Blake Lively responded to claims within Justin Baldoni’s $250 million libel lawsuit against the New York Times on Thursday, saying the Tuesday motion “changes nothing” about her sexual harassment claims against the “It Ends With Us” director and star.
On New Year’s Eve, Baldoni was one of 10 plaintiffs that filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, alleging that the publication was libelous in its Dec. 21 report, “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The report was a write-up of Lively’s own sexual harassment complaint against the actor, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that Baldoni and executives at his Wayfarer Studios created an unsafe work environment.
Baldoni’s Dec. 31 suit sued the paper for $250 million for libel and invasion of privacy. Publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan – co-plaintiffs in the case – accused the paper of relying on “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead” in its bombshell report.
“Nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms. Lively’s California Civil Rights Department Complaint, nor her federal complaint, filed earlier today. [Baldoni’s] lawsuit is based on the obviously false premise that Ms. Lively’s administrative complaint against Wayfarer and others was a ruse,” Lively’s attorneys said in a statement to TheWrap.
“While we will not litigate this matter in the press, we do encourage people to read Ms. Lively’s complaint in its entirety,” the statement continued. “We look forward to addressing each and every one of Wayfarer’s allegations in court.”
Also on Tuesday, Lively sued Justin Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios for sexual harassment and breach of contract, citing the “unconscionable” alleged smear campaign against her following a Jan. 4 meeting where the actor and co-plaintiffs agreed to cease “harassing behavior and other disturbing conduct.”
Additionally Lively accuses Baldoni’s publicists of orchestrating a smear campaign against the actress in order to cover up for their own misconduct. In the New York Times report and her complaint, several text messages revealed that the publicists behind the Wayfarer Studios team tried to “bury” Lively.
In their suit against the New York Times, Baldoni and his team claims that text messages revealing that crises PR efforts for the Wayfarer Studios tried to “bury” Lively provided for Lively’s initial sexual harassment complaint and included in the Times’ reporting were “cherry-picked” to prove malicious intent.
“The Times story relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives,” the suit, which also accuses the paper of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract, stated.
According to the Times, however, Baldoni and his camp have yet to provide “a single error” in its reporting, despite the suit’s claims. A New York Times spokesperson told TheWrap that “the role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead.”
Since Lively’s complaint, Baldoni has been dropped by his agency WME, and Lively has received a slew of supporters, including author Colleen Hoover, Gwyneth Paltrow and SAG-AFTRA.
