Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are feuding. Between multi-million-pound lawsuits, counter lawsuits, allegations of sexual harassment, defamation and extortion – and that’s not even the full extent of it – it’s hard to imagine how their stint as co-stars in It Ends With Us could have gone worse.

Not only are both their reputations at stake, but the whole legal saga has taken the entertainment industry by storm. Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds has been accused of bullying, Taylor Swift’s name has been dragged into the lawsuits, Baldoni’s wife Emily is having her Instagram captions analysed by social media sleuths and Baldoni’s publicists have had to hire their own legal teams too. In other words, it’s messy. Don’t hold your breath for the sequel.

Tapping into the widespread public interest in the case, Baldoni’s team has published a 168-page PDF of his lawsuit online via thelawsuitinfo.com, which is publicly available to read. It’s a bold move – and one that has piqued the interest of several budding detectives on social media already.

It largely reads as a counter argument to Lively’s original lawsuit, with Baldoni offering his version of events. The text messages he includes in the document suggest the two actors started the project on friendly, even enthusiastic terms, but their relationship deteriorated over time.

While tension between the pair only became known to the public last August, it evidently started long before. In Lively’s lawsuit, she claims Baldoni made inappropriate comments about her body after she gave birth, brought up his past porn addiction on set and would enter her trailer without permission while she was breastfeeding. Baldoni has shared text messages to show he reassured Lively not to worry about her body and claims he only entered her trailer when he was personally invited to do so. He has also called the comments about a porn addiction ‘categorically false’.

Where Lively claims Baldoni improvised kissing scenes and added gratuitous sex scenes without consent, Baldoni states all intimate scenes were based on notes by a hired intimacy coordinator. In December, Lively accused Baldoni of sexual harassment, which he denies.

They also appeared to fall out over the editing process. Baldoni was the person who originally optioned the book for film and was brought on as director, yet by the time the film was being promoted his name was allegedly removed from the poster and says he was not invited to walk the red carpet at the premiere with the rest of the cast.

In his PDF document, Baldoni offers evidence to suggest he was pushed out of the final editing process. Lively has previously said she wanted to add ‘feminine touches’ to the final cut and told journalists that her husband helped to rewrite the iconic balcony scene. Given that she was not originally brought onto the project in this capacity, a rift began to emerge. In his PDF document, Baldoni suggests she used her Hollywood influence to infiltrate the editing process and claims she said she ‘could not promise to promote the film’ if she was not involved.

However, a letter has since also been leaked in which he asked for her to be brought into producing credits, and leaked text exchange shows Baldoni leaving Lively a 2am voicememo in which he apologises for ‘falling short’ on how he responded to her suggested changes to the script, after she explained that she’d had ‘far too many experiences’ with directors who have overlooked her, refused to credit her for work, or been brought on as a collaborator but then expected to be a ‘yes man’.

When It Ends With Us was released in cinemas, Lively suffered extensive backlash on social media. She was accused of downplaying the film’s more serious themes of domestic violence by encouraging fans to ‘grab your girls and wear your florals’ during press junkets and was criticised for launching a new alcohol brand and hair care line in tandem with the film.

However, all was not as it seemed. In December, she filed a lawsuit accusing Baldoni and his PR team of launching a ‘calculated smear campaign’ against her, which included text threads between Baldoni and the crisis management expert Melissa Nathan who allegedly said, ‘We can bury anyone’ and Baldoni shared an example of a viral X thread – where the user was accusing Hailey Bieber of being a ‘mean girl’ – saying ‘This is what we would need.’ Lively claims she suffered a 78% loss in haircare and drink sales due to Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign.

Baldoni then retaliated with two counter lawsuits. In one, he is suing The New York Times for up to $250 million in damages for publishing Lively’s allegedly ‘self-serving narrative’ and excluding evidence that refutes her claims (see: the 168-page document). In the other, he accuses Lively and Reynolds of civil extortion, defamation and false light invasion of privacy, amongst other claims.

Baldoni is also reportedly attempting to gather evidence from Disney to prove that Reynolds based his Deadpool & Wolverine character Nicepool, a faux feminist with a signature man bun, off of him and claims the character was used to ‘bully’ him. In his lawsuit, he also claims that Reynolds has attempted to tarnish his reputation in the industry, rather than the other way around.

There are new twists and turns each day – with more and more details of the saga being brought into the public domain. Arguably, it was only a matter of time before one side decided to publish all their evidence themselves.

Lively and Reynolds, for their part, are reportedly hoping that Baldoni’s lawsuit gets thrown out. Their lawyer says the website has the potential to influence a jury and details should be taken down, but Baldoni’s lawyer says the couple are trying to ‘hide and delay the discovery of hundreds of pages of well-documented information’.

Against the odds, an insider told People that Lively is ‘surprisingly calm’ about the recent development and is trying ‘to focus on family life’. Apparently, ‘she sees the whole lawsuit as a necessary bump’.

What’s clear is that high profile celebrity legal battles are the flavor de jour, and people on the internet have never been so invested. We’ve already seen an unprecedented interest in the upcoming sex trafficking trial of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’, in which he plans to plead not guilty and denies all allegations, which starts on 5 May, and may well push Lively and Baldoni’s case off the top spot. The ongoing legal battle between Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt over the shares of their French winery shows no signs of being settled out of court either. Their latest hearing took place on 5 February.

Messy, toxic celebrity legal feuds are, in a rather dystopian way, becoming a part of popular culture, whether their lawyers like it or not.