Blake Lively sues 'It Ends With Us' director Justin Baldoni alleging harassment and smear campaign
Actor Blake Lively sued "It Ends With Us” director Justin Baldoni and several others on Tuesday, alleging harassment and a coordinated campaign to attack her reputation.
The federal lawsuit was filed in New York just hours after Baldoni and many of the other defendants in Lively's suit sued The New York Times for libel for its story on her allegations.
Baldoni's lawsuit alleges the newspaper and the star were the ones conducting a coordinated smear campaign.
The two lawsuits are a development in a story emerging from the surprise hit film that has already made major waves in Hollywood and led to discussions of the treatment of female actors both on sets and in media.
Lively's suit said that Baldoni, the film's production company Wayfarer Studios and others engaged in “a carefully crafted, coordinated, and resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her, and others, from speaking out.”
She accuses Baldoni and the studio of embarking on a “multi-tiered plan” to damage her reputation following a meeting in which she and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, addressed “repeated sexual harassment and other disturbing behaviour” by Baldoni and a producer Jamey Heath, who is also named in both lawsuits.
The plan, the suit said, included a proposal to plant theories on online message boards, engineer a social media campaign and place news stories critical of Lively.
The alleged mistreatment included comments from Baldoni on the bodies of Lively and other women on the set.
The lawsuit said Baldoni and Heath “discussed their personal sexual experiences and previous porn addiction, and tried to pressure Ms Lively to reveal details about her intimate life.”
Baldoni's lawyer Bryan Freedman has not responded to a request for comment on Lively's lawsuit, but previously called the same allegations “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious.”
Lively's lawsuit comes the same day as the libel lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Baldoni and others against the Times seeking at least $250 million.
The Times stood by its reporting and said it plans to “vigorously defend” against the lawsuit.
Others who are defendants in Lively's suit and plaintiffs in the libel suit include Wayfarer and crisis communications expert Melissa Nathan, whose text message was quoted in the headline of the Times story: “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.”
The Times story was published just after Lively filed a legal complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, a predecessor to her new lawsuit.
The libel lawsuit says the newspaper “relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives. But the Times did not care.”
A spokesperson for the Times, Danielle Rhoades, said in a statement that “our story was meticulously and responsibly reported."
“It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article. To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni, the other subjects of the article and their representatives have not pointed to a single error," the statement said.
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But Baldoni's lawsuit says that “If the Times truly reviewed the thousands of private communications it claimed to have obtained, its reporters would have seen incontrovertible evidence that it was Lively, not Plaintiffs, who engaged in a calculated smear campaign.”
Lively is not a defendant in the libel lawsuit.
Her lawyers said in a statement that “nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms Lively’s California Civil Rights Department Complaint, nor her federal complaint, filed earlier today."
The romantic drama “It Ends With Us,” an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 novel, was released in August, exceeding box office expectations with a $50 million (£39 million) debut.
However, the film's release was shrouded by speculation over hostility between Lively and Baldoni.
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