Baldoni’s legal team met its Monday deadline in New York federal court with a filing that attacks Lively’s $8,035,040.88 fee request from every angle. Attorneys Bryan Freedman and Ellyn Garofalo are asking Judge Lewis Liman to reject the demand outright, or slash it to a fraction, calling it “anything but a typical fee motion.“
The core argument pulls no punches. “Lively fails to meet her burden to present credible evidence showing that the fees and costs she seeks to recover are reasonable and, accordingly, her fee motion should be denied in its entirety,” the filing states, per Us Weekly.
Then comes the math. The filing says Lively’s request covers 7,070.20 billable hours spread across 82 timekeepers, which People reports is roughly 20 times what courts have approved in comparable high-profile defamation cases. “The most cursory review of Lively’s submission shows multiple lawyers at the same hearings, numerous charges for lawyers conferencing, conferring, or strategizing with one another, and to put it mildly, extremely excessive research and online investigation,” Garofalo wrote. The Daily Mail, citing the billing schedules, reports three lawyers billed independently for one identical January meeting, while the filing flags $361,403.50 in entries too vague to decipher.
The rates take fire too. Lead attorney Michael Gottlieb billed $457,000 over 224 hours at a “discounted” $2,187 per hour, a figure Garofalo argues should be cut to $1,677.90. And the filing offers Judge Liman a brutal benchmark: The New York Times sought just $181,622.70 in fees after winning dismissal of the very same defamation claim.
The underlying war, which began with Lively’s December 2024 lawsuit and Baldoni’s dismissed $400 million countersuit, was settled in May without payment, and all parties have denied all allegations. Baldoni and his wife Emily broke their two-year silence in an emotional Instagram video just days before this filing.
Lively’s Camp Fires Back as Fans Crown the Real Winner
Her side is not blinking. An insider close to Lively told TMZ the statute covers the successful defense of the litigation, not merely the claim, and that Baldoni’s lawyers “don’t deal with that at all in their opposition, because they know they’re wrong.“
Online, though, the thread under TMZ‘s report ran heavily against her, with barely a defender in sight. “8 million in fees and somehow the only ones winning this thing are the lawyers,” one fan observed. The Baldoni faithful were blunter: “She asking for things that jave nothing to do with his defamation case and for fees already denied by the judge previously,” one wrote. Others stayed on the fence, “I’ll wait until everything plays out before picking a side,” while one fan kept it real: “That 8 will go a long way for me rn.“
The ball now sits with Judge Liman, whose fee ruling will be the last word in a fight that consumed Hollywood for a year and a half.
