u/77DarkHorse7

The way I see it, Bryan Freedman has been getting hit over the head with so much bad press, and people looking at him sideways for statements he made, and actions he took or didn't take... BUT, or maybe I should say AND he has been quietly collecting and curating evidence that had nothing to do with these Federal cases in New York.

Now, before I continue, just an aside: It's very difficult for me to imagine that Bryan would go through all of that without some kind of prior promise from his client that it would pay off for him. That he wouldn't go through all of that for nothing.

But look at all of the evidence he's chosen not to use in the case. The whole investigation by Wayfarer into Blake's claims after she filed her CRD. They told the Judge they wouldn't be using it in NY. The entire Vanzan sham lawsuit, they declined to use it at all, no MIL no grandstanding. The Taylor Swift extortion attempt, Bryan put it on the docket, yes, but it was never used in pretrial at all, all we got was this rumor that he got something big, and sped off quietly into the night. Then there's the failure to amend. After Justin's case was dismissed, they still had claims they could have amended, at least that would have given them more leverage in negotiations, but no, that was forgone. Why? Finally, everyone has been jumping down WP's throat for not moving to dismiss Blake's complaint earlier, but for Bryan's plan to work, he needed a Judgment as important evidence. A Judgment, not a mere dismissal.

FINALLY, what Bryan Freedman got Blake Lively to admit during her deposition was HUGE:

>Freedman asked why she believed both the defendants and he himself were part of the alleged campaign. Lively responded, “Outside of what I know through my attorneys, I believe the act of a retaliatory lawsuit, the press coverage you have done, and the statements you have made about me and my character have felt incredibly retaliatory.” The lawyer asked for specific actions by the other defendants. Lively responded, “Like I said, outside of conversations with my attorney, I cannot answer that.” - Yahoo News

In America, you personally, have to have a reasonable basis in fact, aka a good faith belief that someone has harmed you. Again, with facts to support it. You cannot proceed with a lawsuit when you just have some vague feeling that something bad happened to you, and 'that group of people had sumthin' to do with it'. And if you do proceed, because you've found some unscrupulous lawyers to help you, then you bear the consequences of that. You can get sued "into oblivion". Blake admitted in her deposition, twice(Jed Wallace's atty. as well), that she didn't know any supporting facts when she filed for retaliation. None. And less than nothing on her false light claims, because nothing was untrue.

All of this evidence, dutifully collected and categorized by Freedman, is the potential basis for a fabulous slam-dunk malicious prosecution and abuse of process case. And in California, it would be televised. He's teed it all up perfectly and is just waiting for the go-ahead from anyone on the Wayfarer side. So, it may happen or it may not. It is their decision on how they wish to proceed, or whether they will or not.

I, for one, hope Justin chooses to do the right thing and greenlight this suit, because so many people have been hurt by this woman and her entourage of thugs. And there are other people like Blake in this world, who are watching very closely, and if it seems to them like Blake is getting off scot-free, it'll just spur them on to act in kind, and hurt innocent people on their own way to the top.

Regardless of what happens going forward, Bryan needs a win after all the cheap shot insinuations of incompetence on his part. People have no idea.

Calm Down Now. This is not over.... No, I am not saying that with anger or some kind of blistered anguish. It's a reflective understanding of where we are.

Wayfarer is safe now. They aren't in danger of financial ruin. TAG is alright. It Ends With Us Movie, LLC. is defunct like it was always meant to be after serving its intended use.

What happens now is the individual people who once WERE the Wayfarer Parties have to consider what their options are. Wayfarer cannot make any more legal moves, but that is JUST Wayfarer.

Justin is a good person and he is going to want to move on, BUT what's about to happen online and in the media is going to prove to him beyond a shadow of any doubt, that he has to take Bryan up on his plan. A Malicious Prosecution case against Blake, televised, in California is the Only way he can come out of this with his future intact.

Who knows, maybe Justin is actually ready for it right now. But it IS GOING TO HAPPEN, and soon.

So please, for me, calm down, because trust me, this is NOT OVER.

Let's pretend you're Justin, and you've just attended the premiere of your movie, and you had to stay in the basement, and all of your rights to the movie have been stripped away, your name, your control and decision making power over how it's going to be marketed by most of the cast, all of it gone.

