Justin Baldoni Thanks God, His Fans, and the Justice System

It’s been about a month since the headache-inducing It Ends With Us legal war reached an anticlimactic settlement, and since then, Blake Lively was snubbed from Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Justin Baldoni decided he is ready to crawl back into the limelight. In May, the two parties reached a settlement in Lively’s suit (Baldoni’s countersuit was dismissed in 2025), and in June, a judge ruled that Baldoni would have to pay $8 million toward Lively’s legal fees. So after allllll that, a majority of claims in both suits were dismissed, reputational ruin was achieved, and millions in court fees were incurred. All because of a damn Colleen Hoover book.

On Wednesday, after a near-two-year break from public comments, Justin and his wife, Emily Baldoni, posted a 5-minute video on Instagram to break their silence. If you have a spare 4 minutes and 53 seconds in your one precious life on Earth, feel free to watch the whole thing, or I could just tell you the gist of what it took them that long to say, between the pauses and the smiling.

“We have not spoken publicly for the better part of the last two years, and it’s not because we haven’t had anything to say,” he starts. “Because lord knows we have, but it just felt like every time we went to make a video like this, we wanted to speak, something was telling us not to. It just didn’t feel like the right time.” After pondering whether to make this video for a while, the Baldonis “prayed about it” and decided now was the right moment.

Emily starts by expressing the couple’s gratitude to everyone around them. “Gratitude has saved us,” Justin says.

“It doesn’t negate the injustice and the pain that we have also felt in the last few years. “We’ve had to wrestle with so many things and try to understand so many things, like how could something like this even happen? Let alone disguised as a fight for women… reality is that there’s been a lot of trauma for us to move through as a family.”

“There have been so many painful things that have been spoken into existence over the last couple of years that created so much noise. And we didn’t want to add to the noise. So we just wanted to let the justice system run its course.”

Amid the legal back-and-forth and the internet firestorm smearing Lively’s motives for filing the suit, a data expert who also analyzed online activity during the Depp v. Heard case told The Guardian that he estimated roughly 80% of posts were inorganic, aka bot activity. That certainly sounds like a lot of “noise” to me, but go on.

“If you’ve ever been through something traumatic, you know that healing isn’t linear. It looks different every day. We have had to rethink for ourselves what is real and what matters. It’s this. It’s our family, it’s our friends, it’s our community, who have been there for us, it’s our faith. I think we’re closer, more devoted, and steadfast in our faith than we’ve ever been.”

They then thanked their fans for standing by them and believing that Justin would come through on the side of truth; however, the court’s decision hinged largely on a legal technicality: because Lively was technically an independent contractor, she could not bring certain harassment claims under federal law.

As they wrapped up the video, Emily hinted it would not be the last time we would hear from them, alluding to a potential announcement, hence the whole reason for this timing of this video in the first place.

“The time will come,” she said, “but for now, we are going to focus on continuing the healing and hanging out with our kiddos and enjoying life.”

And after spending my one precious life on Earth piecing together the details of this (hopefully actually finally over) legal battle, I have come to accept that we will never know every little detail of what happened or exactly why Lively and Swift fell out. However, I still think the most telling piece of the puzzle comes from comedian and It Ends With Us costar Jenny Slate, who once wrote in some unsealed text messages, “Honestly I have no words to describe what a fraud [Baldoni] is. I honestly have never ever encountered anything like this dude. He’s the biggest clown and the most intense narcissist. Lots of lessons learned!”