Lively asked for $8m in fees. The judge gave her 5 percent.
A judge cut Blake Lively’s $8m attorney-fee claim to $407,451, ruling media relations don’t count as legal defense.
By The Weekend · · 5 min read
Blake Lively asked a federal judge to make Justin Baldoni's side pay $8,040,000 in attorneys' fees and costs. She got $407,451.75. The gap between those two numbers is not a rounding error — it is a judge drawing a line around what a defamation defense actually costs, and what everything else around it cost instead.
The ruling landed on Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman, who split the award into $363,245.40 in attorneys' fees and $44,206.35 in costs. Lively had sought $7.5 million in fees and $540,000 in costs — meaning the court granted roughly 5 percent of what she asked for. For anyone who has ever paid a lawyer by the hour, that ratio is the whole story: the billing rate wasn't the problem, the hours were.
A California statute, not a settlement, decided this number
Lively wasn't recovering fees because she won a defamation suit outright. She and Baldoni settled their 18-month legal fight in May, just weeks before a scheduled federal trial, leaving only the fee question open. Lively's claim for reimbursement rested on a California law built to protect people who report sexual harassment or discrimination from being hit with retaliatory lawsuits — in this case, the defamation claim Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios, filed against her after she alleged an online smear campaign followed her complaint about conditions on the set of "It Ends With Us."
That statute lets a defendant recover fees spent defending against the retaliatory suit specifically — not fees spent on the broader war. Liman's ruling turned on that distinction. He found Lively's lawyers' hourly rates "not unreasonable" given what he called a case with "complex legal issues." But he found the number of hours billed unreasonable, and he excluded categories of work outright — most notably, media relations. "Media relations were not integral to defending the defamation claim brought against Lively," the ruling states, "time spent on media relations and press coverage is not compensable." In a case that generated as much press coverage as this one, that sentence is doing a lot of work: it tells you the court drew a hard fence between litigating a claim and managing a narrative, and refused to let one side bill the other for the second.
The paperwork gap that cost the difference
Part of what sank the larger number wasn't legal theory — it was documentation. Liman noted that Lively submitted a declaration from a fee expert who reviewed her legal team's billing records, but never submitted the underlying invoices themselves. Courts calculating fee awards typically want the receipts, not a summary of the receipts. Without them, a judge weighing a $7.5 million claim has limited ability to test it line by line, and the ruling reflects exactly that: rates upheld as reasonable in principle, hours discounted heavily in practice.
An 18-month case that started with a set and ended with a subpoena
The dispute began in December 2024, when Lively filed a complaint alleging that Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios ran a retaliatory campaign against her after she raised concerns about sexual harassment and a hostile environment during production of "It Ends With Us." Baldoni and Wayfarer countered with a defamation suit the following month, arguing that Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had planted false claims to seize creative control of the film. Baldoni separately sued The New York Times over its coverage of Lively's allegations. Both of those suits were dismissed, along with several claims inside Lively's own complaint, well before the case reached a settlement in May.
By the time the fee dispute reached Liman's desk, the underlying fight — over who controlled the film, who leaked what to reporters, and who harassed whom — had already been resolved by the settlement itself. What remained was arithmetic: how many lawyer-hours count as "defending against the defamation claim," and how many count as something adjacent to it. The court's answer excluded not just media strategy but, implicitly, most of the sprawl that an 18-month, multi-party entertainment lawsuit generates. Legal costs in cases like this tend to balloon because litigation and public relations blur together — press statements timed to filings, declarations that double as narrative — and Liman's ruling is a rare moment where a court priced that blur at zero.
What the ruling doesn't touch
The financial result is closed — barring a new suit, this was Lively's last avenue for monetary recovery in the case — but nothing about the underlying allegations was adjudicated by this ruling. Fee awards test litigation conduct and billing reasonableness, not the truth of the original harassment claim or the countersuit's defamation theory. Both of those questions were resolved by settlement, not verdict, which means neither side received a court finding on the merits. Baldoni and his wife, Emily, said in July that they had endured "injustice and pain" through the process; Lively has made public appearances since the settlement, including at the Met Gala and the World Cup final, without commenting publicly on the case itself. The open question the ruling leaves is straightforward: if press management is now explicitly uncompensable under this statute, does that change how future harassment-retaliation claims get litigated — with legal teams keeping media strategy financially and procedurally separate from the courtroom filing from day one, rather than discovering the split costs them 95 percent of a fee claim after the fact?
How much did Lively actually recover, combined?
$407,451.75 total — $363,245.40 in attorneys' fees plus $44,206.35 in costs — against a request of just over $8.04 million.
Can Lively appeal or refile for the remaining fees?
The ruling describes this as her last chance at monetary compensation in the case unless she files a separate suit, which would restart the legal clock entirely.