Blake Lively made rare remarks about hers and husband Ryan Reynolds’s controversial 2012 wedding during her It Ends With Us deposition, it has just been revealed.
Lively, 38, and Reynolds, 49, married on September 9, 2012 at Boone Hall, a former slave plantation in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
After facing backlash for their choice of wedding venue at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the couple publicly admitted they were ‘uninformed’ and made a $200,000 donation to the NAACP in 2020.
Lively, who is suing It Ends With Us director/co-star Justin Baldoni, was grilled by his lawyer Bryan Freedman last July about the ‘negative press’ she and Reynolds received at the time.
‘It’s true that you dealt with negative press with respect to being married on a plantation during, kind of, the height of Black Lives Matter; is that right?’ Freedman asked, according to legal transcripts reviewed by Us Weekly.
Lively admitted that she and her husband were wrong to pick the venue for the ceremony due its past history of slavery.
‘I feel like that negative press was deserved,’ the mother-of-four said. ‘It’s a mistake we have publicly acknowledged and done a lot of work to reconcile for ourselves and others.’
The Daily Mail has reached out to reps for Baldoni, Lively and Reynolds for further comment but has yet to hear back.
In the July 2025 deposition, Lively said she took ‘full accountability for that decision, as does [her] husband ‘ Reynolds, implying that it was only being brought up to discredit her.
‘But I don’t know what weaponization of the past has been a part of [Justin Baldoni’s alleged smear] campaign.’ Baldoni — who directed and co-starred alongside Lively in It Ends With Us — has denied the claims.
She said of the backlash to the plantation controversy, ‘I’m used to it after this many years in the industry,’ adding, ‘It’s not something I’ve had to deal with often.’
Reynolds in August of 2020 told Fast Company that the wedding venue will forever be something ‘impossible to reconcile’ for the couple.
The Deadpool star added, ‘It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for.’
Reynolds at the time said that they pair selected Boone Hall while looking for ‘a wedding venue on Pinterest,’ only learning after the event that it has been ‘a place built upon devastating tragedy.’
He added: ‘Years ago we got married again at home – but shame works in weird way. A giant f***ing mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action.’
‘It doesn’t mean you won’t f*** up again, but repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.’
The interview came months after the couple pledged $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in June of 2020 amid social unrest in the U.S. following the death of George Floyd.
They said in a joint statement at the time: ‘We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is,’ noting they had wanted to use their ‘privilege and platform to be an ally.’
Lively and Reynolds said at the time, ‘We’ve never had to worry about preparing our kids for different rules of law or what might happen if we’re pulled over in the car.’
‘We don’t know what it’s like to experience that life day in and day out. We can’t imagine feeling that kind of fear and anger.’
The pair said that they had been raising their children ‘differently than the way our parents taught us’ with a sense of added social consciousness.
‘We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it… especial our own complicity,’ the duo said. ‘We talk about our bias, blindness and our own mistakes.
‘We look back and see so many mistakes which have led us to deeply examine who we are and who we want to become. They’ve led us to huge avenues of education.’
Lively and Reynolds said they were ‘committed to raising our kids so they never grow up feeding this insane pattern and so they’ll do their best to never inflict pain on another being consciously or unconsciously.’
They wrapped up in saying, ‘It’s the least we can do to honor not just George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner, but all the black men and women who have been killed when the camera wasn’t rolling.’
The latest news in the It Ends With Us litigation comes as the contentious legal battle between Lively and Baldoni has gone on for more than a year.
In December of 2024, Lively named Baldoni in a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment, retaliatory conduct, and intentional infliction of emotional stress.
In her lawsuit, the actress accused Baldoni of sexually harassing her in multiple ways – including body shaming her – and orchestrating a smear campaign against her to damage her reputation.
In her lawsuit, Lively named a number of Baldoni’s collaborators, including his company Wayfarer Studios, the studio’s CEO and financial backer, and PR personnel.
Baldoni had initially asked for $250 million in damages from The New York Times, mentioning a report it published on the topic that he claimed was defamatory, then added it to the $400 million lawsuit he filed this past January.
In the suit, Baldoni named Lively, her spouse Ryan Reynolds and her publicist Leslie Sloane, citing the aforementioned report in legal documents. It was thrown out of court this past June. All parties have denied all of the allegations against them.
