The Saga Continues! Justin Baldoni Has Filed A $250 Million Dollar Libel Lawsuit Against The New York Times
On June 2, 2023, Blake Lively began a text exchange with her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni that blamed her assistant for not getting her an updated batch of script pages. “She didn’t realize they were new,” Lively wrote. “New pages can always be sent to me as well please.” The actress signed the missive with an “X” — the universal symbol for a kiss. Lively followed up with another text shortly thereafter. “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.” Baldoni responded: “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.” Eighteen months later, that interaction was depicted in a New York Times bombshell report in a far more sinister light. The Times wrote: “[Baldoni] repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”
That discrepancy is one of many highlighted in a scathing $250 million lawsuit filed Tuesday afternoon by Baldoni against the Times in Los Angeles Superior Court. Baldoni is among a group of 10 plaintiffs that also includes publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel who are suing the newspaper for libel and false light invasion of privacy over the Dec. 21 article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The parties, which also include “It Ends With Us” producers Jamey Heath and Steve Sarowitz, claim that the Times relied on “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”
The 87-page complaint, which also accuses the Times of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract, offers a rebuttal of the narrative set forth in the 4,000-word article that has rocked Hollywood and led to WME dropping Baldoni as a client hours after publication. Written by Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the piece painted Lively as an actress who allegedly endured months of sexual harassment from Baldoni and Heath and supposedly faced retaliation in the form of a smear campaign because she voiced her concerns. But according to the lawsuit, it was Lively who embarked 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.” And according to the suit, Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, allegedly berated Baldoni in an aggressive manner during a heated meeting at their Tribeca penthouse in New York, “accusing him of ‘fat shaming’” his wife. The suit claims that the A-list actor also pressured Baldoni’s WME agent to drop the director during the “Deadpool and Wolverine” premiere in July, well before Baldoni enlisted crisis PR.
ICYMI you can read the original story here, and the most recent update here.
It must be fun to be rich and famous. Just a never ending wave of multi-million dollar movies, lawsuits, allegations, lies, and mysterious flight logs. To sum it up, Baldoni's legal team is accusing NYT of running with this story despite the evidence being very faulty. They say the text messages, which were a big point of emphasis, were "cherry picked' and altered to remove emojis and other context that disproved guilt, implied sarcasm etc. They also say that Lively's publicist, who used to work for Harvey Weinstein, was seeding stories about Baldoni sexually harassing people on set before the movie even came out (Variety said they asked Sony if there were any complaints about him and they said no).
I maintain my stance from the original blog I had on this. I think the reality here is most likely that they both just suck. Very similar to the Depp-Heard situation in a way which is a coincidence since Melissa Nathan, one of the plantiffs here, was also the PR rep for Depp during that time. You can suck and not be a criminal, however, so we will see how this plays out. Something tells me that since they're about to have all their texts, emails etc. dumped out during discovery for this lawsuit that the Baldoni camp is confident enough that they're in the clear as far as that is concerned.
One part of this I want to point out is what the producer Jamey Heath said in his complaint here.
Another allegation made by Lively centered on Heath showing her a video of his naked wife. “The Times compounded its journalistic failures by uncritically advancing Lively’s unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment against Heath and Baldoni. … [with the] CRD complaint even labeling [that] footage as ‘pornography.’ This claim is patently absurd,” the lawsuit says. “The video in question was a (non-pornographic) recording of Heath’s wife during a home birth — a deeply personal one with no sexual overtone. To distort this benign event into an act of sexual misconduct is outrageous and emblematic of the lengths to which Lively and her collaborators are willing to go to defame plaintiffs.” The suit adds that the video in question was shown to Lively as part of a creative discussion regarding a birthing scene in “It Ends With Us.”
Let's be clear: Showing your coworker a video of your wife doing a home birth is still pretty fucking weird, Jamey!