Justin Baldoni has amended his counterclaim suit against Blake Lively, which names Ryan Reynolds, The New York Times, and others as defendants, and claims Lively and her PR team colluded with the Times for months to smear him. Baldoni directed and co-starred with Lively in It Ends With Us.
Baldoni’s lawyers filed the 224-page amended counterclaim on Friday, and a website, which launched on Saturday, hosts the complaint as well as a timeline.
Among the new allegations, it claims that Lively’s complaint against Baldoni was filed only after Lively and her team “spent months feeding falsehoods to the New York Times.” It alleges that the paper had access to Lively’s civil rights lawsuit at least 11 days prior to The Times report entitled “We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” published on Dec. 21. The report accused Baldoni and his publicists of trying to hurt Lively’s reputation in an apparent retaliation for Lively making sexual harassment complaints on the film’s set. Lively filed a federal court lawsuit against Baldoni on Dec. 31.
Baldoni has sued Lively and The Times for defamation, alleging that they “’cherry picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.” The amended suit claims that The Times may have been working on the story as early as Oct. 31. In addition, the suit claims that a companion video to The Times story was created on Dec. 12, nine days prior to the story’s publication. The suit alleges that the newspaper first reached out for comment from Baldoni’s team on the evening of Dec. 20, with a deadline of noon the next day. The story was posted at 10:11 a.m. on Dec. 21 and included a comment from Freedman.
A spokesperson for The New York Times did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. “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,” a Times’ spokesperson said in a statement to Variety. “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.”
Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
The amended lawsuit also raises new allegations about Lively’s husband Reynolds and his portrayal of Nicepool in Deadpool & Wolverine, accusing the actor of “mocking and bullying” him via the character.
“Reynolds portrayed Nicepool as a vicious caricature of a ‘woke’ feminist before concluding the character’s arc with his violent shooting death at the hands of ‘Ladypool,’ a character voiced by Blake Lively,” the suit alleges, adding that Nicepool was “intended to be a transparent and mocking portrayal of Reynolds’ warped perception of Baldoni.”
Reps for Lively and Reynolds did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment.
The amended complaint, which seeks at least $400,000,000 in compensatory damages, comes two days before the first hearing on the federal lawsuits. The trial over Blake Lively’s lawsuit against Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios, has been scheduled to commence on March 9.
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