Buckle up — Justin Baldoni has amended his defamation lawsuit against Blake Lively ahead of their first hearing, claiming metadata proves she was plotting with The New York Times on what his lawyer calls a “well-calculated hit piece.”
The “It Ends With Us” director, who co-starred with Lively in the domestic violence drama, says she and The Times were in communication since at least Oct. 31, according to the amended filing obtained by TMZ. That was nearly two months before Lively filed a complaint accusing Baldoni of on-set sexual harassment and a retaliatory smear campaign.
Excerpts from Lively’s complaint quickly took the internet by storm when they became the centerpiece of a Dec. 22 article in The Times, for which Baldoni has filed a $250 million lawsuit.
“Careful observers reported that viewing the HTML source code for the article revealed references to a ‘message-embed-generator’ that referred to a date of ‘2024-10-31,” reads the amendment lawsuit, which includes screengrabs of the published article as well as the metadata.
The filing quips that perhaps it was just coincidental yet perfect timing that the outlet started using this new tool “only to stumble six weeks later upon the perfect opportunity to show off,” using “cherry-picked and misleadingly reframed text messages” from Lively’s complaint.
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,” the suit claims.
Baldoni sued the Times on Dec. 31, the same day Lively officially sued him. Roughly two weeks later, Baldoni filed a $400 million lawsuit against the “Gossip Girl” alum, her husband Ryan Reynolds and publicist Leslie Sloane, alleging offenses including defamation and civil extortion.
The trio has signaled to a judge that they intend to pursue a motion to dismiss Baldoni’s suit. Lively and Reynolds are also pursuing a gag order against Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman.
A trial for the dueling lawsuits has been scheduled for March 2026, with a first hearing slated for this Monday.