It Ends With Us actor Justin Baldoni’s lawyers said there would be a big response coming and they followed through days later. The last day of the 2024 movie release year was full of headlines remarking on the $250 million suit that Baldoni and his legal team filed against the New York Times after that outlet published “We Can Bury Anyone: Inside A Hollywood Smear Machine.” The bombshell article included allegations that painted Baldoni and other individuals in a bad light before his co-star Blake Lively filed her own complaint (and subsequent lawsuit). This included text messages between the director and his PR team reportedly planning how to spin some allegations the actress was hinting at in the press. Now, in back-to-back moves, both he and Lively have officially filed, and both suits contain information that leads to different conclusions.
To note, the filings are different. They are directed at different people and outlets. Baldoni is suing the New York Times for libel, writing in his suit the newspaper outlet allegedly “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context.” What does this mean? More on that in a minute.
Blake Lively is suing the production company behind It Ends With Us, along with Justin Baldoni specifically and several other names. This includes Jennifer Abel, the publicist who spoke out about the alleged “smear campaign” she says her team discussed but did not execute. (Jennifer Abel has subsequently filed her own suit.)
Lively's lawsuit was also filed on Tuesday claiming “severe emotional distress” after she had previously filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department.
The Discrepancies Between The Report And Justin Baldoni’s It Ends With Us Adjacent Suit
The Baldoni lawsuit can be seen online filed in full (via Yahoo), but one incident is very striking in terms of how it played out in the New York Times article and what Baldoni’s team says happened while on the set of the popular movie based on the Colleen Hoover book.
When the New York Times dropped its article, that outlet wrote about a specific incident that reportedly occurred when It Ends with Us was still filming. Per the New York Times article Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath had walked in on her trailer unannounced repeatedly, including incidents such as the following:
She said that both men repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.
Both Baldoni and the Lively-adjacent complaints indicate he headed to her dressing room while she was breastfeeding, but the It Ends with Us director’s suit mentions the context matters.
In his legal team's assertion, the New York Times had been “quietly working” with Blake Lively’s team on the matter before the article dropped, so she could then reportedly drop her own Civil complaint and lawsuit. That report has “blatant falsehoods” and “egregious misrepresentations,” per Baldoni's legal team, with this story about breastfeeding and running lines in Lively’s trailer thing being one example.
In his view, there were “creative differences” between the two of them, and one of these moments culminated in her asking for “new pages” as they should “always be sent to [her] as well, please.” He complied and she wrote in a text message:
I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.
The screenshotted text exchange shared in the lawsuit shows that he wrote back to the star of the movie and planned to comply with her request:
Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.
Other incidents in which the newspaper alleged Lively had been subjected to a producer's "wife naked" and more were also reportedly taken out of context, as the producer's wife had agreed her birthing video could be shown on set to help with a birth scene. Moments like these have re-sparked conversation about intimacy coordinators on sets.
The suit Lively filed alleges a “smear campaign" was undergone by Baldoni and others adjacent to the movie, but the new suit against the Times asserts the backlash was “organic” and stemmed from Lively’s floral fashion campaign and other marketing moments she chose to promote for a movie he felt was about “domestic violence.” We’ll have to wait and see if any or all of this gets settled out of court.
