Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s press litigation ends with judge

Amid a flurry of news items about who did what to whom and who started what and where, a federal judge has requested that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's lawyers please shut the hell up. In today's hearing, the first in the much-publicized dispute between Lively and Baldoni over sexual harassment during the production of It Ends With Us and a supposed "smear campaign" launched during the promotion of the film, Judge Lewis Liman warned both sets of lawyers that there would be consequences if they don't cease making incendiary comments to the press.

"If it turns out that this ends up being litigated in the press in a way that would prejudice the opportunity for parties [to have] a fair trial, one of the tools that the court does have available to it is to accelerate the date of the trial," he said. Liman instituted an Empire State rule on both, asking them to keep things civil in public, per Deadline.

As readers of this site know, since the filing of Lively's sexual harassment complaint against Baldoni, his lawyer, Bryan Freedman, has been all over the press and making the case that it is Baldoni who is the victim here. To wit, Lively's lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, filed paperwork against Freedman for inappropriate comments in the press, including claims that Lively's "sole intent [was] to ruin" Baldoni's life through a "fictitious smear campaign," Vulture reports. Gottlieb would like Freedman to stop making "extrajudicial statements" about Lively, which he believes comes close to defaming her and her husband, Ryan Reynolds.

"Not to sound like a 4-year-old fighting a 4-year-old with the 'But they started it,'" Baldoni attorney Bryan Freedman said. "They very pointedly used the press. This has not been a one-way street."