Going into full anti-MSM mode, Justin Baldoni is determined the New York Times will not get itself dismissed from the It Ends With Us star and director’s sprawling $400 million and counting legal brawl with Blake Lively.
“This dispute should be resolved by a jury at trial,” a very wide-ranging March 14 memorandum of law in opposition from Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, CEO Jamey Health, financier Steve Saraowitz and publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan retorts of the Gray Lady’s February 28th instigated attempt to be dropped from the matter long before the March 29, 2026 starting trial kicks off.
“A pietistic bastion of the media establishment, the NYT has long presumed itself beyond accountability,” sounding very MAGA the 36-page memo filed in federal court in NYC also states. “Not here. The NYT went past merely reporting on Plaintiff Blake Lively’s (“Lively”) California Civil Rights Department Complaint (“CRD Complaint”) and actively vouched for the veracity of its false narrative.”
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“The fair report privilege the NYT seeks to hide behind does not protect it from liability for maliciously colluding with Lively and her cohort to publish a false and defamatory hit piece about the Wayfarer Parties, wrongly casting them as villains and making them scapegoats for Lively’s well-publicized media missteps.”
Poll vaulting off the December 21 posted NYT expose ‘We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine’ about Lively’s December 20 complaint filed with the California Civil Rights department alleging sexual harassment and retaliation with “astroturfing” and online “social manipulation,” Baldoni and his inner circle originally sued the paper with their own claims of libel, fraud and more on New Year’s Eve for $250 million in state court in California. Among other things, coming on the same day Lively officially sued Baldoni in federal court, the NYE suit alleged the paper was in cahoots with Lively to set Baldoni up with her CRD complaint. The filing added that the NYT journalists, one of whom was among the trio that in 2027 revealed the sordid depths of Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assaults, gave him and his team only a couple of hours to respond to their story before it was published online.
The NYT waved those claims off at the time and just over a month later Baldoni waved off the suit too, kind of. The Bryan Freedman-led Baldoni attorneys shut the California case down in early February. Just beforehand, Baldoni’s side on January 31 folded the NYT into their suit against Lively, Ryan Reynold and their PR chief Leslie Sloane for defamation and extortion with an impermissible group pleading amended complaint.
It is that lumping together of all the defendants and not specifying how they are going after for what by Baldoni and team that could provide an out for the NYT along with the First Amendment of the Constitution. On February 18, Lively filed her own much more damning amended complaint against Team Baldoni – – adding self-described “hired gun” Jed Wallace, who allegedly worked with Nathan and Abel against Lively. Amidst all that, Vision PR founder Sloane is spotlighting the so-called deficiencies in the other side’s filings to try to get out of the case herself.
Somewhat overlooked in the accusations of Lively leaking the CRD complaint to the Times and crafting the story with them is that TMZ actually had the story first. Getting their hands on the documents within hours of them being filed, TMZ’s self-announced exclusive of ‘Blake Lively Sues Justin Baldoni For Sexual Harassment …Claims Of Wild Behavior On Set’ went up at 4:54 a.m. PT on December 21. While Baldoni’s side say the the Times had its hands on Lively’s CRD complaint long before it was filed with the Golden State government, the paper’s ‘We Can Bury Anyone’ (a quote from correspondence between Baldoni’s Crisis PR team) was published on the paper’s site at 10:11 a.m ET/7:11 a.m PT.
To that, timestamps may proved a sticky wicket for a part of Baldoni’s argument against the Times.
Certainly the paper snared a win on March 4 when Judge Lewis J. Liman hit pause on any further discovery by Team Baldoni. The stay on a deep dive into the files of America’s unofficial national publication will be in place as the paper’s dismissal motion works its way through the courts. Still, in a case that seems to grow every week, no actual date for a hearing on the Times’ dismissal desire had been set yet by the court.
For the A. G. Sulzberger run NYT, the attacks on the paper’s December 21 text message illustrated reporting on what went down between Baldoni and Lively on IEWU and afterwards in a distraction, on all levels. “The flaws in the Baldoni/Wayfarer case were made clear last week in their own legal filing when they asked the court for yet another opportunity to amend their complaint to try to make it legally sufficient,’ Times Communications SVP Danielle Rhoades Ha told Deadline today. “We are looking forward to addressing the various problems in their latest brief when we file our reply later this week.”
Speaking of this week, Lively continued her reemergence into the red carpet and into the public eye that started with her and Deadpool hubby Reynolds at the February 16 SNL50: The Anniversary Special and the Another Simple Favor debut at SXSW on March 7. On March 16, the Gossip Girl alum took to Instagram to detail the cookies she and Reynolds were cooking up for their quartet of children. Among the pics was a selfie of the A-lister couple that looked like they didn’t have a care in the world – which was exactly the point.
The post Justin Baldoni Insists “Pietistic” New York Times Stay In Blake Lively Clash; Gray Lady Wants Dismissal appeared first on Deadline.
