Los Angeles, Feb 2 (IANS) The legal fight between Hollywood actor-director Justin Baldoni and actress Blake Lively is intensifying and getting uglier with the passage of time. Justin has now updated his lawsuit against Blake and has added new claims about New York Times metadata.
He has also accused her husband, Ryan Reynolds, of “bullying” him with the character of Nicepool in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’, reports ‘Variety’.
Baldoni’s lawyers filed an amended, 224-page lawsuit on Friday night (Pacific Standard Time), and launched a website to host the complaint along with an accompanying 168-page timeline.
As per ‘Variety’, Baldoni directed and co-starred with Blake 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 Blake Lively’s civil rights complaint at least 11 days before its bombshell December 21 report. The story, entitled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” accused Baldoni and his publicists of working to tarnish Blake 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 October 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 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 December 12, nine days before the story ran. According to his suit, the Times first reached out to get comments from Baldoni’s side on the night of December 20, giving a deadline of noon the next day, about 14 hours later. The story ultimately posted at 10:11 a.m. on December 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.
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.
–IANS
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