- A new Lively-Baldoni scuffle concerns Wayfarer exec Steve Sarowitz's so-called 'dead bodies' rant.
- Lively had quoted this month from Sarowitz's remarks, which targeted her and Ryan Reynolds.
- On Thursday, Baldoni demanded that the full text of these 2024 remarks be unsealed for "context."
Lawyers for Blake Lively say it's case-clinching evidence of a retaliation scheme: secretly-recorded 2024 audio in which studio executive Steve Sarowitz says "there will be two dead bodies" if the actor and her husband Ryan Reynolds "ever cross the line."
So far, a transcript of that recording, a key exhibit in a nine-month court battle over the 2024 hit movie "It Ends With Us," has remained sealed on Lively's request.
But on Thursday, Lively's opponents in her ongoing litigation against costar Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, and millionaire Paylocity founder Sarowitz asked a Manhattan judge to lift that seal and release the transcript.
The entirety of Sarowitz's remarks — not just what Lively's side calls the "dead bodies threat" — needs to be public, lawyers for the Baldoni defendants argued.
Attorneys for Lively and for Sarowitz, Wayfarer, and Baldoni did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing, which argues, "Mr. Sarowitz should be allowed to have the entire recording made public to ensure accuracy and provide context."
The excerpts surfaced on September 9, as part of a spin-off lawsuit in which Lively seeks cash compensation — including legal fees and punitive damages — from a Baldoni defamation countersuit that was dismissed in June.
According to Lively's side, Sarowitz called a meeting in August 2024 with an unnamed witness, someone identified only as an individual who was working with Wayfarer on a project unrelated to "It Ends With Us."
During the meeting, the unnamed witness secretly recorded Sarowitz saying, "that if Ms. Lively or Mr. Reynolds ever cross the line, ever, then I will go after them,'" Lively's lawyers wrote.
"I will protect the studio like Israel protected itself from Hamas," they quote Sarowitz saying. "There were 39,000 dead bodies. There will be two dead bodies when I'm done," they said the movie executive continued.
"Minimum. Not dead, but 'you're dead to me.' So that kind of dead. But dead to a lot of people."
Sarowitz, a Wayfarer cofounder and financier whom Lively's lawyers refer to as "a multimillionaire," went on to promise, "I'm gonna spend a lot of money to make sure the studio is protected."
The call supports a key accusation in Lively's December 2024 lawsuit, which alleges that the Baldoni defendants schemed to retaliate against Lively for reporting sexual harassment on the set, her lawyers argued this month.
But the identity of the witness who recorded the call must remain sealed, her side argued, along with the call transcript and related filings quoting directly from the witness and describing the circumstances of the call.
Baldoni's team agreed only to the sealing of the witness's name and the title of the project the witness worked on with Sarowitz.
The rest? Publish, they argued, citing the First Amendment and caselaw establishing the presumption of immediate public access to judicial documents.
"Certainly, any privacy interest belongs to Mr. Sarowitz — the person who was recorded without his consent," the Baldoni legal team argued.
"He should be permitted to have the public hear the entire audio recording and not be confined solely to Lively's flawed and out-of-context purported transcription of the audio recording," they argued.
US District Judge Lewis Liman, who sits in Manhattan, has set a March 2026 jury trial date for the Lively versus Baldoni lawsuit. He did not immediately rule on the Sarowitz sealing matter.
