What Justin Baldoni’s Unseen Texts About Blake Lively Reveal

Here is the quick version: private texts from Justin Baldoni about a tense, very personal meeting with Ryan Reynolds just hit the court record, and they paint a messy picture of what happened behind the scenes of It Ends With Us. The texts were sent to Rainn Wilson, they were never meant to be public, and now they are very public. Buckle up.

The timeline, cleaned up

• Jan 4, 2024: According to new court filings, Baldoni (41) met with Ryan Reynolds at the NYC apartment Reynolds shares with Blake Lively.
• Jan 5, 2024: Filming on It Ends With Us was set to resume after the Hollywood strikes. Baldoni says the meeting happened the night before cameras restarted.
• In texts to Rainn Wilson (entered into evidence), Baldoni describes the meeting as an ambush and says he left feeling emotionally paralyzed.
• Nov 13, 2025: An account called @thebushbirds posts screenshots of those texts on X; the replies are full of people defending Baldoni.
• Jan 2025: Baldoni files a complaint that also recounts the Reynolds meeting; his lawyers call Reynolds’s behavior a tirade.
• Now: Lively’s suit and Baldoni’s counters are both in motion. Lively’s case is currently set for trial in March 2026 in the Southern District of New York.

What Baldoni says happened in the apartment

Per the texts cited in court records and reporting, Baldoni says Reynolds confronted him about allegations raised by Lively. The Deadpool star allegedly read from a phone a list of complaints about Baldoni’s behavior. Baldoni claims some items were loosely tied to real events but, in his words, taken out of context. He says the words creepy and abuse were used about him, and that he was handed a written apology to recite on the spot. He says he couldn’t do it.

He also says Reynolds spoke to him like he was a child, and that Reynolds and Lively argued Baldoni and his producing partner Jamey Heath were not who they presented themselves to be, and that having a podcast suggesting they were safe people was itself unsafe. Baldoni’s version is that he shut down in the moment and struggled to even form sentences.

'I was emotionally paralyzed.'

Baldoni’s texts say he went home in shock, felt like he was seven years old again, and was embarrassed he couldn’t find the words to apologize in front of the team. He credits Heath with handling the room better than he did.

What sparked the confrontation, according to Baldoni

In reporting cited by PEOPLE, Baldoni says he asked a trainer about Lively’s weight for a scene where his character had to lift her, explaining he has a history of back issues. The trainer allegedly relayed the question to Lively, she told Reynolds, and that chain led to the meeting in the apartment.

The fallout in his own words

In the same text thread, Baldoni calls the situation unjust, says he briefly wanted to blow the whole movie up, and admits he could only see one way forward: acknowledge Lively and Reynolds’s feelings and apologize. He says he prayed for the right words, they did not come, and he felt abandoned by God in that moment (while adding he knows that is not actually what happened).

He also says he was told this was the worst experience of Lively’s life, that others had witnessed similar behavior, and that his conduct on set was called creepy. He compares the night to an old, rough meeting at SoulPancake years ago with someone he identifies as Golriz, but says this was a hundred times worse. He tells Wilson he spent an hour with his therapist trying to shake the haze and could barely get off the couch. He ends by saying he is putting on a smile and doing his best to lead the crew, promising to unpack everything after the shoot, and apologizing for what he calls a vulnerability dump to one of the few safe spaces he has.

How both sides are framing it in court

In Baldoni’s January 2025 complaint (as summarized in reports), his lawyers say Reynolds launched into a tirade and that Baldoni had never been spoken to like that in his life. They also suggest the timing and setting may have been strategic, describing it as an inappropriate and humiliating berating while other celebrity friends came and went from the penthouse. Later, Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman told Page Six that Reynolds was angry, stern, and impassioned, but pushed back on the idea that Reynolds aggressively berated Baldoni, pointing out that berate literally means to scold angrily.

Lively’s lawsuit tells a different story. Her legal team says she chose to have Reynolds present as her representative, and that the meeting was used to detail the inappropriate conduct she, her staff, and other cast and crew allegedly experienced from Baldoni and Heath.

Where this leaves everyone

The texts are out. The apartment meeting is now a centerpiece in dueling legal narratives. Fans online are already taking sides. And the court calendar has Lively’s case headed to trial in March 2026 in New York. Messy, uncomfortable, very Hollywood. More when this inevitably gets messier.