It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni sues New York Times for libel over Blake Lively story

It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni sued The New York Times for libel on Tuesday (Dec 31) over its story on allegations that he sexually harassed and sought to smear the reputation of the film's star, Blake Lively.

The lawsuit seeking at least US$250 million was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the next major move in a growing story that has made major waves in Hollywood. It alleges the Times and Lively coordinated a smear campaign against Baldoni and his nine fellow plaintiffs.

The Times stood by its reporting and said it plans to “vigorously defend” against the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs include the film's lead producer Jamey Heath, its production company Wayfarer Studios, and crisis communications expert Melissa Nathan, whose text message was quoted in the headline of the Dec 21 Times story: ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.

But the lawsuit says that “if the Times truly reviewed the thousands of private communications it claimed to have obtained, its reporters would have seen incontrovertible evidence that it was Lively, not Plaintiffs, who engaged in a calculated smear campaign.”

Lively is not a defendant in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a statement that “nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms Lively’s California Civil Rights Department complaint.”

Written by Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the story was published just after Lively filed a legal complaint that is usually a predecessor to a lawsuit with the California Civil Rights Department over her alleged treatment.

Both her legal complaint and the Times story allege Baldoni enlisted publicists and crisis managers in a plan to destroy Lively’s reputation if she went public with her on-set concerns.

Baldoni's lawsuit says the newspaper “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. But the Times did not care.”

A spokesperson for the Times, Danielle Rhoades, said in a statement that “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. To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni, the other subjects of the article and their representatives have not pointed to a single error," the statement said.

The romantic drama It Ends With Us, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 novel, was released in August, exceeding box office expectations with a US$50 million debut. But the movie’s release was shrouded by speculation over discord between Lively and Baldoni. Baldoni took a backseat in promoting the film while Lively took centerstage along with her husband Ryan Reynolds, who was on the press circuit for Deadpool & Wolverine at the same time.

Lively came to fame through the 2005 film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and bolstered her stardom on the TV series Gossip Girl from 2007 to 2012. She has since starred in films including The Town and The Shallows.

Baldoni starred in the TV comedy Jane the Virgin, directed the 2019 film Five Feet Apart and wrote Man Enough, a book pushing back against traditional notions of masculinity. He responded to concerns that It Ends With Us romanticised domestic violence, telling the Associated Press (AP) at the time that critics were absolutely entitled to that opinion.

He was dropped by his agency, WME, immediately after Lively filed her complaint and the Times published its story.