, accused Reynolds of defamation, even though Reynolds did not know who Sarowitz was until the litigation was filed and never previously said anything about him. Similarly, the film company It Ends With Us, LLC asserted civil extortion and tortious interference claims against Reynolds and Lively, without pointing to anything Lively and Reynolds ever asked of the company.

In other words, Lively and Reynolds picked the most frivolous subset of the claims alleged by Baldoni and his buddies. These were claims that could not have been true and which were not even supported by allegations, let alone evidence. Lively and Reynolds then sent Rule 11 letters pointing out those sanctionable claims and inviting Baldoni and his buddies, AKA “the Wayfarer Parties,” to withdraw them within 21 days.

That did not happen.

Instead, on the very last day of the 21-day safe harbor period, a lawyer from Freedman’s firm who never entered an appearance in the case submitted a letter to Judge Liman suggesting that it was improper for Lively and Reynolds to seek Rule 11 sanctions given that they had also moved to dismiss the offending complaint in its entirety.

“[I]f the Court grants your clients’ motions to dismiss in whole or part, the Wayfarer Plaintiffs will amend the [Complaint] as directed by the Court, obviating any imagined Rule 11 issue,” argued attorney Ellyn Garofolo.

That’s not the law. No court has ever said that a party must choose between filing a motion to dismiss legally unsupported claims as a matter of law and seeking sanctions for some or all of the most frivolous of those claims. Nor did making this bizarre argument pause the safe harbor period. And so, with the 21-days elapsed and no withdrawal of the offending pleading, Lively and Baldoni filed their motion for sanctions.

On June 3, Wayfarer Parties filed an opposition to the motion which was no less bizarre then their Rule-11-OR-Motion-to-Dismiss letter. They recycled the same PICK ONE argument, while huffing that “discovery is still in its infancy” and perhaps they’ll find facts to support their claims if given time to keep digging.

Last Tuesday, Reynolds and Lively filed their reply, and it is savage. First, they note that the Wayfarer Parties “make no attempt whatsoever to defend the legal or factual basis” of the claims they asked them to withdraw.

“Their silence concedes the absence of any reasonable basis in fact or law for any of the challenged claims,” they argue. And they’re right.

Their lawyer, Willkie Farr’s Michael Gottlieb, called the argument that you can’t move to dismiss and for sanctions at the same time “nonsensical and unsupported by the law.” They’re right about that, too.

The safe harbor letters “warned Plaintiffs that certain of their claims were so baseless and brought with such an improper purpose that they were sanctionable under Rule 11.” The fact that that subset of claims was also legally insufficient and dismissed under Rule 12 “does not insulate them from sanctions, and none of the cases Plaintiffs cite stand for that proposition.”

Gottlieb also took the Wayfarer Parties to task for suggesting that they might discover facts to rehabilitate their claims. Discovery is not “still in its infancy” with respect to this lawsuit: The document production cutoff is July 1, a little over two weeks from now, and the close of all discovery is just two months away.

But more importantly, “Rule 11 does not permit parties and counsel to file frivolous claims in the hope that discovery will render them nonfrivolous.” A lawyer must certify that the factual claims are well-supported at the time they’re filed. “Wishful thinking about potential future discovery,” Gottlieb notes, is “not a license for counsel to disregard the obligations of Rule 11.”

Ouch.

Reynolds and Lively want Baldoni to kick up for their attorneys’ fees incurred in defending against the sanctionable claims (which would also include the cost of litigating the Rule 11 motion itself), “a formal reprimand” of the two primary lawyers litigating on behalf of Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties, Freedman and Mitchell Schuster, and whatever other sanctions the court finds appropriate.

Sanctions are an extreme remedy. They’re rarely imposed. But Judge Liman is no stranger to extreme remedies. He’s already struck two letters from the docket penned by Freedman as “irrelevant,” filed solely to “promote public scandal,” and a potential “reservoir of libelous statements for press consumption.” In that order, Judge Liman warned counsel that “future misuse of the Court’s docket may be met with sanctions.”

The cope is strong over on Reddit, where Baldoni has convinced his fans that this is all a triple Xanatos Gambit to expose Lively and Reynolds. He’s got them right where he wants them! Or possibly Judge Liman is a secret Lively-stan. Or…

The reality is that Baldoni steered himself into a heap of shit by confusing his publicity strategy for his legal strategy. And soon enough, the piper will have to be paid.