Justin Baldoni launches new website with amended lawsuit, 'timeline of relevant events' in Blake Lively feud
2025-02-02
Category: entertainment

Justin Baldoni's team has launched a new website amid his ongoing legal battle with "It Ends With Us" co-star Blake Lively. The website, thelawsuitinfo.com, which was published Saturday, featured a landing page with links to two PDF files, including a copy of a newly amended complaint that the 41-year-old actor filed against the 37-year-old actress and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and another document with a 168-page "timeline of relevant events" that showcased new emails and texts related to the case.&nbsp; Both documents were filed Friday in New York federal court ahead of the case's first hearing, which is scheduled for Monday.  Lively has claimed she was sexually harassed on the set of "It Ends With Us" and filed a lawsuit against Baldoni, his Wayfarer studio and former PR representatives in December. The same day Lively filed her suit, Baldoni filed a $250 million suit against The New York Times for a December article about Lively's lawsuit and the alleged smear campaign Baldoni attempted to run against his co-star. Weeks later, Baldoni then named Lively and Reynolds in a separate $400 million defamation lawsuit in which he accused the Hollywood power couple of attempting to hijack "It Ends With Us" and create their own narrative.&nbsp; Baldoni's amended complaint alleged Lively had been working with The New York Times weeks before the article was published in December.&nbsp;  The documents stated that metadata embedded within The New York Times article indicated the outlet "had already begun building its defamatory Article no later than October 31, 2024."&nbsp; The lawsuit claimed that "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.’"&nbsp; LIKE WHAT YOU’RE READING? CLICK HERE FOR MORE ENTERTAINMENT NEWS According to the documents, The New York Times created a tool to display Lively's texts in the article Oct. 31, which Baldoni's legal team suggested was evidence the story was first generated on or before that date. "It may seem unsurprising and even respectable that a news organization should work for weeks or months before publishing a purported investigative report," the documents say.&nbsp; "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."  In a statement to Fox News Digital, Baldoni's lawyer, Bryan Freedman, addressed the amended complaint.&nbsp; "The decision to amend our lawsuit was a logical next step due to the overwhelming amount of new proof that has come to light," Freedman said. "This fresh evidence corroborates what we knew all along, that due to a blind pursuit of power, Ms. Lively and her entire team colluded for months to destroy reputations through a complex web of lies, false accusations and the manipulation of illicitly received communications. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT NEWSLETTER "The ongoing public interest in this case online has ironically shed light on the undeniable facts pertaining to The New York Times and how heavily Ms. Lively and her representatives were not only deeply involved in the attempted takedown and smear campaign of Mr. Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and their teams but that they themselves initiated it."  In a statement to Fox News Digital, The New York Times Company's representative, Danielle Rhoades Ha, pushed back against claims made in the amended lawsuit. "The Baldoni/Wayfarer legal filings are rife with inaccuracies about The New York Times, including, for example, the bogus claim that The Times had early access to Ms. Lively's state civil rights complaint," she said. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP "Mr. Baldoni's lawyers base their erroneous claim on postings by amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong. The sleuths have noted that a version of the Lively state complaint published by The Times carries the date 'December 10' even though the&nbsp;complaint wasn't filed until more than a week later. The problem: that date is generated by Google software and is unrelated to the date when The Times received it and posted it." Representatives for Lively did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Fox News Digital's Tracy Wright contributed to this report.