Justin Baldoni Reportedly Using Blake Lively's Kate Middleton Photoshop Joke Against Her In Court

Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively clashed in a Los Angeles courtroom on Tuesday, 28 April, as Baldoni's legal team argued that the actor-director cannot be blamed for any downturn in Lively's brands and instead cited her 'unlikable' image, including her widely criticised joke about Kate Middleton's edited Mother's Day photo, as the real problem.

The two stars are locked in an increasingly acrimonious legal battle tied to their collaboration on It Ends With Us, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel.

The case, which is due to go to trial in the coming weeks, centres on duelling claims over reputational damage and the financial performance of Lively's business ventures.

Lively has alleged that Baldoni's conduct and subsequent retaliation harmed her standing and, by extension, hurt her companies. Baldoni's side has now responded with a sharp counter‑narrative that turns the spotlight onto her own public behaviour.

Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively And The Kate Middleton Joke

In court, lawyers for Justin Baldoni, 42, told the judge that the Gossip Girl star's businesses were faltering long before this dispute and that any struggles could not reasonably be pinned on him.

According to TMZ's report of proceedings, they portrayed Blake Lively, 38, as someone with a patchy track record in building and sustaining consumer brands and insisted that her alleged failures were self‑inflicted rather than the fallout of any campaign by Baldoni.

They went further, arguing that part of the reason Lively's ventures, including her Betty Buzz and Betty Booze drinks lines had not performed as strongly as hoped was that she 'wasn't likable' to a key slice of the buying public.

To make that argument land, Baldoni's team reached for a very specific example that had already inflamed opinion once this year, Lively's decision to lean into the online frenzy around Princess Kate's photo editing saga.

On 13 March 2024, as speculation around the Princess of Wales intensified, Lively unveiled new flavours for her Betty Buzz and Betty Booze ranges on Instagram. The post, now deleted, showed a series of promotional images, one of which was obviously and deliberately over‑edited.

Her caption read, according to NBC's Today, 'I'm so excited to share this new photo I just took today to announce our 4 new @bettybuzz & @bettybooze products! Now you know why I've been MIA.'

The timing and tone were hard to miss. Only days earlier, Kensington Palace had released a Mother's Day photograph of Kate and her children, which was swiftly called out by news agencies for apparent manipulation, fuelling wider conspiracy theories about her absence from public life after abdominal surgery. Lively appeared to be riffing on that furore to sell soft drinks.

When Kate Middleton later disclosed in a video message that she had been undergoing treatment for cancer, the mood online shifted sharply. Within hours, Blake Lively posted an Instagram Story attempting to step back from the joke.

'I made a silly post around the 'photoshop fails' frenzy, and oh man, that post has me mortified today,' she wrote, without naming the princess. 'I'm sorry. Sending love and well wishes to all, always.' The apology did little to erase the earlier impression.

Court Battle Turns On Reputation, Not Just Revenue

In Tuesday's hearing, Justin Baldoni's representatives seized on that episode and, according to TMZ, characterised Lively's original post as 'bullying.' In their telling, it was emblematic of an approach to publicity that undermined Blake Lively's own reputation rather than something that could credibly be blamed on Baldoni or his camp.

Their strategy was blunt: if Lively's halo has slipped, the lawyers argued, it is because of choices she made in public, from how she marketed Betty Buzz to how she handled the Kate Middleton saga, not because the It Ends With Us director orchestrated some covert exercise to damage her image.

They framed the Kate incident as one more data point in a pattern, effectively asking the court to see Lively's brand stumbles as the consequence of misjudged humour and poor management.

Blake Lively's team painted a very different picture. While detailed filings were not read into the public record in the report, her lawyers maintained that Justin Baldoni's alleged retaliation following their professional falling‑out had a material effect on her businesses, contending that they did not perform 'as well as they could' because of his actions.

In other words, where Baldoni's side wants the judge to look at Instagram and marketing missteps, Lively's wants attention on what they say was a damaging backlash by a powerful collaborator.

The dispute reaches back to their work on It Ends With Us, where Baldoni serves as director and co‑star and Lively leads the cast. What began as a high‑profile partnership built around a wildly popular book has deteriorated into a courtroom drama over who harmed whose career and by how much. Each side is effectively arguing that the other turned a creative project into a reputational minefield.

The legal teams now appear to be preparing for a trial that will scrutinise not only contracts and box‑office projections but also Instagram captions, deleted posts and the business fortunes of celebrity‑fronted brands.

Whether a single ill‑judged joke about Kate Middleton can reasonably be treated as evidence of Blake Lively's alleged 'unlikability,' or whether it is being opportunistically weaponised by Justin Baldoni's lawyers, is likely to be tested under cross‑examination rather than on social media.

Nothing has been decided yet, and many of the claims aired on both sides remain just that: allegations rather than established fact, to be treated with caution until the court weighs the evidence in full.