Justin Baldoni has updated his lawsuit against Blake Lively to add new claims about New York Times metadata, while also accusing her husband, Ryan Reynolds, of “bullying” him with the character of Nicepool in “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Baldoni’s lawyers filed an amended, 224-page lawsuit on Friday night, and launched a website to host the complaint along with an accompanying 168-page timeline. Baldoni directed and co-starred with Lively in “It Ends with Us,” which has led to an epic legal and PR battle over the last six weeks.
Among the new allegations, Baldoni’s team alleges that metadata on the Times’ website shows that the paper had access to Lively’s civil rights complaint at least 11 days before its bombshell Dec. 21 report. The story, entitled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” accused Baldoni and his publicists of working to tarnish Lively’s reputation in apparent retaliation for her complaints about sexual harassment on set.
Baldoni has sued Reynolds, Lively and the Times for defamation, alleging that they smeared him by twisting text messages and taking them out of context. The amended complaint alleges that the Times first uploaded a version of Lively’s civil rights complaint against him on Dec. 10. The suit also claims that other metadata suggests the Times was working on the story even before then, perhaps as early as Oct. 31.
The Times disputed “inaccuracies” in the complaint, while Baldoni’s team held up the metadata as vindication.
“This fresh evidence corroborates what we knew all along, that due to purely egotistical reasons 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,” said Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s attorney, in a statement to Variety.
The suit also claims that a video accompanying the Times’ piece was created on Dec. 12 — nine days before the story ran. According to his suit, the Times first reached out to get comment from Baldoni’s side on the night of Dec. 20, giving a deadline of noon the next day, about 14 hours later. The story ultimately posted at 10:11 a.m. on Dec. 21 with a comment from Freedman.
The metadata issue was first raised by online sleuths. In response on Saturday, the New York Times said the information is false.
“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,” a Times’ spokesperson said in a statement. “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 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.”
In defending against the defamation suits, both the Times and the Lively/Reynolds parties can assert legal privileges that protect the parties’ right to litigate and newspapers’ right to cover litigation. If it can be shown that the Times and Lively’s team had early discussions outside the scope of those privileges, Freedman argued it would “strip away the legal shields” that protect them.
The amended lawsuit also includes new allegations about Reynolds’ portrayal of the character Nicepool in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Baldoni accuses Reynolds of using the character to mock and bully him.
“Reynolds portrayed Nicepool as a vicious caricature of a ‘woke’ feminist before concluding the character’s arc with his violent shooting death at the hands of ‘Ladypool,’ a character voiced by Blake Lively,” the suit states. The suit goes on to say that Nicepool was “intended to be a transparent and mocking portrayal of Reynolds’ warped perception of Baldoni.”
The suit alleges that the Nicepool scene was shot in January 2024, shortly after an “ambush” at Lively and Reynolds’ apartment, at which Reynolds allegedly berated Baldoni and demanded he apologize for things he asserts he did not do.
A representative for Lively or her legal council could not be reached for comment.
Both sides are due in court on Monday for their first hearing on their federal lawsuits. Lively’s side had anticipated that Freedman would publish a website containing further evidence in the case, and has asked the court to rein in his PR campaign, arguing it will prejudice the jury pool.
The website includes only documents that were filed publicly on Friday, and are also available on CourtListener, a site that allows public access to federal court records.
