After a summer full of rumors and speculation surrounding It Ends With Us, a bombshell complaint from Blake Lively was published in The New York Times, as she accused Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and others of sexual harassment, retaliation and more. After that, the director of the 2024 film sued the NYT over the article that featured the complaint and he filed a $400 million lawsuit against Lively, Ryan Reynolds and more. Now, his team has updated their argument, claiming that the actress and the newspaper had plotted for months before publishing the article that sent the drama surrounding this film into a new stratosphere.
On December 20, a complaint was filed by Lively with the California Civil Rights Department. On December 21, The New York Times published its article, “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The story – which was published months after the initial allegations about the drama between the Ite Ends With Us co-stars started – is extremely long and breaks down the complaint in detail. It also includes graphics of the texts shown in the legal document.
According to The Daily Mail, however, the metadata on the story could show that the reporters had been working on it for much longer than a day – with one example showing that the “topper image” of the two actors involved in this issue was embedded on December 16, 2024. Now, per the outlet, Baldoni’s team has amended their $400 million suit to say that The New York Times had allegedly been working with Lively as far back as October.
The filing alleges that a “message-embed-generator” was found in the story’s source code with October 31, 2024, as the date next to it. The update makes two allegations to explain why that date is months before Lively’s filing happened. One states:
Of course, it may be the case that the New York Times just happened to load a new tool for embedding text messages within an article as part of routine system upgrades, only to stumble six weeks later upon the perfect opportunity to show off this new graphic tool in an article that relied heavily upon cherry-picked and misleadingly reframed text messages.
Meanwhile, the other claims that the Gossip Girl star and the publication had been working on this story for much longer than was expected, as it alleged:
But the simpler explanation is that the New York Times had already begun building its defamatory Article no later than October 31, 2024, including developing a slick new graphic display module to prominently feature the misleadingly edited and context-stripped text messages centered in the Article.
Along with this, Baldoni’s team is claiming that a promo used by NYT for this story was created well before the filing, because the URL features the date December 12.
Now, the filing does note that it’s not unusual for publications to spend months working on investigative pieces. However, they are arguing that this story should not warrant the same legal protections journalists normally have when they quote published legal documents. Explaining that point further, the filing claims:
It may seem unsurprising and even respectable that a news organization should work for weeks or months before publishing a purported investigative report. But the significance of the timing of these elements of the defamatory Article is that they strip away the legal shields that Lively, the Times, and the other Lively Parties were likely relying on to protect their malicious acts of defamation, such as the litigation privilege and the fair reporting privilege.
This update is the latest in a slew of claims made from both Baldoni and Lively’s camps as this legal battle continues to get more complex. Just last week, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ lawyers argued that Baldoni’s lawyer should get a gag order. Then, one day ago (per Variety), news broke that the couple was trying to dismiss the director’s lawsuit. On top of all that, the release of unedited footage, the information about the metadata in the NYT story, and more have caused speculation and chatter about this ongoing legal battle to increase.
According to a lawyer, it’s possible that these legal issues between Baldoni and Lively will get “nastier,” and at the moment, the trial date for this whole situation is set for March 9, 2026. So, odds are, more updates and claims will be coming down the pipe as we continue to learn more about why the two stars of It Ends With Us are suing each other.