Hollywood Director Justin Baldoni has sued The New York Times for libel and demanded a whopping $250 million as fine. Notably, Justin Baldoni directed and acted in the film, ‘It Ends With Us’. He recently moved a lawsuit against The New York Times after the latter published an article in which they included the allegations from his movie co-star, Blake Lively.
Incidentally, on Tuesday (31st December 2024), The New York Times shared the details about the same. It also gave the content written in the lawsuit letter. As per the information, the lawsuit seeks at least $250 million as damages and it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
According to the lawsuit, the Times and Lively coordinated a smear campaign against Baldoni and his nine fellow plaintiffs. The letter adds that The Times relied on “cherry-picked” and altered communications and it “deliberately spliced” details like necessary context to “mislead”.
It is pertinent to note that The New York Times published the alleged defamatory story on 21st December. It was titled, “We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” It was written by reporters Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate. The article piece highlighted Blake Lively’s allegations of sexual misconduct by Baldoni. It also alleged that there was campaign to “tarnish” Lively’s reputation and image.
The article incorporated purported text messages, email exchanges that allegedly took place between Baldoni’s publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan. However, according to Baldoni’s lawsuit, the exchanges in The Times’s story were stripped of “critical context.”
Baldoni’s lawsuit against The New York Times states, “The Article’s central thesis, encapsulated in a defamatory headline designed to immediately mislead the reader, is that Plaintiffs orchestrated a retaliatory public relations campaign against Lively for speaking out about sexual harassment — a premise that is categorically false and easily disproven.”
The lawsuit further states, “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.”
Apart from the Hollywood Director Baldani, nine other plaintiffs include ‘It Ends With Us’s lead producer Jamey Heath, its production company Wayfarer Studios, and crisis communications expert Melissa Nathan. Strikingly, it was Nathan whose text message was quoted in the headline of the Dec. 21 Times story: “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.”
So far, the publication has stood by its reporting adding that it plans to “vigorously defend” against the lawsuit.
The spokesperson of The New York Times, Danielle Rhoades said, “our story was meticulously and responsibly reported.”
In an official statement, the spokesperson said, “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.”