If you are a bad person, or even a neutral person, you're going to seek revenge. You're going to burn the world down to get back at this alleged monster, or at least part of the world. Hell, it's what most of us would do. But not Justin. Justin Baldoni is actually a good person and he sees that he has to offer Blake one last chance, one offer to coexist and for each of them to get the most of this opportunity as possible. They don't have to be friends but they can both walk away clean. Maybe even make the sequel together.

So you devise a plan. NOT to "tarnish" her, but to put the ball in Blake's court, as it were. So, here's what you do: You make it so that there are two diametrically opposing competing narratives out in the streets about Blake. One, that was already out there, says "she's a horrible person, look at all the bad things she's done in the past, she's mean to this woman in an interview, she got married on a plantation, she's difficult to work with." BUT you also, PERSONALLY, put out the opposite narrative, saying that Blake is a creative, brilliant person to work with who puts her heart and soul into her work and everything she does is made better for it.

You do this knowing the world is watching her very closely. You have offered her an olive branch, and are waiting to see if she takes it. If she doesn't take it, and chooses the path of vindictiveness with the world watching, the world is going to believe the bad narrative that's out there, that Blake hasn't changed, and they're going to forget 'whatever kook' said she was awesome and move on. If she DOES take the olive branch and decides to peacefully coexist, then the world brushes off the revelations about her past and everyone moves on.

Her choice, whether to do the right thing, is the thing that decides how this all goes for her. So in effect, it doesn't actually matter if the bad narrative was helped along by Justin (or anyone on his team) or it was all organic, both paths were out there and both paths were ready to be taken by Blake if she so chose. Like regular light vs. polarized light. Regular light is only non-polarized because it consists of both extremes of polarization, and it is only when a polarizing factor is placed in front of the beam, where the final outcome is revealed.

But how do you prove this? This is just a theory right?

Well, what did Justin do just 2 DAYS AFTER the premiere of IEWU? He went on the Today Show and gushed about Blake:

https://preview.redd.it/277zu7phm5zg1.png?width=653&format=png&auto=webp&s=d59c9c084ea66abc508d2b6be0cedcb85e89ba9d

So, Blake had her fate in her own hands the entire time. Maybe "Ophelia" will soon choose to do the right thing.

_________________________________________________

ETA: Please read carefully, I never said he did smear her at all. I said it was immaterial whether he did or not. Both Narratives about Blake were out there and free to be believed by the public, Blake's decisions would influence which narrative was ultimately going to win the popularity contest. The ONLY Narrative we know for certain came from Justin was the one praising Blake's abilities.

We've all seen it by now, Blake demanding the dailies be destroyed. Even ordering Sony to contact all the vendors to delete any trace. It happening after Justin already made his cut. After the movie itself premiered. Really there was no real reason to do it other than because of the lawsuit. But is this worse for Blake than merely wanting to hide how bad she behaved on the set, how extensive her takeover was, how often she spoke over Justin just to get everything she wanted?

What are the Real World Implications Of This?

Let's rewind, to a little more than a year ago. What happened? Well Blake had filed her lawsuit, it was all written down, permanent like. It was all over the internet. Also, Justin had come out with his timeline disproving most of it, and that was made immortal on the net. But then the dance video came out, and we all saw how different it was from Blake's account.

In response, Blake's lawyers quietly mended her account of that scene in her second amended complaint, like it was nothing, just another day. But crucially we were fed this bogus story about how Blake didn't realize there was audio in that video.

And that has never felt right to me. She didn't know there was audio. First of all, why wouldn't there be audio? Justin's an audio guy, has he ever shot a video where there was no audio? Hell his hobby with his best friend was a friggin' Podcast. And directors always have audio on at all times, even for montage scenes, because they need to cue the editing team about what part of the scene is meant for the film. If you say "action" but you're looking the other way, the editor isn't necessarily going to know this is where filming starts. But second of all, how could Blake Possibly think there was no audio, after all SHE EDITED the movie. She's seen all the scenes probably 50 times. Of course she knew there was audio in the dance scene.

So the only thing that ever made sense to me about that was Blake thought the video was gone. I, personally, figured she had deleted it in the editing room while she was making her cut, and just didn't realize there were backups. Unfortunately, in my mind at least, that would mean there would be no proof she did that so I left that thread untied. I didn't know Blake would be stupid enough to tell everyone her intention to delete evidence, and ask them to go along because "I'm Blake Lively, And All Bow To Me"

As far as I'm concerned, we now have Clear And Convincing Evidence that Blake Lively had evidence destroyed so that she could lie about bad behavior that Justin allegedly engaged in on the set. This wasn't about hiding a bad look, or how nice she was to Justin even after the events in her allegations would erstwhile have taken place. It was a deliberate forgery of an account.

