Justin Baldoni has sued The New York Times after it reported that he and his public relations team were behind a smear campaign against his It Ends With Us co-star Blake Likely.
The NY Times published the article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine” on Saturday, Dec. 21 – shortly after Lively filed an 80-page complaint with the California Civil Rights Department against Baldoni, including allegations that Baldoni sexually harassed her and developed a retaliatory public smear campaign against her. Lively alleges that Baldoni, alongside his publicist Jennifer Abel and crisis firm TAG PR’s Melissa Nathan, was attempting to manipulate social media and work alongside the press to “destroy” her reputation.
As obtained by PEOPLE, the 87-page complaint – filed on Tuesday, Dec 31 – lists Baldoni and a group of nine other plaintiffs (including his production company Wayfarer Studios, and It Ends With Us producers Jamey Heath, Steve Sarowitz, along with Jed Wallace, and publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel), who are suing the Times for $250 million. Baldoni and his associates allege libel, false light invasion of privacy, promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract, and accuse the Times of using “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead” in the article.
Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, said in a statement: “In this vicious smear campaign fully orchestrated by Blake Lively and her team, the New York 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. In doing so, they pre-determined the outcome of their story, and aided and abetted their own devastating PR smear campaign designed to revitalize Lively’s self-induced floundering public image and counter the organic groundswell of criticism amongst the online public.”
In response to the lawsuit, the New York Times defended its article as “meticulously and responsibly reported,” with a spokesperson saying that the publication plans to “vigorously” defend against Baldoni’s lawsuit: “the role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead. 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. We published their full statement in response to the allegations in the article as well.”
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