How Justin Baldoni’s Team Is Using Naughty Heated Rivalry Scenes To Support His Argument About ‘Steamy And Turbulent’ Blake Lively Scenes

Justin Baldoni‘s team is going for it!

As his It Ends With Us feud with Blake Lively rages on, the director’s lawyers appeared in court on Thursday in an attempt to persuade the judge to dismiss his co-star’s sexual harassment suit, which includes allegations that involve improvisation during filming of NSFW scenes — which his team does not think amounts to alleged gender-based harassment. And their biggest evidence to back this up has to do with… Heated Rivalry. Huh?!

Related: Blake Lively Begged Ben Affleck & J.Lo For Help Amid Justin Baldoni Battle

According to Variety, Justin’s lawyer Jonathan Bach is the one who brought up the HBO Max hit, asking in court:

“I don’t know if the court is familiar with the show Heated Rivalry.”

LOLz!

While the room erupted in laughter, Judge Lewis Liman said he was not familiar with the gay hockey romance, so the attorney explained the phenomenon to him and shared that it includes NSFW scenes that were improvised by stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. Hudson previously teased to Vanity Fair that they “got comfortable just being inches from each other’s face and invading each other’s personal space,” calling their dynamic on set a “nightmare for HR.”

And this is Baldoni’s big new strategy!

Jonathan argued that if the male actors were able to improvise sex scenes then there couldn’t be a complaint of gender-based discrimination in this case. Hmm… We’re sure a lot of skeptics of this argument will find it a stretch to have to rely on a completely separate production that has nothing to do with IEWU.

But the lawyer’s second argument? That any of the touching between Blake and Justin was part of the relationship of their characters and had nothing to do with the fact Blake is a woman. Hmmm.

Bach went on to claim that the Gossip Girl star signed up for the film, knowing it would include “hot and sexy scenes” that would become “steamy and turbulent.” He suggested her complaints were “small potatoes” that didn’t count as sexual harassment. Hmmm.

Esra Hudson, one of Blake’s lawyers, strongly hit back at this argument, insisting she was “kissed, nuzzled and touched” in ways she did not consent to — regardless of understanding the kind of film she signed onto. She urged that this provided a basis for the gender-based discrimination claim.

While she denied a jury needing to rule on every touch-related decision made on set, Esra wants the jury to determine whether a reasonable person would have reacted similarly in certain instances, such in a moment when Lively looked uncomfortable, surprised, and leaned back, suggesting she hadn’t given consent for certain alleged improvisations.

And luckily for Blake, the judge pushed back at her opponent’s approach. Liman said the lawyer was surely “not suggesting” that the film’s mature subject matter gave the actor the right to touch his co-star however he wanted without consent, asking for Bach to “help me understand where the lines are.” Jonathan insisted, “context matters,” and suggested that if anything “awkward” happened on set, it was a result of trying to obtain a certain aesthetic. Hmm.

The judge is now taking both sides’ arguments into consideration and will rule on the motion sometime before the scheduled May trial.

Thoughts? Can U believe Heated Rivalry got dragged into this case??

[Image via MEGA/WENN & HBO Max & CBS/Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube]