Blake Lively will receive $400,000 in legal fees from Justin Baldoni in their bitter court battle after she demanded that Justin Baldoni cover $8 million in legal expenses.
In a final humiliation for the ‘Gossip Girl’s alum on Wednesday, a judge in New York ruled that the actress will be awarded just 5 percent of the amount she sought to recoup for defending herself against Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit.
The judge said that the number of hours that Lively had billed for her lawyers was ‘unreasonable’ and criticized the ‘discrepancies’ in the expenses she was trying to claim.
The court ruling comes months after the same judge threw out most of the claims in Lively’s sexual harassment case against her It Ends With Us co-star and they agreed to settle the case with no money changing hands.
Judge Lewis Liman had previously dismissed Baldoni’s $400 million defamation countersuit against Lively, but he did allow her to seek legal fees solely related to defending that action.
Judge Lewis Liman ruled: ‘The clerk of court is respectfully directed to enter judgment for Lively in the amount of $363,245.40 in attorneys’ fees and $44,206.35 in costs’.
The total award amounts to $407,451.75 – a fraction of the $8 million she originally demanded in June.
Lively had claimed Baldoni owed her $7,495,526.87 in legal fees and $539,514.01 in costs that she accumulated in 10 months from fighting his countersuit before it was dismissed.
In the docs obtained by Page Six, Judge Lewis J. Liman called Lively’s request for $8 million an ‘outrageously unreasonable demand.’
