Throughout the entire production of It Ends With Us, a persistent and peculiar rumor circulated on the set.
According to this rumor, Justin Baldoni and It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover shared a spiritual bond. Both were supposedly members of a small, obscure Iranian religious community known as Baha’i. It was this shared faith — or so the rumor went — that helped the 41-year-old director initially secure the rights to It Ends With Us.
Justin Baldoni’s Leap of Faith
For those who have been blissfully able to avoid the whole fracas, Blake Lively‘s December complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, which then became the basis of a lawsuit, was the opening salvo in this uncivil war.
In her lawsuit, she accused Baldoni and his partner Jamey Heath of all sorts of inappropriate behavior — including walking in on the actress while she was breastfeeding, using sexually charged language on-set and flouting industry-wide safety protocols — and then orchestrating a smear campaign against the actress for standing up to him.
Several additional lawsuits have since been filed, including two by Baldoni. He filed a $250 million libel lawsuit against The New York Times after it broke the news of Lively’s allegations, and then a second suit against Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist Leslie Sloane seeking $400 million in damages and accusing them of defamation and other contractual claims.
A judge has set a trial date of March 9, 2026.
From the outset, the Lively-versus-Baldoni feud has been framed as the newest chapter in Hollywood’s ongoing fight for gender equality. It has rekindled increasingly dormant debates about sexual harassment and power dynamics. And that framing certainly could fit the facts — we’ll have to see how it plays out in court.
But there’s also another possibility, one that has less to do with gender equality than it does a simple cultural misunderstanding. What if much of it — the alleged inappropriate hugging and pre-filming praying — could be explained as a clash between a very specific faith-driven community with its unique mores, and a much more modern, post-#MeToo one with its own set of beliefs and commandments?
Over the past several weeks, THR has interviewed multiple friends and former colleagues of Baldoni, along with members of the Baha’i community, to piece together if and how this religion might have inadvertently contributed to the situation.
Baldoni — whose Irish Catholic father and Ashkenazi mother both converted to the religion before he was born and raised in California — has made no secret about his devotion to the Baha’i faith, which is based on notions of humanity, universalism and gender equality.
What’s also clear from talking to people in his orbit is that Baldoni has his own unique way of communicating and behaving, much of it informed by the tenor of his religion. His unique mannerisms have at times come into conflict with Hollywood’s current ethos, which in the wake of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements and the COVID pandemic has become far more rigid, uniform and policed.. .
- On the first day of filming, several members of the crew participated in a Baha’i prayer, according to a source.
- Other sources report that Baldoni frequently would “ask God for guidance” before making big creative decisions on the film.
- Two more sources noted that there was an unusual amount of physical contact in the form of hugging among crewmembers.
- (“The faith’s principles and ideas are interpreted and accepted in a variety of cultural contexts,” says Heern.
- “In France, followers might be more inclined to hug. In Saudi Arabia, less so.”)
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