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Actor Justin Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit against The New York Times on Tuesday, claiming the Gray Lady defamed him and his team when covering his “It Ends with Us” co-star Blake Lively’s claim he launched a “smear campaign” against her.
Lively previously filed a lawsuit against Baldoni for sexual harassment, retaliation, intentional affliction of emotional distress, negligence and more. Lively also claims that Baldoni executed and participated in a “social manipulation” campaign to destroy her career and reputation.
The Times published a December 21 story headlined, “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which reported private emails and text messages that show a “playbook for waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era” about Lively, a 37-year-old actress married to actor Ryan Reynolds.
However, Baldoni and other plaintiffs, including Hollywood public relations gurus, assert that the Times article “deliberately omitted portions of text exchanges and other information that contradicted the actress’s version of events.” They claim the Times defamed them in the process, leaving out critical context from communications that dispute many of Lively’s claims.
“The article’s central thesis, encapsulated in a defamatory headline designed to immediately mislead the reader, is that plaintiffs orchestrated a retaliatory public relations campaign against Lively for speaking out about sexual harassment — a premise that is categorically false and easily disproven,” the 87-page lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court by attorney Bryan Freedman, claims.
“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 continues.
Freedman told Variety that the 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.”
The Times stands by its reporting.
“The role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead. Our story was meticulously and responsibly reported. It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told Fox News Digital.
“We published their full statement in response to the allegations in the article as well,” she continued. “We plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”
The lawsuit also claims the Times published its report before the deadline that was given to Baldoni’s reps to respond in order to “pay lip service to journalistic ethics and fundamental fairness” but “never intended—or wanted—for Plaintiffs to respond.”
Talent agency William Morris Endeavor dropped Baldoni as a client on the heels of the Times piece, according to the paper.
Freedman did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment about Baldoni’s claims about the Times. He previously told The Times that Lively’s initial claims were “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt and rehash a narrative in the media.”
Fox News Digital’s Lauryn Overhultz and Christina Dugan Ramirez contributed to this report.