Justin Baldoni files $250M lawsuit against New York Times over Blake Lively claims

                                                      

There is never-ending legal drama surrounding "It Ends With Us": After his co-star Blake Lively's smear campaign charges were reported by The New York Times, the movie's director, Justin Baldoni, filed a libel lawsuit against the publication.

Baldoni is suing The New York Times for $250 million in an 87-page complaint obtained by USA TODAY and filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday. 

Baldoni and nine other plaintiffs — including publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel and producers Steve Sarowitz and Jamey Heath of "It Ends With Us" — allege libel, false light invasion, and privacy, promissory fraud, and breach of implied-in-fact contract.

The complaint was filed on New Year's Eve in reaction to a story titled "'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine" that appeared in The New York Times on December 21. The story described Lively's allegations that Baldoni organized a public relations campaign against her, which were also documented in a lawsuit that was submitted to the California Civil Rights Department on the same day.

Lively accused Baldoni of sexually harassing her in a 62-page lawsuit, saying he called her trainer four months after the birth of her fourth child, inappropriately discussed his genitalia, and made disparaging remarks about her weight.

Additionally, Lively formally sued Baldoni on Tuesday. The lawsuit, which USA TODAY was able to get and was filed in a federal court in New York, is similar to Lively's previous allegations that Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios CEO, Jamey Heath, had inappropriate sexual behaviour both within and outside of the office.

"In this vile slander campaign, which Blake Lively and her crew masterminded, the New York Times catered to the wishes and caprices of two influential 'untouchable' Hollywood elites, ignoring  journalistic practices and ethics once befitting the revered publication by using doctored and manipulated texts and purposefully omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative," attorney Bryan Freedman, who filed the lawsuit on Baldoni's behalf, told moviemood90is.

By doing this, they set the stage for their story's conclusion. They supported their own destructive public relations smear campaign.

Following her criticism of Baldoni's purported actions on the set, Lively filed a lawsuit on December 21 alleging that Baldoni orchestrated a public relations campaign using a crisis consultancy, which her attorneys referred to as "'social manipulation' intended to 'destroy' Ms Lively's reputation." The complaint included copies of Baldoni's text messages that provided an inside peek at the off-screen controversy.