More than three months after Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation suit against Blake Lively, the New York Times, Ryan Reynolds and others was tossed out, the Gray Lady wants the It Ends With Us director to cough up some cash.
Around $150,000 in attorney’s fees, damages and more, actually.
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“The District Court’s opinion makes clear that Wayfarer and its affiliates both commenced and continued the lawsuit against The Times without a substantial basis in fact and law,” states a September 30 filing in New York state court from the NYT and its in-house counsel.
After an initial $250 million action against the Times, Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios wrapped the paper into its January countersuit against his IEWU co-star Lively, her Deadpool spouse Reynolds and her publicist Leslie Sloane over Lively’s sexual harassment and retaliation allegations first reported to California’s Civil Rights Department late last year ahead of a lawsuit filed on New Year’s Eve. The NYT dropped a deeply researched story on Lively’s CRD filing on December 21, just hours after it was handed over to the Golden State division.
After issuing a comprehensive 132-page order June 9 dismissing the Wayfarer countersuit that threw shade on journalistic ethics and more left, right and center, Judge Lewis Liman gave Baldoni, his execs, financiers and PR team the option to file a new amended complaint. However, after some huffing and puffing, they declined to submit a new-ish complaint.
The District Court “held that any statements in the article and video reporting on the alleged sexual misconduct experienced by Lively were not actionable because they were based on the CRD complaint and therefore were subject to New York’s fair report privilege and separately ‘were not plausibly made with actual malice,’” the Times’ filing Tuesday says. “As for Times’s statements about the smear campaign, the District Court found, to the extent they fell outside the privilege because they relied upon communications not included in the CRD Complaint, they were not plausibly made with actual malice.”
With depositions and discovery now occurring, and on-again, off-again cameos from the likes of Taylor Swift and more, Lively’s action against the formerly WME-repped Baldoni and the Wayfarer gang is set to go to trial beginning on March 9, 2026.
(L-R) Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni in It Ends With Us
In the meantime, the Times today made it clear this was about defending its journalists perhaps even more than its costs.
“The New York Times filed a suit against Justin Baldoni’s production company, Wayfarer Studios, to obtain reimbursement of The Times’s legal fees from their baseless libel suit, which has now been dismissed by a federal judge,” the company’s Communications SVP Danielle Rhoades Ha told Deadline. “New York law allows publishers to recover their fees when they are targeted by suits designed to silence them. That is precisely what happened here. Our journalists covered carefully and fairly a story of public importance, and Wayfarer and Baldoni should pay for having tried to misuse the courts and mislead the public.”
On the other side of the table, Baldoni and Wayfarer’s lead lawyer Bryan Freedman postulated that perhaps what constitutes justice in this particular matter needs to be reexamined.
“Win, lose, or draw, we refuse to cave to power brokers even in the face of seemingly impossible odds,” Freedman said today. “We continue to stand tall for a reason: the pursuit of truth, in the face of giants. Our unwillingness to compromise our values, no matter the odds or the outcome, reflects a simple conviction that standing up for the truth and what is right matters. If the current laws protect legacy media in this manner, perhaps it’s up to us to ignite that change.”
To paraphrase the Times, all the lawsuits that are fit to be filed.
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