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Bryan Freedman, now defending his client against Blake Lively’s accusations over ‘It Ends With Us,’ claimed Baldoni’s directorial debut ‘Five Feet Apart’ violated the copyright of a man who’d previously appeared on Baldoni’s docuseries about terminally ill young people.
By Gary Baum
Senior Writer
Justin Baldoni’s high-profile litigator Bryan Freedman has been on the warpath to defend his client in the evolving drama over It Ends With Us. Weeks after filing a $250 million libel suit against The New York Times for allegedly conspiring with the film’s star Blake Lively and her PR team to advance an “unverified and self-serving narrative” using “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context,” the attorney’s firm on Jan. 21 highlighted a chunk of unedited footage featuring the actors in the hope of debunking claims of sexual harassment.
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Yet Freedman, one of the entertainment industry’s most divisive attorneys (in a 2024 Hollywood Reporter profile he explained: “If you fuck with my client, you get what you get”), has gone after Baldoni, too. In a previously unreported 2021 case that’s since been settled, he represented a person with cystic fibrosis who’d appeared on the Baldoni-produced and -hosted docuseries My Last Days, about young people suffering from terminal illnesses. Freedman claimed Baldoni’s 2019 directorial debut Five Feet Apart — a weepie featuring Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse as star-crossed cystic fibrosis patients — thoroughly ripped off his client Travis Flores’ own tear-jerking romance script Three Feet Apart. That project, which also centered on young lovers with cystic fibrosis, had earlier been in development at a production company affiliated with Universal. Freedman contended that a mutual associate had shared Flores’ script with Baldoni or others working on the film.
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The lawsuit, which also named Baldoni’s Wayfarer Entertainment, contended there was an array of copyright-infringing similarities between the projects’ plots, characters and themes — and that this extended to key world-building details: “In both works, the narrator has one or more important mementos from their dead sister.”
Five Feet Apart, which earned $92 million on a $7 million budget, was dedicated to YouTuber Claire Wineland, another individual with cystic fibrosis who’d been featured on My Last Days. Baldoni explained that he’d been inspired after asking for the “inside scoop” on “what happens in these hospitals” when teenagers with cystic fibrosis are attracted to each other. “She was the one that told me that that is so bad and looked down on and dangerous, because there’s something called cross-infection, and that’s why people with CF can’t be closer than 6 feet because they can contaminate each other with their unique bacteria,” he said, adding in an interview ahead of the film’s premiere: “I asked her to be a part of it, and she joined me, and when I hired the writers, she sat with the writers, and we talked about stories, and ideas, and treatments, and she got to be a part of it,” explained Baldoni. “She passed away [in September 2018] just before I could show her my director’s cut.”
Freedman, who didn’t respond to THR‘s request for comment, filed a motion to dismiss the case in 2022. Settlement terms were undisclosed. Flores, an activist and children’s book author who had three double-lung transplants, died in May 2024 from complications of the progressive, genetic disease.
My Last Days, which THR’s television critic Daniel Fienberg described as “manipulative, but only sometimes exploitative,” had run for several seasons on The CW, home to Jane the Virgin, on which Baldoni had his breakout role as Rafael Solano. Baldoni’s nonfiction series was key to establishing his credentials as a producer of commercial projects with a tenderhearted spin. He explained that, after the death of an uncle from lung cancer, “I sat down one night and what literally came through me was the title ‘My Last Days’, a documentary series about life told by the dying.” He added that Wayfarer itself was a continuation of the same impulse: “We create moments to help you remember you are alive and breathing.”
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