Ryan Reynolds’ Private Baldoni Texts Outlast the Settlement

Newly unsealed filings quote Ryan Reynolds calling Justin Baldoni a predator and sociopath in an August 2024 text to author Colleen Hoover. The notes went out as It Ends With Us opened, months before Blake Lively sued over the production, and they reached the public docket only after that case had already settled.

Baldoni, who directed and co-starred in the film, has denied Lively’s allegations. The messages do not retry those claims. They show how the people around the movie were already writing the story of the other side, in private, while the picture was still selling tickets.

The Texts Landed on Opening Weekend

On Aug. 10, 2024, Reynolds wrote Hoover about the backlash Lively faced while promoting the domestic-violence drama, which is based on Hoover’s novel. Everybody on a production could “completely run away from a person who is obviously a predator and sociopath,” he wrote, “and the narrative must first land on why a woman is the problem.”

It’s amazing to me that you can have everybody involved with a production completely run away from a person who is obviously a predator and sociopath and the narrative must first land on why a woman is the problem.

Ryan Reynolds, text to Colleen Hoover, Aug. 10, 2024

He kept going. “It’s amazing to me how low people still go,” he wrote. “But people are already coming forward and soon enough someone is just gonna go on record.”

The calendar matters. Domestic opening day was Aug. 9, 2024, when the film took in $50,016,652. The day before the Hoover thread, Reynolds had already texted his talent agent, Warren Zavala, and called Baldoni a “human rounding error” while marking the movie’s start. Lively did not file her California civil-rights complaint until Dec. 20, 2024, or her federal suit until Dec. 31. The insults were not a reaction to a docket. They were opening-weekend talk.

Colleen Hoover Was Already in the Middle

Hoover, whose book the studio adapted, did not push back. “It’s mind blowing,” she wrote. She added that the loudest critics looked to her like “mostly 13-year-olds who don’t have fully developed brains yet and will be mortified by their thought process a few years from now.” Then: “Good to hear it’s already beginning to skew away from him.”

Reynolds answered that he was surprised the pile-on was “mostly girls,” at least from what he had seen, and that “the really smart folks already know.” He also flagged the other public story in motion, “how insanely well the film is performing and how much audiences love it.” Hoover hearted that reply, according to the filings.

HOOVER ON THE THREAD

• The insult: She did not challenge Reynolds when he called Baldoni a predator and a sociopath.
• The crowd: She blamed the noise on teenagers and said she was glad the mood was already turning away from Baldoni.
• The laugh: When Reynolds mocked Baldoni’s crisis team, the filings say she reacted with a laugh.

That is a problem for anyone who wanted Hoover treated as a bystander. Earlier filings had already put her in the same fight, including a note to Baldoni that she felt forced to choose a side and had been disappointed by his conduct. The new thread shows her in Reynolds’ phone as well, laughing at a parody of the director while the movie she wrote was still in theaters.

He Wrote Baldoni a Crisis Script

Reynolds treated Baldoni’s public tone as a product. “Yeah, when he uses a crisis team like that, you can start to see all the strategy they’ve equipped him with,” he wrote Hoover. Then he staged the coaching.

“Crisis team: okay, Justin, all you do is talk about DV and how wonderful Blake is. And we’ll handle the online stuff. No matter what, you keep up your feminist advocacy. And speak like an emotionally elevated thought leader. Understood?” He supplied Baldoni’s imagined answer: “Justin: Namaste. Let’s get this bitch.”

“And I think the truth about him is already finding its way to the light,” Reynolds added.

The joke is the tell. He was angry about a crisis shop he believed was shaping Baldoni’s lines, and he was shaping lines of his own, to the novelist and to his agent, on the same weekend. Separate messages in the file, dated Aug. 17, 2024, show him pressing Zavala about Sony Pictures and arguing the studio needed to “frame it the right way” and stop “thread[ing] the needle” while Lively took the public hit. Baldoni “needs to see that an entire studio knows what he’s doing,” Reynolds wrote in that thread.

Lively’s complaint later accused Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, producer Jamey Heath, crisis publicist Melissa Nathan of The Agency Group PR, and former Jonesworks publicist Jennifer Abel of a retaliatory smear. Baldoni denied it. Jonesworks, run by Stephanie Jones, later sued over alleged client-poaching and smear tactics of its own. The unsealed parody does not prove those claims. It does show Reynolds had already cast Baldoni as a client reading from a crisis binder, months before any of it was a caption on a complaint.

Why the Messages Are Public Now

The legal war did not end with a jury. It ended with paperwork, and then with a judge who declined to keep the paperwork dark.

On May 4, 2026, the parties put out a joint statement two weeks before a May 18 trial date in Manhattan. They said the finished film remained a source of pride, that “concerns raised by Ms. Lively deserved to be heard,” and that they hoped the deal would bring closure. On May 7 they filed a notice of settlement. Lively, on one side, and Wayfarer Studios, It Ends With Us Movie LLC, Baldoni, Heath, Steve Sarowitz, The Agency Group PR, Nathan, and Abel, on the other, dismissed the remaining claims with prejudice. They waived appeals. Lively kept only her motion for fees under California Civil Code Section 47.1, the statute aimed at retaliatory defamation suits against people who speak about sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination.

U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman of the Southern District of New York then had to decide what stayed sealed. Sealing motions, he wrote in a Sept. 17, 2026 memorandum, concern the presumption of public access to the file under the common law and the First Amendment. “Accordingly, they are not resolved by the parties’ settlement and the resolution of this case.”

Lively told the court she did not want continued sealing of the documents in those motions. Jonesworks largely stood down except for personal details. The Wayfarer parties still sought protection for some medical, business, and third-party material. Liman granted some redactions, denied others, ordered parties to refile stacks of exhibits with only approved cuts, and directed the clerk to unseal a long list of docket entries, including Nos. 892, 908, 909, 972, 973, 991, 992, 1010, 1055, 1067, 1094, 1140, 1181, 1183, 1186, 1188, 1190, 1198, and 1208. He closed the leftover motions in both 1:24-cv-10049 and 1:25-cv-449.

FROM OPENING WEEKEND TO THE UNSEAL

1. August 9, 2024: Reynolds texts Zavala that Baldoni is a “human rounding error” as the film opens domestically to $50,016,652.
2. August 10, 2024: Reynolds and Hoover exchange the predator, sociopath, and crisis-script messages.
3. December 20, 2024: Lively files her California civil-rights complaint; the federal case follows on December 31 as 1:24-cv-10049.
4. January 31, 2025: The Wayfarer parties file an amended complaint in 1:25-cv-449 seeking $400 million and naming Lively, Reynolds, publicist Leslie Sloane, and Vision PR, later adding claims against The New York Times Company.
5. June 9, 2025: Liman dismisses that amended complaint, with limited leave to replead two business-tort theories the Wayfarer parties then drop.
6. April 2, 2026: Liman wipes out most of Lively’s case and leaves three claims for trial.
7. May 7, 2026: The stipulation ends those claims. The 47.1 fee fight continues.
8. September 17, 2026: Liman unseals the leftover file. The Hoover texts then move through the public docket.

That is the second punch. The settlement could end the claims. It could not, under Liman’s reading, end the public’s right to see what the parties had already used to argue those claims.

The Scorecard After the $400 Million Suit

By the time the texts returned, the courtroom score was already ugly for both camps. Lively’s sexual-harassment counts were gone. So was Baldoni’s $400 million case. What remained was a fee petition and a public record.

On April 2, 2026, Liman granted the Wayfarer parties judgment on the pleadings and summary judgment in part. In Lively v. Wayfarer Studios LLC, three claims were left standing: retaliation under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act against It Ends With Us Movie LLC and Wayfarer; aiding and abetting that retaliation against The Agency Group PR; and breach of a contract rider against It Ends With Us Movie LLC. Individual defendants, including Baldoni, were out. The harassment theory failed in part because Lively was treated as an independent contractor on the film, not an employee covered by the federal workplace statute she had invoked.

The Wayfarer action had already died on June 9, 2025. Liman dismissed the amended complaint that had charged Lively, Reynolds, and their publicists with civil extortion, defamation, and a run of business torts. On June 12, 2026, after the settlement, he held that Lively was entitled to reasonable fees and costs under Section 47.1 for beating the defamation claim, and he denied treble and punitive damages.

The size of that bill came on Aug. 26, 2026. Lively asked for $8,035,040.88, which her papers split as $7,495,526.87 in fees and $539,514.01 in costs, across 82 timekeepers. Liman would not treat “the litigation” as the whole Hollywood war. Section 47.1, he wrote, covers the defense of the defamation claim. “The Wayfarer Parties have the better of the argument.” He cut work after June 9, 2025, and he would not pay for the rest of the case simply because a defamation count had been parked beside it. The judgment was $363,245.40 in attorneys’ fees and $44,206.35 in costs.

Bryan Freedman, lead counsel for Baldoni and Wayfarer, said the ruling spoke for itself and called it a victory for his clients. Lively’s lawyers, Esra Hudson and Michael Gottlieb, called the award the first of its kind under the California statute and said her case had not been about money. Both things can be true in a file that pays out a sliver of the ask and still puts Reynolds’ private vocabulary in the caption.

HOW THE CLAIMS CLOSED

No damages changed hands in the May deal. The only dollars Liman later moved were those fee and cost lines, and they were tied to the dismissed defamation count, not to a finding that Baldoni harassed Lively or that Reynolds defamed Baldoni.

A Hit That Did Not Buy Peace

Reynolds was not wrong about the grosses, even if the rest of the text has now become an exhibit. Box Office Mojo’s ledger puts It Ends With Us at $351,441,044 at the worldwide box office, with $148,518,266 domestic (42.3 percent) and $202,922,778 international (57.7 percent). Sony Pictures Releasing opened it in North America on Aug. 9, 2024.

THE OPENING THE TEXTS SAT INSIDE

• Domestic open: $50,016,652 on Aug. 9, 2024, the same date as the “human rounding error” note.
• Domestic total: $148,518,266 for Sony Pictures Releasing.
• Worldwide total: $351,441,044, with most of the money coming from overseas.

That is the weekend Reynolds told Hoover the “really smart folks already know,” while the louder public fight was still about Lively’s press tour. The movie did the business. The people who made it kept writing about one another anyway.

Online, the new file is being read less as a husband defending his wife than as proof that Reynolds was already in the reputation business, scripting Baldoni’s motives for the novelist whose name was on the poster. The other reading is still available: a crisis team was in the field, Lively was taking the heat, and he was trying to drag a studio and an author onto her side. The docket now holds both the parody of Baldoni’s talking points and Reynolds’ own.

Representatives for Reynolds and Hoover did not immediately comment on the unsealed messages. Baldoni’s denial of the underlying allegations stands where it stood in 2024. Jonesworks still has its own case in the same courthouse. None of that puts the Aug. 10 language back in a sealed PDF. Liman said the settlement did not retire public access. The clerk unsealed the entries. The predator line is in the file with Hoover’s laugh next to it, attached to a movie that had already recouped in cash what it never recouped in peace.