When the first day of production finally arrived, Baldoni thanked Lively for trusting him enough to take the part. “Let’s do this shit,” Lively said.
Two years later, in a deposition taken as part of Lively’s blockbuster lawsuit against Baldoni and his team, alleging that he harassed her on set and then retaliated when she spoke up about it, Lively would say she only slowly came to realize her discomfort with Baldoni. “There were things that he said and did where at the time, you don’t totally — you feel confused by someone’s behavior or words being at odds with who they say they are,” Lively said. “You start to see different pieces come together.” She thought back to their first meeting in Tribeca and found it odd that Baldoni volunteered that he was circumcised during a conversation about what decisions Lively might make if she gave birth to a boy. “I found it disturbing,” Lively said later. But Baldoni seemed nice, and Lively “hoped and assumed it would be an isolated incident.”
There would turn out to be many more, a seemingly endless cascade of gray-area moments in which it was hard to tell if Baldoni was a worrisome creep or a clumsy naïf — and whether Lively was a righteous victim or an oversensitive diva.
