Before Blake Lively filed a lawsuit against her It Ends With Us costar and director Justin Baldoni, alleging sexual harassment, retaliation and more, the actress opened up about the vital importance of intimacy coordinators.
“I think it’s critical to have an intimacy coordinator,” Lively, 37, told DigitalSpy in an August 2024 interview, published three months before she filed her lawsuit against Baldoni with the Southern District of New York.
“You coordinate stunts, you coordinate dancing, it is choreography,” she continued. “So it’s to be able to say, ‘This is what happens here, here and here in a stunt,’ and ‘This is what happens here and here in a dance,’ but like ‘Now you guys put your bodies together, and your mouths and whatever’ and just action and cut.”
Lively went on to say that she believes “being choreographed” during intimate scenes is “critical for everyone’s safety.”
Lively officially sued Baldoni on Tuesday, December 31, 2024, Us Weekly previously confirmed, alleging sexual harassment, retaliation, breach of contract, infliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy and lost wages. In addition to Baldoni, Lively is suing publicists Melissa Natahan and Jennifer Abel, as well as Wayfarer Studios.
Lively also filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, citing similar claims.
“I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted,” Lively said in a statement to Us.
In response, Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit against The New York Times on the same day and for its reporting on Lively’s sexual harassment accusations. In the suit, Baldoni accuses the publication of libel and false light invasion of privacy, alleging that the newspaper “cherry-picked” communications and omitted context in order to mislead readers.
The lawsuit also alleges that Lively pursued a “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign against Baldoni, using false “sexual harassment allegations to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production.”
Baldoni also alleges that Lively never met with an intimacy coordinator while filming It Ends With Us.
“In this vicious smear campaign fully orchestrated by Blake Lively and her team, the New York Times cowered to the wants and whims of two powerful ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites, disregarding journalistic practices and ethics once befitting of the revered publication by using doctored and manipulated texts and intentionally omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative,” Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, said via a statement to Us on Tuesday, December 31.
“In doing so, they pre-determined the outcome of their story, and aided and abetted their own devastating PR smear campaign designed to revitalize Lively’s self-induced floundering public image and counter the organic groundswell of criticism amongst the online public,” Freedman continued. “The irony is rich.”
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