Justin Baldoni files $250 million lawsuit against New York Times
Justin Baldoni has filed a lawsuit against the New York Times over a story it wrote regarding the “It Ends With Us” director and Blake Lively.
In the 87-page complaint obtained by Variety, Baldoni accused the Times of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract. He also offered a scathing rebuttal to the 4,000-word piece titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which led to WME dropping him as a client just hours after it was published.
One of those rebuttals was to the accusations that “[Baldoni] repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”
According to the lawsuit, on June 2, 2023, Lively sent Baldoni a text in which she blamed her assistant for not providing her with an updated batch of script pages for “It Ends With Us.”
“She didn’t realize they were new,” Lively wrote. “New pages can always be sent to me as well please.” The actress allegedly signed the message with an “X” — the universal symbol for a kiss.
She followed up by allegedly sending him another text shortly after, telling him, “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines,” to which he responded, “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.”
That discrepancy is one of the many claimed in Baldoni’s $250 million lawsuit filed on Tuesday afternoon, which included 10 plaintiffs. High-profile publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel are among the plaintiffs suing the Times for libel and false light invasion of privacy over the article published on Dec. 21.
The Times’ piece painted Lively as a star who endured months of alleged sexual harassment from Baldoni, claiming she allegedly faced retaliation of a smear campaign when she voiced her concerns.
However, the lawsuit states it was Lively who allegedly embarked on a “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign, using false “sexual harassment allegations to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production.”
Baldoni’s lawsuit also accuses Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, of allegedly berating him during a heated meeting at their Tribeca penthouse in New York, in which he accused the director of “fat shaming” his wife.
He also claimed Reynolds pressured Baldoni’s agency, WME, to drop him — allegedly during the “Deadpool and Wolverine” premiere in July, which took place before Baldoni hired his crisis PR team.
A WME rep denied the accusations that Reynolds or Lively pressured the company to drop Baldoni as a client.
Blake’s attorney’s told The Post, “Nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms. Lively’s California Civil Rights Department Complaint, nor her federal complaint, filed earlier today. This lawsuit is based on the obviously false premise that Ms. Lively’s administrative complaint against Wayfarer and others was a ruse based on a choice “not to file a lawsuit against Baldoni, Wayfarer,” and that “litigation was never her ultimate goal.” As demonstrated by the federal complaint filed by Ms. Lively earlier today, that frame of reference for the Wayfarer lawsuit is false. While we will not litigate this matter in the press, we do encourage people to read Ms. Lively’s complaint in its entirety. We look forward to addressing each and every one of Wayfarer’s allegations in court.”
Attorney Bryan Freedman, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, told Variety that the 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.”
The Post reached out to the New York Times for comment.
