Justin Baldoni wants the New York Times to face a jury!
As Perezcious readers know, the newspaper was dragged into the It Ends With Us director’s legal battle against Blake Lively after they published her complaints in a scathing article in December 2024. The publication, which was sued for $250 million, has since filed a motion to dismiss, and a judge already granted them a pause on any further discovery in the legal matter while he decides whether or not to let them off the hook.
Related: Blake Lively Finally Gets A WIN In Court!
In his response to the NYT‘s motion to dismiss filing, Justin submitted new legal docs on Friday, obtained by Deadline, in which he argued a “jury must decide” whether the newspaper should be dismissed or not. The docs stated:
“A pietistic bastion of the media establishment, the NYT has long presumed itself beyond accountability. Not here.”
Justin’s legal team argued the newspaper “went past merely reporting on Plaintiff Blake Lively’s (‘Lively’) California Civil Rights Department Complaint (‘CRD Complaint’) and actively vouched for the veracity of its false narrative” when they published Blake’s full complaint against him and his colleagues. The legal filing continued:
“The fair report privilege the NYT seeks to hide behind does not protect it from liability for maliciously colluding with Lively and her cohort to publish a false and defamatory hit piece about the Wayfarer Parties, wrongly casting them as villains and making them scapegoats for Lively’s well-publicized media missteps.”
He furthered:
“The press enjoys the fair report privilege when faithfully relaying the contents of a filed complaint. But that is not what the NYT did; it (admittedly) based its Article and Video on its reporters’ review of ‘thousands of page’ of documents and expressly credited Lively’s claims, framing them as having been verified by the NYT’s own investigation. In doing so, the NYT forfeited the fair report privilege.”
Justin also claimed the NYT had “months of plotting” with Blake’s team but only gave his team “hours to respond” before the story went live. In a statement to Deadline on Monday, the Times communications SVP Danielle Rhoades Ha responded:
“The flaws in the Baldoni/Wayfarer case were made clear last week in their own legal filing when they asked the court for yet another opportunity to amend their complaint to try to make it legally sufficient. We are looking forward to addressing the various problems in their latest brief when we file our reply later this week.”
It’ll be interesting to see what happens! What do you think — should the NYT have to face a jury? Tell us (below)!
