Just before Christmas, Blake Lively and her lawyers filed a huge complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, all about Justin Baldoni and his production company. Lively accused Baldoni of sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us, and then using a crisis manager for a “social manipulation” campaign against her over the summer. Blake’s team also released a cache of texts and emails from Baldoni’s publicist and crisis manager, asserting that the texts and emails proved the “social manipulation” part of her case. The New York Times published the texts and emails in a bombshell exclusive. Baldoni has been widely criticized by many within the industry, as everyone is now trying to line up behind Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. We also heard that Baldoni’s fight-back would begin in the New Year. Well, on New Year’s Eve, Baldoni sued the NY Times for what he’s calling a cherry-picked narrative and unethical journalism. Baldoni’s side is that this is all Blake and Ryan setting out to destroy him and his career. What’s interesting is that Baldoni kept his own receipts, and some of his receipts contradict Blake’s narratives, or (at best) make some of Blake’s claims look exaggerated. You can read the exhaustive coverage here at Variety. Some highlights:

Baldoni kept receipts: On June 2, 2023, Blake Lively began a text exchange with her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni that blamed her assistant for not getting her an updated batch of script pages. “She didn’t realize they were new,” Lively wrote. “New pages can always be sent to me as well please.” The actress signed the missive with an “X” — the universal symbol for a kiss. Lively followed up with another text shortly thereafter. “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.” Baldoni responded: “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.” Eighteen months later, that interaction was depicted in a New York Times bombshell report in a far more sinister light. The Times wrote: “[Baldoni] repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”

Baldoni’s lawsuit: That discrepancy is one of many highlighted in a scathing $250 million lawsuit filed Tuesday afternoon by Baldoni against the Times in Los Angeles Superior Court. Baldoni is among a group of 10 plaintiffs that also includes publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel who are suing the newspaper for libel and false light invasion of privacy over the Dec. 21 article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The parties, which also include “It Ends With Us” producers Jamey Heath and Steve Sarowitz, claim that the Times relied on “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.” The 87-page complaint, which also accuses the Times of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract, offers a rebuttal of the narrative set forth in the 4,000-word article that has rocked Hollywood.

What was Blake Lively’s motive? According to the lawsuit, it was Lively who embarked on a “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign of her own and used false “sexual harassment allegations to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production.” And according to the suit, Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, allegedly berated Baldoni in an aggressive manner during a heated meeting at their Tribeca penthouse in New York, “accusing him of ‘fat shaming’” his wife. The suit claims that the A-list actor also pressured Baldoni’s agency, WME, to drop the director during the “Deadpool and Wolverine” premiere in July, well before Baldoni enlisted crisis PR. A WME rep denies that there was any pressure from Reynolds or Lively to drop Baldoni as a client.

Baldoni’s lawyer: Attorney Bryan Freedman, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, tells 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.”

Blake’s publicist planted stories too: “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 says. The plaintiffs also contend that the Times reporters overlooked text messages indicating that Lively’s camp may have been waging its own PR war against Baldoni preemptively. “The [Times] article also deliberately ignores that Lively’s publicist, Leslie Sloane (“Sloane”), of Vision PR, once backed by Harvey Weinstein, seeded stories critical of Baldoni, including that Baldoni was a sexual predator, ahead of the film’s release.” The complaint also states that Nathan’s firm “was made aware of Sloane planting an unfavorable, false and defamatory story about Baldoni’s Baháʼí faith to Page Six” and also planted “a false story alleging that there were ‘multiple’ HR complaints during production.”

The story of Heath showing Blake a video of his naked wife. “The Times compounded its journalistic failures by uncritically advancing Lively’s unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment against Heath and Baldoni. … [with the] CRD complaint even labeling [that] footage as ‘pornography.’ This claim is patently absurd,” the lawsuit says. “The video in question was a (non-pornographic) recording of Heath’s wife during a home birth — a deeply personal one with no sexual overtone. To distort this benign event into an act of sexual misconduct is outrageous and emblematic of the lengths to which Lively and her collaborators are willing to go to defame plaintiffs.” The suit adds that the video in question was shown to Lively as part of a creative discussion regarding a birthing scene in “It Ends With Us.”

The intimacy coordinator situation: The Times article states that before shooting on “It Ends With Us” began in 2023, Lively objected to sex scenes Baldoni “wanted to add that she considered gratuitous.” In response, Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios “agreed to provide a full-time intimacy coordinator.” But today’s lawsuit offers an alternate version of events. In one text message sent by Lively before production included in the suit, she indicates that she is in no hurry to meet with the film’s intimacy coordinator. “I feel good. I can meet her when we start 🙂 thank you though!” Baldoni’s lawsuit also references “notes from the intimacy coordinator [that] included a suggestion that perhaps ‘Ryle’ [played by Baldoni] chooses not to orgasm after he satisfied Lily [played by Lively].” According to the complaint, “Lively personalizes this and states, ‘I’d be mortified if that happened to me,’ to which Baldoni, following Lively’s lead in what seemed like an attempt to connect and develop their characters, says, “I’m not sure about you but those have been some of the most beautiful moments with [my wife] and I.”

Ryan Reynolds berated Baldoni: As for the meeting at Lively and Reynolds’ penthouse apartment in Tribeca, everyone was “in shock” by Reynolds’ outburst, the lawsuit claims. According to the lawsuit, one of the film’s producers who was present said that “in his 40-year career he had never seen anyone speak to someone like that in a meeting, [while] the Sony representative mentioned that she would often think of that meeting and her one regret is that she didn’t stop Reynolds’ berating of Baldoni.”

[From Variety]

In one part of Baldoni’s filing, his lawyers point out that Blake filed her complaint with the California Civil Rights Department because the discovery process is a lot different, as is answering questions under oath. Baldoni’s argument being, Blake didn’t have the balls to sue him directly because her case would have fallen apart under scrutiny. As soon as Baldoni sued the Times, Lively filed a federal complaint against Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and everyone else. So we’re at the point where only one of these people will have a career once the dust settles, right? The courts will have to sort through a lot of material, so I’m going to wait-and-see on some of this stuff. One thing I will say is that I absolutely believe that Ryan Reynolds raged out on Baldoni, and I think that might be a crucial piece of the larger story.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.