This is the very thing she accused Justin of (an addictive habit she seems to have formed ), evidence spoliation. No wonder she thought Justin did it, she's projecting her evil deeds on to others. This could, of course, have dire consequences for her own case. Sanctions, Jury instructions on her credibility, Fines, fees. Who knows. Maybe even a total dismissal of her case.

What's more interesting is what I found when I asked Gemini about the implications, Criminal Consequences:

"The following statutes from Title 18 of the U.S. Code are the most common tools for prosecuting the intentional destruction of evidence in federal proceedings:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(1) (Evidence Tampering): This is the most direct statute for your scenario. It makes it a crime to "corruptly" alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal a record, document, or other object with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.
  • "Official Proceeding": This includes federal civil trials and grand jury hearings.
  • Anticipation of Suit: Courts have held that the proceeding does not need to be pending at the time of destruction; it is enough if the party anticipates the suit."

In September of 2024, Blake already had the phone dump that Stephanie Jones had taken from Jen Abel. She filed the Vanzan phony lawsuit less than a month after asking for the deletion of the dailies. She was definitely anticipating her lawsuit. This is the second felony I've found in this case that Blake has engaged in.

One thing to say: This is all going to be very interesting.

(TLDR at the end)

We got another doozy of a take by Esra Hudson, in her latest filing. In which she not only fails in a basic understanding of time and causality, but she fails to understand the basics of employment law, the very specialty she has chosen for her career.

It's a wonder how someone can fit so many mistakes into a few sentences. Someone call Guinness?

Here it is:

https://preview.redd.it/ywkz9rk5peyg1.png?width=689&format=png&auto=webp&s=429cc1a8ca7706db00645ebd2276c18f54f4df27

To witt: "Defendants have consistently “asserted that their conduct was not directed at retaliating against Ms. Lively for her prior complaints of discrimination but in protecting themselves from what they consider to be her false and defamatory comments about them.” "But the false and defamatory comments” about them are statements that constitute Ms. Lively’s protected activity,"

So time is her weakness. Apparently Ms. Hudson still cannot get it through her head that retaliation has to be in Response to something that was already done, and you cannot retaliate for something you think someone will do in the future. The evidence clearly shows that in August of 2024 the Wayfarer parties were contemplating what they should do in case Blake went ahead with publicizing her allegations of SH. Since Blake never publicized her allegations of SH until late December 2024, any action the Wayfarer parties took in the summer of 2024 could not have been retaliatory. At least not in response to that possibility.

What Ms. Hudson also fails to grasp is what constitutes a protected activity. In that a protected activity must be characterized by some kind of articulated notice to the employer and good faith belief that unlawful activity is currently going on in the workplace, and that this activity is in opposition to that.

The Californian gold standard Yanowitz case puts it this way: "Standing alone, an employee's unarticulated belief that an employer is engagING in discrimination will not suffice to establish protected conduct for the purposes of establishing a prima facie case of retaliation, where there is no evidence the employer knew that the employee's opposition was based upon a reasonable belief that the employer was engagING in discrimination."

Put another way, there is no case law or statute that says that a statement that is privileged under 47.1 is automatically, and simultaneously, a Protected Activity. Otherwise people would be coming out of the woodwork with tales about long defunct places they worked at decades ago, on the off chance that some corporation with deep pockets will make the mistake of saying anything derogatory about them, and giving them a reason to sue for retaliation. The courts would burst at the seams.

TLDR: To earn "protected activity" status, your activity must give the employer notice that you are opposing unlawful activity that is going on right now. The law cannot protect an activity that doesn't give the employer notice, is made months after the fact, when the workplace no longer exists, and is not made with your good faith belief that the employer's unlawful conduct is ongoing. Temporal anomalies notwithstanding.

Is Esra Hudson a true moron? She's either an Employment Lawyer, a legal specialist, who doesn't know her own State's Employment Law. Or an unscrupulous person who doesn't care about integrity and honesty. Or a schizophrenic person with a time-traveler delusion. Any way you slice it, it seems fairly moronic to me, IMHO.