It Ends With Us star Justin Baldoni has filed a $250,000,000 lawsuit against The New York Times over a story it published about his interactions with co-star Blake Lively.
The filing comes after Lively filed her own lawsuit against Baldoni on December 20, when she accused her former co-star and director of orchestrating a ‘smear campaign’ against her and allegedly causing her ‘severe emotional distress’ while they worked together on their 2024 romance-drama movie.
Lively also accused Baldoni of sexual harassment, however, Baldoni has denied all of the claims made against him.
Now, he’s been named as one of 10 plaintiffs in a new, $250 million lawsuit which was filed on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The lawsuit accuses The New York Times of libel, false light invasion of privacy, promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract in relation to its December 21 article, headlined “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.”
The article featured claims about Baldoni, at one point alleging he had ‘repeatedly entered [Lively’s] makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding’.
The claim came from a June 2023 text exchange between herself and Baldoni in which Lively wrote: “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.”
In response, Baldoni wrote: “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have claimed The New York Times ‘cherry-picked’ communications and presented them ‘stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead’.
“The Times story relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives,” the suit claims, alleging Lively took on a ‘strategic and manipulative’ smear campaign of her own and used false ‘sexual harassment allegations to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production’.
The suit also hits back at a list of demands Lively claimed to have made to Baldoni while on set, alleging: “No such document was ever presented to Baldoni, the [production company] Wayfarer team, or, to their knowledge, anyone else – whether during that meeting or at any other time – and therefore, could not have been agreed to.”
Attorney Bryan Freedman, who filed the lawsuit, told Variety that The New York Times ‘cowered to the wants and whims of two powerful ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites, disregarding journalistic practices and ethics once befitting of the revered publication by using doctored and manipulated texts and intentionally omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative’.
In response to the lawsuit, The New York Times said: “The role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead. Our story was meticulously and responsibly reported. It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article.
“To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni, the other subjects of the article and their representatives have not pointed to a single error. We published their full statement in response to the allegations in the article as well. We plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”
In addition to her original lawsuit, lawyers for Lively have said they have now filed a federal complaint against Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios, claiming the defendents ‘have violated federal and California state law by retaliating against her for reporting sexual harassment and workplace safety concerns’.
“Now, the defendants will answer for their conduct in federal court,” Lively’s legal team said.
UNILAD has reached out to representatives for Baldoni, Lively and the New York Times for comment.
