Justin Baldoni amends Blake Lively lawsuit, claims she plotted with New York Times

Buckle up — Justin Baldoni has amended his defamation suit against Blake Lively up of their archetypal hearing, claiming metadata proves she was plotting with The New York Times connected what his lawyer calls a “well-calculated deed piece.”

The “It Ends With Us” director, who co-starred with Lively successful the home unit drama, says she and The Times were successful connection since astatine slightest Oct. 31, according to the amended filing obtained by TMZ. That was astir 2 months earlier Lively filed a ailment accusing Baldoni of on-set intersexual harassment and a retaliatory smear campaign.

Excerpts from Lively’s ailment rapidly took the net by tempest erstwhile they became the centerpiece of a Dec. 22 nonfiction successful The Times, for which Baldoni has filed a $250 cardinal lawsuit.

Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively are seen connected the acceptable of ‘It Ends with Us’ connected January 12, 2024 successful Jersey City, New Jersey. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

“Careful observers reported that viewing the HTML root codification for the nonfiction revealed references to a ‘message-embed-generator’ that referred to a day of ‘2024-10-31,” reads the amendment lawsuit, which includes screengrabs of the published nonfiction arsenic good arsenic the metadata.

The filing quips that possibly it was conscionable coincidental yet cleanable timing that the outlet started utilizing this caller instrumentality “only to stumble six weeks aboriginal upon the cleanable accidental to amusement off,” utilizing “cherry-picked and misleadingly reframed substance messages” from Lively’s complaint.

But “the simpler mentation is that the New York Times had already begun gathering its defamatory nonfiction nary aboriginal than October 31, 2024, including processing a slick caller graphic show module to prominently diagnostic the misleadingly edited and context-stripped substance messages centered successful the article,” the suit claims.

Baldoni sued the Times connected Dec. 31, the aforesaid time Lively officially sued him. Roughly 2 weeks later, Baldoni filed a $400 cardinal suit against the “Gossip Girl” alum, her hubby Ryan Reynolds and publicist Leslie Sloane, alleging offenses including defamation and civilian extortion.

The trio has signaled to a justice that they mean to prosecute a motion to disregard Baldoni’s suit. Lively and Reynolds are besides pursuing a gag order against Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman.

A proceedings for the dueling lawsuits has been scheduled for March 2026, with a archetypal proceeding slated for this Monday.