Blake Lively – wealthy, beautiful and successful, with an adoring film star husband in Ryan Reynolds, powerful friends including Taylor Swift and a stellar acting career –may have thought herself fortunate to the point of invincibility.

However, since December 31 she has been on the receiving end of a jolting lesson in Newton’s Third Law, which holds that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Her move to incinerate the reputation and career of Justin Baldoni, her co-star in hit film It Ends With Us, via a civil complaint filed just before Christmas accusing him of sexual harassment on set, has led to a media storm which has engulfed her – and Reynolds – in painful ways which they clearly never saw coming.

That much is indicated by the fact that for two weeks now, spooked by a global wave of hostility towards the 37-year-old actress who made her name in TV series Gossip Girl, all comments have been disabled on the A-list couple’s respective Instagram accounts.

Even the author who wrote the book on which the film is based has gone so far as to close down her Instagram this week, such is the abuse being levelled at Lively.

Lively and Reynolds, 48, might have been expected to go to the Golden Globes on January 7 as his film Deadpool & Wolverine was up for an award. But they didn’t attend and, perhaps to lessen their embarrassment, neither did his co-star and friend Hugh Jackman. All concerned will certainly be staying home on Oscars night on March 2, too.

‘Can you imagine Blake walking down a red carpet at this point?’ says a Hollywood publicist. ‘Nobody would be nuts enough to let that happen.’

The twists and turns of this bitter Hollywood feud have become steadily more sensational – and more damaging for Lively – as January has unfolded.

The film at the heart of the feud, based on the 2016 bestseller by Colleen Hoover, was released in August and was a box office hit. It follows Lily Bloom, a florist played by Lively, who falls in love with a charming but abusive neurosurgeon played by Baldoni, who also directed the movie.

Initial rumours of a fall-out between the co-stars surfaced over the summer after they appeared to avoid each other during the movie’s promotional tour and have since blown up into a full-scale war after Lively’s lawsuit dropped on December 23.

This included claims that Baldoni, 41, entered Lively’s trailer while she was topless, showed her pornographic pictures and a graphic video of his wife giving birth, repeatedly discussed his ‘porn addiction’, described his own genitalia and even bit and sucked on Lively’s lips during an improvised kissing scene for which Baldoni insisted on doing multiple takes.

This week, Justin Baldoni’s team released a video of unedited footage of him and Lively doing three takes of one scene of their characters flirting in a bar, which had given rise to Lively’s accusations of sexual harassment.

Both sides say the video vindicates their account, but most people agree what is shown appears to fall a long way short of the ‘predatory’ behaviour of which Lively complained.

Meanwhile Baldoni’s contention – that Lively ‘stole’ the film from him, erased his credit, banished him to the basement on the night of the premiere as she wouldn’t allow him to be in the same room as her and cooked up a story about creepy behaviour to cover up what she had done – is being widely believed on social media. Thousands of Mean Girl memes proliferate. To put it bluntly, Blake has been cancelled.

Unedited footage from the filming of It Ends With Us released by Justin Baldoni’s legal team this week, showing the actor and Lively in a scene during which she claims she was sexually harrassed

BTS footage of Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively filming dance scene

Now it can be revealed that Lively needs to brace herself for more of the same – and worse. Multiple sources connected with the lawsuit confirm that Baldoni’s team are building a full website on the case which will be open to the public.

When it goes live – soon – it will include numerous snippets of unedited footage from the film, including anything which ‘speaks to’ Lively’s original complaint about her co-star. As Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman puts it: ‘We have all the receipts – and more.’

This might extend to footage of one scene which Lively has complained about where her character is giving birth. She said that she was ‘pressured’ into simulating ‘full nudity’; Baldoni’s team say that she was covered by a prosthetic bump and a hospital gown.

The website will also include full unedited WhatsApp, text and email exchanges between Lively and Baldoni, such as a message where she invites him to come and run through lines in her trailer, saying she was ‘pumping’ (expressing breast milk – she’d not long had her fourth child at the time of filming).

This could cast doubt on her assertion Baldoni had entered her trailer on multiple occasions while she was breast-feeding, causing her distress.

