Justin Baldoni Sues New York Times for $250 Million Over Blake Lively Smear Campaign Reporting
UPDATED with response from LIvely’s attorneys: “It Ends with Us” director and star Justin Baldoni is suing the New York Times for $250 million in damages over its reporting on the scandal surrounding the film and actress Blake Lively, who on December 20 hit Baldoni with a bombshell legal complaint accusing him of sexual harassment and a smear campaign to damage her reputation.
Almost simultaneously as news was breaking about the suit against the Times, Lively has formally filed suit against Baldoni after previously just issuing a complaint. Her lawyers have pushed back against Baldoni’s new claims and said nothing is changed about their own legal action.
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It was reported that Baldoni was prepping a countersuit against Lively, but Variety reported Tuesday that Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman didn’t wait for the new year and has first sued the paper of record, accusing it of libel, false light invasion of privacy, promissory fraud, and breach of implied-in-fact-contract.
The lawsuit alleges that reporters Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire, and Julie Tate in their 4,000 story “cherry picked” text exchanges that only served Lively’s side of the story and overlooked key details that refuted her point of view.
“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 reads.
“In this vicious smear campaign fully orchestrated by Blake Lively and her team, 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,” Freedman said in a statement to IndieWire. “In doing so, they pre-determined the outcome of their story, and aided and abetted their own devastating PR smear campaign designed to revitalize Lively’s self-induced floundering public image and counter the organic groundswell of criticism amongst the online public. The irony is rich.”
The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.
Baldoni’s suit is the latest in one of the ugliest entertainment media stories of 2024. On December 20, Lively issued a legal complaint (not a formal lawsuit) accusing Baldoni of retaliation, negligence, breach of contract, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, as well as Baldoni hiring a crisis PR firm to flood social media with negative comments about Lively in order to damage her reputation after issues of sexual harassment and misconduct allegedly took place on the “It Ends with Us” set. Baldoni has denied all the claims.
But Freedman argues in the suit that by only issuing a legal complaint rather than a formal lawsuit, Lively’s full document was able to remain confidential and not open her up to the discovery process or answering questions under oath, but they were still able to leak the document to the Times.
Lively’s attorneys pushed back on that notion and have now formally filed suit. Her lawyers in a statement to Deadline said “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,” the statement reads. “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.”
One of the text exchanges in Lively’s complaint is in one in which members of Baldoni’s PR team, Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel (who are also plaintiffs in Baldoni’s suit), appear to take credit for an article slamming Lively. But Baldoni alleges that the Times ignored additional context in the same text exchange that indicates Nathan and Abel were joking and being sarcastic.
In another instance, Lively’s complaint makes a key point about sexual harassment by saying that Baldoni repeatedly entered her dressing room while she was breastfeeding. But Baldoni’s suit includes a complete exchange in which Lively tells Baldoni that she’s “pumping” and to come by.
Lively’s complaint said Baldoni discussed his sex life with her and improvised unwanted kissing without her consent, that he repeatedly entered her trailer while she was undressed, and that producer Jamey Heath engaged in similar inappropriate activity, including showing her a video of his wife naked. Baldoni also allegedly sought to add sex scenes beyond what was featured in the script, and that as retaliation for her complaints to the studio, Baldoni hired a crisis PR firm to launch a “social combat plan” to harm Lively.
But Baldoni asserts it was Lively’s team led by Leslie Sloane at Vision PR that embarked on its own “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign, not the other way around, and the Times ignored other facts regarding Sloane’s actions. Per Variety, the suit also claims that Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds aggressively berated Baldoni and urged Baldoni’s agent to drop him while the two were at the “Deadpool and Wolverine” premiere.
Since Lively’s complaint was released, Baldoni was dropped by his agents at WME (which also represents Lively and Reynolds), had an award for women’s solidarity revoked from him, and was hit with another lawsuit by his former publicist.
“It Ends with Us” was hounded with drama and internet speculation about the on set friction between Baldoni and Lively, who never appeared in interviews together in support of the film. The attention helped buoy the box office performance for the Colleen Hoover adaptation to $350.9 million against a $25 million production budget.
At the time, Lively and Hoover in press interviews avoided discussions of the film’s frank themes of domestic violence and focused on it being a story of women’s uplift, a move that provoked strong criticism.
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