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The legal battle between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively has turned another corner. Baldoni has come up with a reply to The New York Times which moved to dismiss itself from the $400 million lawsuit accusing the news and media corporation of defamation in February.
In a copy of the memorandum filed by Justin Baldoni, his production company Wayfarer Studios and its CEO, Baldoni’s financier and publicists, shared by Deadline, the consolidated plaintiffs wrote,
“A pietistic bastion of the media establishment, the NYT has long presumed itself beyond accountability. Not here. The NYT 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. 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.”
According to the Collins English Dictionary, pietistic refers to “an excessively or affectedly pious or saintly person.” In the context of the above memorandum, Baldoni and his associates claim that The New York Times operates with an attitude of excessive saintliness, referring to the news outlet’s coverage of Lively’s civil rights complaint against Baldoni. Baldoni alleges that The New York Times’ report on his dispute with Lively was biased and written to favor Lively.
What is the dispute between Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively and The New York Times?
The former co-stars Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, who worked together on the film, It Ends With Us, have been embroiled in a legal battle since Lively accused Baldoni of s*xual harassment during the production of the film which was directed and produced by Baldoni. Lively’s complaints against Baldoni involved a California Civil Rights Department complaint filed on December 21, following which she filed a lawsuit as well, as per CNN’s coverage at the time.
Justin Baldoni alleged in his initial $250 million defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, filed on the same day as Lively’s lawsuit, that the news publication received a copy of Lively’s complaint ahead of the filing of the complaint, as per Deadline.
The allegations were directed at The New York Times because of an article published by its journalists, titled "‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which alleged that Baldoni and his crisis and publicity teams worked to build a social-media oriented smear campaign against Lively after the co-stars’ conflicts during the production of It Ends With Us.
As per Deadline, Baldoni alleged that his team was only given a couple of hours to respond to the allegations in the story before it was published.
In January 2025, Justin Baldoni had filed a lawsuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and their public relations head, accusing them of seeking to destroy Baldoni and his career, as per CNN.
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According to Deadline, Baldoni and his team later dropped the lawsuit against The New York Times in February, after amending the lawsuit filed against Lively to include The New York Times in the complaint.
While for the time being, Justin Baldoni and his associates are trying not to let The New York Times be dismissed from the lawsuit against it, it remains to be seen what the next development in the dispute between Baldoni and Lively will be.
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