Justin Baldoni files $250 million lawsuit against New York Times over Blake Lively story

Justin Baldoni has filed a lawsuit against the New York Times over a story it wrote regarding the “It Ends With Us” director and Blake Lively.

In the 87-page complaint obtained by Variety, Baldoni accused the Times of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract. He also offered a scathing rebuttal to the 4,000-word piece titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which led to WME dropping him as a client just hours after it was published.

One of those rebuttals was to the accusations that “[Baldoni] repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”

According to the lawsuit, on June 2, 2023, Lively sent Baldoni a text in which she blamed her assistant for not providing her with an updated batch of script pages for “It Ends With Us.”

“She didn’t realize they were new,” Lively wrote. “New pages can always be sent to me as well please.” The actress allegedly signed the message with an “X” — the universal symbol for a kiss.

She followed up by allegedly sending him another text shortly after, telling him, “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines,” to which he responded, “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.”

That discrepancy is one of the many claimed in Baldoni’s $250 million lawsuit filed on Tuesday afternoon, which included 10 plaintiffs. High-profile publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel are among the plaintiffs suing the Times for libel and false light invasion of privacy over the article published on Dec. 21.

Baldoni’s lawsuit also accuses Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, of allegedly berating him during a heated meeting at their Tribeca penthouse in New York, in which he accused the director of “fat shaming” his wife.

He also claimed Reynolds pressured Baldoni’s agency, WME, to drop him — allegedly during the “Deadpool & Wolverine” premiere in July, which took place before Baldoni hired his crisis PR team.