UPDATE 3:00 P.M. PST: The New York Times has hit back at the claims made in Justin Baldoni’s amended lawsuit! A spokesperson for the publication told TMZ on Saturday afternoon that his filing is filled with “inaccuracies,” including the claim that they had “early access” to Blake Lively’s complaint:
“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. Mr. Baldoni’s lawyers base their erroneous claim on postings by amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong.”
The rep continued:
“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. A look at the metadata from the posted document correctly shows it was posted after Ms. Lively filed it with the California Civil Rights Department.”
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There is a huge update on the ongoing legal drama between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively!
As Perezcious readers will recall, the filmmaker filed a $250 million libel lawsuit against The New York Times over an article We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine about her sexual harassment complaint. The Gossip Girl alum alleged he sexually harassed her on the set of their movie It Ends With Us and then launched a smear campaign in retaliation for speaking up.
Justin vehemently denied her accusations, claiming she was the one who engaged in a calculated smear campaign — not him. The Clouds director accused the outlet of working with Blake to destroy his reputation and cherry-picking and doctoring text messages in the article to misrepresent their interactions.
This month, he then took things a step further and sued the actress and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for $400 million for civil extortion, defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and more. And Justin has receipts to back up all these claims! This now includes new supposed proof that the power couple has been plotting against him for months! Whoa!
Related: Justin Baldoni Offered ‘Miracle’ Home To Multiple Families In Aftermath Of LA Fires!
According to new court documents obtained by TMZ on Friday, the actor amended his lawsuit against Blake and Ryan, alleging they schemed with The New York Times for several months before she dropped her lawsuit against him in December. As you may recall, the four-thousand-word piece dropped on December 21 — less than a day after she filed her California Civil Rights Department complaint. However, Justin believes Blake and her team had been coordinating with the Times “likely over a matter of months before the CRD Complaint was filed.”
When did it supposedly start? Justin claimed the “malicious and reckless” defamation began as early as October 31 — at least! What! The Jane The Virgin alum apparently found this through the metadata embedded in the NYT article about Blake’s accusations against him! His team claimed in the docs:
“There is even reason to believe that the Times had been working on the Article months before, at least as of October 31, 2024. Careful observers reported that viewing the HTML source code for the Article revealed references to a ‘message-embed-generator’ that referred to a date of ‘2024-10-31.’”
Basically, Justin believes The New York Times started to build the alleged “defamatory article no later than October 31, 2024” when they created a “slick new graphic display module to prominently feature the misleadingly edited and context-stripped text messages” in the piece. He recognizes the publication could have developed “a new tool for embedding text messages within an article as part of routine system upgrades” and just decided to use it “six weeks later” for the Blake article. A mere coincidence perhaps! However, he doubts it! Justin thinks all this was in the works for months! Check out the receipt (below):
You are most likely not surprised that a news organization spent a significant amount of time working on a piece before publishing! It happens all the time! But in terms of the legal battle, Justin explains this is significant because the elements behind the article “strip away the legal shields that Lively, the Times, and the other Lively Parties were likely relying on to protect their malicious acts of defamation, such as the litigation privilege and the fair reporting privilege,” adding:
“Given the full scope of the Article’s misleading manipulations, it is unsurprising that they would feel the need to attempt to erect protection against suit.”
Wow…
Other evidence includes that “the URLs for various images in the Article point to dates as early as December 16, 2024,” including the topper image of Blake and Justin. Check it out (below):
Meanwhile, the suit noted that the public pointed out that the California Civil Rights Department complaint linked in the article was uploaded to the NYT‘s server as early as December 10, 2024. See (below):
Then, a video accompanying the piece with writer Megan Twohey speaking about “what really happened” with the alleged smear campaign against Blake, according to internet sleuths, was created on December 12, 2024. Take a look (below):
Yeah, it really does look like this has been in the works for a lot longer than just one day after Blake filed her complaint on December 20. Speaking to TMZ, Justin’s attorney Bryan Freedman insisted this “fresh evidence corroborates” the claim that Blake conspired to ruin her co-star’s reputation:
“The decision to amend our lawsuit was a logical next step due to the overwhelming amount of new proof that has come to light. This fresh evidence corroborates what we knew all along, that due to purely egotistical reasons Ms. Lively and her entire team colluded for months to destroy reputations through a complex web of lies, false accusations and the manipulation of illicitly received communications.”
He continued:
“The ongoing public interest in this case online has ironically shed light on the undeniable facts pertaining to The New York Times and how heavily Ms. Lively and her representatives were not only deeply involved in the attempted take down and smear campaign of Mr. Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and their teams but that they themselves initiated it.”
At this time, Blake has not responded to the amended lawsuit but we expect her clap back to come very soon! Reactions? Sound OFF in the comments!
[Image via Access Hollywood/TODAY/CBS Mornings/YouTube]