With six weeks to go before the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni trial opens in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the case feels less like a sober legal proceeding and more of a social media circus whose main event remains maddeningly hard to discern. Last week, Judge Lewis Liman tossed 10 out of 13 causes of action. But while much of the coverage has treated the ruling as a gutting of Lively’s case, that strikes me as an unduly severe read. Lively can still pursue her incendiary claim that she’s been the victim of a Hollywood smear job, with damages potentially large enough to have the lawyers browsing real estate on Nantucket.

To be sure, Judge Liman did perform a bit of spring cleaning. His April 2 ruling tossed Lively’s sexual harassment claims against the It Ends With Us director on the grounds that she was an independent contractor, not an employee. (It had to do with her star power. Watch for this doctrinal nugget to resurface in future Hollywood blood feuds…) Liman also jettisoned several other claims, including the defamation count targeting Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman. For all of the attention paid to Freedman’s media performances, Liman concluded that any reasonable person would understand the lawyer to be commenting about what evidence would show in a judicial proceeding, not delivering freestanding factual assertions from Sinai.

But Lively’s marquee retaliation claims survived—namely, her allegation that Baldoni and the other It Ends With Us producers tried to kneecap her in the press and sow backlash against her on social platforms after she raised concerns about a hostile workplace. For now, Liman has not done much to trim her damages theories.

Which raises the obvious question: What, exactly, is this trial supposed to look like? Is Lively really going to put brand consultants on the stand to testify that she has become radioactive in Hollywood and studios won’t hire her? Is she prepared to sit there stoically as witnesses remind the court that her once-promising haircare line, Blake Brown, which some predicted would be Target’s next $100 million beauty brand, has fallen off a cliff since the It Ends With Us controversy erupted?

Perhaps. That may be the price of dramatizing what she says was done to her: that Baldoni’s camp worked to turn the internet against her, seeding negative narratives, boosting hostile content, and using influencer and social media channels to recast her not as a complainant, but as the problem. (She plans to have a witness testify that there are signs of artificial content manipulation on TikTok, Reddit, and other platforms. Baldoni’s camp has denied the claims of social media engineering.) But leaning into the financial harm to her brand would also invite exactly the sort of scrutiny that most celebrities—like her friend Taylor Swift—spend fortunes trying to avoid. For now, I still need to see it to believe that’s where this is headed.

I’m sure it stung for Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, to watch Liman vaporize the harassment claims based on what they might deem to be “technicalities”—employment status, an unsigned actor loan-out agreement, and the like. (For the record, her legal team has told me that there will be no attempt at a pretrial appeal.) It was probably no accident that, amid the rough press coverage, WME rushed out a statement praising Lively for choosing to “stand up for herself.” Client service, it seems, now knows no earthly limit.

In one respect, though, Liman may have done Lively a small favor. She no longer has to prove that sexual harassment, as a matter of law, actually occurred. While she will almost certainly try to lay out the underlying conduct to the jury in vivid detail, these he-said, she-said contests are notoriously slippery. On the surviving retaliation claims, by contrast, the question is narrower and arguably easier for her: not whether Baldoni’s conduct was actionable harassment, but whether she honestly and reasonably believed that it was. If she can establish that, while fending off Baldoni’s expected counternarrative that her complaints were deployed as a pretext for seizing greater creative control over It Ends With Us, then the trial’s central question becomes whether Baldoni’s P.R. response, as Liman put it, “crossed the line.”

In his ruling, Liman pointed to evidence suggesting a plan to “destroy” Lively. “There comes a point,” he observed, “where the accused stops simply defending him or herself and starts taking action that a reasonable jury could view as retaliation for the fact that the accuser had the temerity to make the accusations.”