It’s unheard of for one side to present such a trove of evidence to the public, independent of court filings. The move has been described to me as ‘super-aggressive’ by one legal analyst and will cause outrage among Lively’s team.

The twists and turns of this bitter Hollywood feud have become steadily more sensational – and more damaging for Lively, here at a gala screening in London in August

As we shall see, though, it’s very much in the playbook of Baldoni’s attack dog lawyer, Bryan Freedman, who has a reputation for fighting hard – his critics would say dirty – and for battling it out in the court of public opinion rather than in front of a judge. He has called Lively’s legal proceedings ‘unethical’ and ‘shameful’.

As you might expect, there are signs of desperation on the other side for things to calm down.

Lively retains four lawyers at two firms – Michael J Gottlieb and Kristin Bender at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Stephanie A Roeser and Catherine Rose Noble at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. They say that they previously issued a ‘cease and desist’ notice over alleged harassment by Baldoni’s team back in December.

Now they have applied to try to get Freedman to stop releasing footage and information to the media, saying it harasses Lively and violates rules of professional conduct regarding trial publicity.

The request issued this week says Freedman’s public statements ‘not only continue the campaign of retaliation that was the subject of Ms Lively’s First Cease and Desist, but they contain numerous new false statements about Ms Lively and others’. It is believed it was Reynolds who pushed for the request over concerns for his and his wife’s careers and her wellbeing.

Lively’s lawyers submitted a letter directly to Freedman at his office as well as to film company Wayfarer, which produced the film. The document, dated Monday, January 20, deplores the release of footage from the unedited film and criticises the plans to release ‘all correspondence and videos’.

Her lawyers say: ‘As Ms Lively’s counsel have attempted, repeatedly, to caution Mr Freedman, federal litigation must be conducted in court and according to the relevant rules of professional conduct. His conduct threatens to, and will, materially prejudice both the Lively Case and the Wayfarer Case by tainting the jury pool, because his statements are deliberately aimed at undermining the “character, credibility, [and] reputation” of numerous relevant parties.’

A source close to the litigation says: ‘The attempts to gag Freedman only make it look worse for Blake. He is pressing ahead with plans to put literally every bit of evidence on a website for the court of public opinion. It’s never been done before.’

The question of evidence, and if it has been manipulated, is at the heart of the first legal action in this feud and led to The New York Times printing a 4,000-word article titled ‘Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine’ within a few hours of the Lively lawsuit being filed.

The article, which is now subject to a libel complaint from Baldoni’s team, alleged that his PRs Melissa Nathan and Jen Abel conspired to create a global smear campaign against Lively at the time of the film’s premiere, when the actress was criticised for being tone deaf in using a movie about domestic violence to promote her alcohol brands and for telling viewers to ‘grab your florals’ to watch it.

It cited one text message from his publicist Nathan which read: ‘We can bury anyone.’ Now it seems the initiative has swung back to the Baldoni camp.

One source says: ‘It seems like a massive miscalculation to launch a lawsuit when the evidence is going to come back and show the other side.

‘There is a belief Blake’s team might decide to settle in order to get her out with dignity.’

For now, Lively’s team are insisting they want to go to court and no discussions over a settlement have been opened. They say: ‘While they [Baldoni’s team] are focused on misleading media narratives, we are focused on the legal process. We are continuing our efforts to require Mr Baldoni and his associates to answer in court, under oath, rather than through manufactured media stunts.’

Baldoni’s lawyer responds: ‘Prior to filing her lawsuit in court, Ms Lively went to The New York Times in an effort to publicly destroy Justin Baldoni. When Mr Baldoni exercises his right to publicly defend himself by putting forth actual facts and evidence, for Ms Lively and team this instantly becomes morally and ethically wrong.

‘Ms Lively wants very different standards to apply to her but fortunately, truth and authenticity apply to everyone and can never be wrong. Looking at the video and the evidence to come, I can understand why Ms Lively would now not want this to play out in public.’

You can see why, when he was profiled in The Hollywood Reporter last year, Freedman was characterised as a ‘street fighter’.

Suffice to say, it doesn’t look like this unseemly showbusiness brawl is going to end any time soon.

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