Author Colleen Hoover has broken her silence about the controversy surrounding the movie adaptation of her book, “It Ends With Us.”
Hoover, 45, didn’t hold back in an interview with Elle magazine about the legal drama between the 2024 movie’s two stars, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, saying it “overshadowed” her book.
“I can’t even recommend it anymore,” Hoover said of her book. “I’m almost embarrassed to say I wrote it. When people ask what I do, I’m just like, ‘I’m a writer. Please don’t ask me what I wrote.'”
In December 2024, Lively sued Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment, retaliation, and attempting to smear her reputation. That set off a cascade of subsequent lawsuits brought by Lively, Baldoni, and even tangential characters like Baldoni’s ex-publicist Stephanie Jones.
In June 2025, a judge threw out Baldoni’s $400 million countersuit against Lively. Baldoni was allowed to file an amended complaint, but in November, the judge formally ended the suit after the deadline for Baldoni to do so had passed.
Lively’s original lawsuit against Baldoni is still ongoing.
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At the time of the Elle interview, Hoover said she was a few weeks away from giving a deposition, but told the magazine that outside of getting an executive producer credit on the movie and being on set a few days while filming a cameo, she was “completely unaware that anything was happening” between the two stars.
Hoover said the headline-grabbing back-and-forth between Lively and Baldoni also affected her mother, whose experience with domestic violence was Hoover’s inspiration for writing “It Ends With Us.”
“The book was inspired by her story, and now it gives us PTSD to think about it,” she said. “I feel awful because I almost feel like she’s gone through more with the aftermath of this film, more pain than she went through with my dad, just seeing the ugliness of it,” Hoover said.
“I was very proud of that book,” Hoover told Elle. “And I’m still proud of it, but less publicly so. Maybe I need therapy, I don’t know.”