Given that setup, Baldoni’s defense is likely to be straightforward. First, his lawyers will presumably recast the crisis-management campaign as ordinary reputational triage—communications decisions made during a turbulent film rollout, not a plot to silence a complainant. Sure, Baldoni’s reps may have contemplated something aggressive, but the defense will argue that the evidence shows something narrower and more conventional. Second, they’ll likely justify the motive not as a punishment, but rather as an effort to protect the movie, its release, and various reputations amid a very public rupture. And finally, if the evidence suggests the P.R. effort had multiple drivers, his team will probably try to persuade the jury that Lively’s complaints were not the “substantial motivating factor.”

Liman’s ruling, in other words, pointed to evidence cutting both ways—roughly, Baldoni & Co. defended themselves versus They tried to bury her—and decided to let a jury sort it out. This will hardly be the last time he shapes the case before anyone is sworn in. His gatekeeping on evidence and witnesses may prove every bit as consequential as the summary judgment opinion itself.

As the trial approaches, expect bruising fights over the permissible scope of the underlying harassment evidence, how far defendants can go in characterizing their P.R. push as lawful self-help, whether Freedman’s activities are protected or fair game, the reliability of dueling P.R. experts, and the soundness of the competing damages models. The wreckage of the dismissed claims, combined with what remains—including the allegation that the producers breached the anti-retaliation clause in the contract rider, Lively’s now-infamous 17-point list of demands from the production—guarantees a great deal of posturing before trial.

There will also be the usual knife fight over jury instructions, along with what’s shaping up to be a particularly interesting battle regarding how this spectacle gets sequenced. If Liman truly intends to try this case alongside the Baldoni camp’s defamation fight against its former publicist, Stephanie Jones, the proceedings may have to be broken into phases—first, what happened on set; then, what happened in the aftermath; and only after all that, what any of it is worth in damages.

Under ordinary circumstances, right now is when cooler heads, skyrocketing legal bills, and the prospect of public humiliation begin nudging everyone toward a settlement. And yet there’s little sign that either side is backing off. This case has long since ceased to be just about litigation risk; it is now also about pride, narrative control, and the refusal to blink. That is precisely why I’m not holding my breath for a détente, even if the trial that awaits still feels faintly unimaginable.

Jones is shaping up to be one of the more underrated figures in this fiasco—a name barely invoked in last week’s coverage, even though she was at the center of a significant March 26 ruling. Thanks to that decision, the publicist who once repped Tom Brady, Dwayne Johnson, Jeff Bezos, and Scooter Braun may yet command a great deal of attention at trial.

Recall that Liman previously tossed the Baldoni camp’s assorted counterclaims against Lively. He also rejected their effort to pin liability on The New York Times for its splashy story about a “Hollywood smear.” Jones, however, did not get off so lightly. After she was fired by Baldoni (she allegedly violated instructions by talking to the press and Sony), she told Lively’s publicist, Leslie Sloane, about a coordinated effort to destroy Lively’s reputation, and later, in response to what has been described as a “sham” subpoena, turned over a cache of internal communications.

On the allegation that she knowingly fed Lively’s team a false narrative, the judge has allowed a defamation claim to proceed. And in an earlier ruling, Liman has also allowed Jones’s former subordinate, Jennifer Abel, to pursue certain claims over the way documents were allegedly taken from a company-issued phone and passed to the other side, eventually becoming grist for the Times.

In other words, when it comes to assigning blame for who really lit the match on this P.R. war, Baldoni’s lawyers are likely to put Jones at the center of the tableau, with the alleged motive being that she resented losing her client. Just as importantly, that may provide Baldoni’s camp with a side door for attacking the credibility of Lively’s account of what happened on set.

Of course, Lively’s team will likely see the maneuver for what it is and move aggressively to keep Jones from becoming an all-purpose foil—which is why I’ll be keeping a close eye on the upcoming pretrial fights. It’s hard to imagine the judge being comfortable with the risk that evidence admissible in one case could unfairly contaminate the other. Then again, there are still six weeks left to sort through that procedural thicket. Quiet, this won’t be. Buckle up.

Thanks, Eriq. I’ll see everyone on Thursday.

Matt