Justin Baldoni’s team has launched a new website amid his ongoing legal battle with “It Ends With Us” co-star Blake Lively.
The website, thelawsuitinfo.com, which was published Saturday, features a landing page with links to two PDF files, including a copy of a newly amended complaint that the 41-year-old actor filed against the 37-year-old actress and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, as well as another document containing a 168-page “timeline of relevant events” showcasing new emails and texts related to the case.
Both documents were filed on Friday in New York federal court ahead of the case’s first hearing, which is scheduled for Monday.
Lively has alleged that she was sexually harassed on the set of “It Ends With Us” and filed a lawsuit against Baldoni, his Wayfarer studio, and former PR representatives in December. On the same day Lively filed her suit, Baldoni initiated a 0 million lawsuit against The New York Times for a December article discussing Lively’s lawsuit and the alleged smear campaign he attempted against her.
Weeks later, Baldoni named Lively and Reynolds in a separate 0 million defamation lawsuit, accusing the Hollywood power couple of attempting to hijack “It Ends With Us” and create their own narrative.
Baldoni’s amended complaint alleges that Lively had been collaborating with The New York Times weeks before the article was published in December.
The documents indicate that metadata embedded in The New York Times article suggested the outlet “had already begun building its defamatory article no later than October 31, 2024.” The lawsuit claims that “careful observers reported that viewing the HTML source code for the article revealed references to a ‘message-embed-generator’ that referred to a date of ‘2024-10-31.’”
According to the documents, The New York Times created a tool to display Lively’s texts in the article on October 31, which Baldoni’s legal team suggests is evidence that the story was first generated on or before that date.
“It may seem unsurprising and even respectable that a news organization should work for weeks or months before publishing a purported investigative report,” the documents state. “But the significance of the timing of these elements of the defamatory article is that they strip away the legal shields that Lively, the Times, and the other Lively parties were likely relying on to protect their malicious acts of defamation, such as the litigation privilege and the fair reporting privilege.”
In a statement, Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, addressed the amended complaint. “The decision to amend our lawsuit was a logical next step due to the overwhelming amount of new proof that has come to light,” Freedman stated. “This fresh evidence corroborates what we knew all along, that due to a blind pursuit of power, Ms. Lively and her entire team colluded for months to destroy reputations through a complex web of lies, false accusations, and the manipulation of illicitly received communications.”
In response, a representative for The New York Times Company, Danielle Rhoades Ha, pushed back against the claims made in the amended lawsuit. “The Baldoni/Wayfarer legal filings are rife with inaccuracies about The New York Times, including, for example, the bogus claim that The Times had early access to Ms. Lively’s state civil rights complaint,” she said. “Mr. Baldoni’s lawyers base their erroneous claim on postings by amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong. The sleuths have noted that a version of the Lively state complaint published by The Times carries the date ‘December 10’ even though the complaint wasn’t filed until more than a week later. The problem: that date is generated by Google software and is unrelated to the date when The Times received it and posted it.”
Representatives for Lively did not immediately respond to requests for comment.