The legal drama between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively is becoming something akin to a soap opera. Despite the serious allegations at play, each side seems to deal a new blow when we least expect it.

Most recently, one from team Lively and Reynolds came in the form of an awkward joke at the SNL 50th anniversary special. In the now viral clip, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler asked, ‘Ryan Reynolds! How’s it going?’ and Reynolds, who was sat next to Lively in the audience, said, ‘Great! Why, what have you heard?’ jokingly referring to their highly publicised legal situation.

The quip received a knowing laugh from the audience and a look of slight dismay from Lively herself, but it has been met with a mixed response elsewhere. A source told Page Six, ‘It’s very plausible that Justin’s legal team will use this public outing to defend him. Justin is taking this lawsuit in all seriousness and isn’t making a mockery out of it.’

A second insider disagrees and claims Lively ‘was initially hesitant to attend the anniversary show but, ultimately, she’s glad she went and had a really nice time. Blake and Ryan have no regrets about making an appearance and they’re glad they showed up because they have nothing to hide and no reason not to’.

It was their first public appearance together since Lively’s original lawsuit was filed in December. She is accusing her It Ends With Us co-star of sexual harassment and of launching a smear campaign against her during the press run. In the lawsuit, which was first reported on by the New York Times, she has included messages that show Baldoni’s PR team allegedly saying they could ‘bury anyone’.

The lawsuit understandably shifted the narrative, which was appeared to be tilted in Baldoni’s favour up until that point. It also encouraged social media users to revisit the barrage of criticism and abuse Lively faced when It Ends With Us came out in a new light. One particularly damning viral clip was from an interview Lively did with the Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa during the Café Society press run in 2016. In the clip, the not-pregnant Flaa said to pregnant Lively ‘congratulations on your little bump’ and Lively appeared to mockingly respond ‘congrats on your little bump’.

The interview no doubt contributed to the discourse that Lively is a ‘mean girl’, and Flaa took its virality as an opportunity to discuss how it affected her on her YouTube channel in a video titled, ‘The interview that made me want to quit my job.’

‘It took me a while to actually get over it,’ she said. ‘It affected me for a while because it made me nervous when I was interviewing other people after that.’ Calling the experience a ‘nightmare interview’, she added, ‘I just felt like, “You know what? It’s not okay to behave like that and I think it needs to be called out.’ And so that’s the reason why I did that now, so much later.’

Following Lively’s lawsuit, however, Flaa spoke up again to say that she had nothing to do with Baldoni’s alleged smear campaign. ‘Okay, so I have to say something because now I see that things are starting to snowball and people start thinking that I had anything to do with the smear campaign against Blake Lively that was orchestrated allegedly by Justin Baldoni and his team,’ she said.

‘I also read the article in the New York Times this morning. I’ve been reading through the lawsuit, and I see there’s been so much dirty work going on behind-the-scenes. I just wanted to say I had nothing to do with it. When I read the text messages that was going back and forth between Justin Baldoni’s PR team, I was shocked and appalled, like everybody else.’

She concluded, ‘I would never want to take part in anything like that. That’s such an insult to me.’

Given how instrumental the Flaa clip was in the criticism of Lively, the fact she says she was not involved in the alleged smear campaign makes things even more complicated.

As does the fact that Baldoni filed a counter lawsuit the same day Lively filed hers. He is seeking at least $400 million for damages, including lost future income, and is suing Lively and Reynolds for civil extortion, false light invasion of privacy and defamation. He has also filed a lawsuit against the New York Times for publishing an allegedly one-sided account of what happened.

Baldoni’s lawyers have since made his entire lawsuit publicly available to read online – a move that Lively’s team claim could potentially influence the jury. The whole saga is messy and complicated and difficult to follow and, as things currently stand, neither side is coming off particularly well.

Lively and Reynolds’ SNL appearance was therefore a marked stance to say they have nothing to hide. It’s also a possible response to the fact Lively was noticeably absent at the Super Bowl on 9 February. Last year, she was stood proudly by Taylor Swift’s side as they watched Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce play for the Kansas City Chiefs, but this year Lively was nowhere to be seen.

Fans were quick to speculate about whether the pair had fallen out because of Swift’s supposed mention in Baldoni’s lawsuit. He claims to have texts from Lively where she calls her ‘mega-celebrity friend’, widely thought to be Swift, one of ‘her dragons’. ‘For better or worse, but usually for better,’ she added. ‘Because my dragons also protect those I fight for.’ Others simply concluded that Lively might be keeping a low profile in light of everything that is going on.

Participating in a lawsuit gag in the SNL anniversary special, then, was a bold and potentially risky move – and one that feeds into the media circus surrounding the case. It’s also one that reflects Reynolds and Lively’s position clearly: they are not going down without a fight.