Justin Baldoni stepped back into the public eye this week for the first time since concluding his explosive legal dispute with It Ends With Us co-star Blake Lively, attending a celebrity television taping with his wife and children at his side.
The Jane the Virgin star appeared in the audience at Dancing With the Stars' first-ever Super Bowl Night on Tuesday, October 13. His wife, Emily Baldoni, and their two children, 11-year-old Maiya and 8-year-old Maxwell, joined him, and the broadcast briefly showed the family applauding early in the episode, right after Love Island UK star Maura Higgins performed a Rihanna-inspired tango.
The appearance marked the end of months out of the spotlight following one of Hollywood's nastiest recent legal battles. Lively had accused Baldoni and his company, Wayfarer Studios, of sexual harassment and of running a smear campaign against her during the promotion of It Ends With Us, the 2024 romantic drama they co-starred in. Baldoni denied the claims and fired back with a $400 million countersuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and others, alleging defamation and extortion.
That countersuit was dismissed by a Manhattan federal judge in June 2025. The two sides then reached an out-of-court settlement in May 2026, just weeks before their scheduled trial, ending the years-long dispute. A judge later ordered Baldoni to help cover Lively's legal fees, adding a final sting to the resolution.
In July, Justin and Emily Baldoni addressed their time away from the public in a joint Instagram video. Emily shared that there had been a lot of trauma for the family to move through, which had made it hard to speak publicly, while Baldoni said the family was now prioritizing healing.
The settlement closed a case that had transfixed Hollywood and the tabloid press for the better part of two years, spawning leaked texts, dueling public-relations offensives and intense debate about power dynamics on film sets. For Baldoni, the Dancing With the Stars outing was a low-key reentry: no red carpet, no interviews, just a family night in the audience. Whether Hollywood's studios will welcome him back for major projects remains an open question, but the appearance signaled that he is ready to be seen in public again.
Baldoni, best known for his long run on Jane the Virgin, had kept a notably low profile since the dispute began, and his choice of a family-friendly network taping as his first stop back was widely read as deliberate image repair. His friendship with Maura Higgins, whose tango performance the family applauded on the broadcast, dates back nearly a decade to his 2016 documentary series My Last Days. Industry watchers say the real test will come when he attaches to his next directing or producing project, and whether studios that once courted him will return his calls.