The New York Times has denied Justin Baldoni’s latest legal claims about its reported involvement in Blake Lively’s lawsuit.
“The Baldoni/Wayfarer legal filings are rife with inaccuracies about The New York Times, including, for example, the bogus claim that The Times had early access to Ms. Lively’s state civil rights complaint,” a spokesperson for the newspaper tells Us Weekly in a Sunday, February 2, statement. “Mr. Baldoni’s lawyers base their erroneous claim on postings by amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong.”
The statement adds, “The sleuths have noted that a version of the Lively state complaint published by The Times carries the date ‘December 10’ even though the complaint wasn’t filed until more than a week later. The problem: That date is generated by Google software and is unrelated to the date when The Times received it and posted it.”
Baldoni, 40, filed a defamation lawsuit against The Times last month, claiming that the outlet helped spread Lively’s accusations against the director before she formally filed court documents. Baldoni’s attorneys alleged that NYT readers found “viewing the HTML source code for the article revealed references to a ‘message-embed-generator’ that referred to a date of ‘2024-10-31.’”
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The Times article was posted in December 2024, reporting that Lively, 37, was suing Baldoni for alleged sexual harassment, fostering a “hostile work environment” and trying to destroy her reputation while they filmed It Ends With Us. (Lively and Baldoni played a couple in an abusive marriage in the movie, which he also directed.)
Baldoni denied Lively’s allegations, eventually filing two defamation lawsuits. In his first motion, he sued The Times for $250 million in January for publishing Lively’s account. Baldoni later named Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, in a $400 million lawsuit, claiming the actress was “determined to make Baldoni the real-life villain in her story” to mask her alleged “tone-deaf” promotion of the film.
Lively denied the accusations and has since attempted to petition the court to issue a gag order to stop Baldoni and his lawyer Bryan Freedman from releasing alleged texts and videos from the film production.
“The video shows Mr. Baldoni repeatedly leaning in toward Ms. Lively, attempting to kiss her, kissing her forehead, rubbing his face and mouth against her neck, flicking her lip with his thumb, caressing her, telling her how good she smells, and talking with her out of character,” her team said in a statement last month.
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Freedman, meanwhile, has condemned Lively’s gag order request.
“The irony is not lost on anyone that Ms. Lively is so petrified of the truth that she has moved to gag it,” Freedman told Us in a January 25 statement. “The immense power that she wielded in Hollywood built on pure fear of her husband and their powerful friends came to an end the moment Ms. Lively planned a mass distribution of a disturbingly false and well-calculated hit piece in The New York Times.”
