“It Ends With Us” director Justin Baldoni sued The New York Times for libel on Tuesday over its story on allegations that he sexually harassed and sought to smear the popularity of the movie’s star, Blake Lively.
The lawsuit looking for not less than $250 million was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the subsequent main transfer in a rising story that has made main waves in Hollywood. It alleges the Times and Lively coordinated a smear marketing campaign towards Baldoni and his 9 fellow plaintiffs.
The Times stood by its reporting and mentioned it plans to “vigorously defend” towards the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs embody the movie’s lead producer Jamey Heath, its manufacturing firm Wayfarer Studios, and disaster communications knowledgeable Melissa Nathan, whose textual content message was quoted within the headline of the Dec. 21 Times story: “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.”
Written by Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the story was revealed simply after Lively filed a authorized criticism that’s normally a predecessor to a lawsuit with the California Civil Rights Department over her alleged remedy.
Both her authorized criticism and the Times story allege Baldoni enlisted publicists and disaster managers in a plan to destroy Lively’s popularity if she went public along with her on-set considerations.
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, mentioned in a press release that “our story was meticulously and responsibly reported.”
“It was primarily based on a assessment of 1000’s of pages of authentic paperwork, together with the textual content messages and emails that we quote precisely and at size within the article. To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni, the opposite topics of the article and their representatives haven’t pointed to a single error,” the assertion mentioned.
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 shouldn’t be a defendant within the lawsuit. Her attorneys mentioned in a press release that “Nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms. Lively’s California Civil Rights Department Complaint.”
The romantic drama “It Ends With Us,” an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 novel, was launched in August, exceeding field workplace expectations with a $50 million debut. But the film’s launch was shrouded by hypothesis over discord between Lively and Baldoni. Baldoni took a backseat in selling the movie whereas Lively took centerstage alongside along with her husband Ryan Reynolds, who was on the press circuit for “Deadpool & Wolverine” on the similar time.
Lively got here to fame by the 2005 movie “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” and bolstered her stardom on the TV collection “Gossip Girl” from 2007 to 2012. She has since starred in movies together with “The Town” and “The Shallows.”
Baldoni starred within the TV comedy “Jane the Virgin,” directed the 2019 movie “Five Feet Apart” and wrote “Man Enough,” a guide pushing again towards conventional notions of masculinity. He responded to considerations that “It Ends With Us” romanticized home violence, telling the AP on the time that critics had been “absolutely entitled to that opinion.”
He was dropped by his company, WME, instantly after Lively filed her criticism and the Times revealed its story.
Associated Press author Ryan Pearson contributed to this story.
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