Justin Baldoni just received a response from The New York Times after he sued them for defamation.
As the director and actor remains caught up in a fierce battle against Blake Lively in the infamous It Ends With Us lawsuit, he accused the outlet in his amended 400 million dollar defamation lawsuit of receiving early access to the Gossip Girl alum’s harassment complaint against him.
In the updated lawsuit, Baldoni’s team mentioned that an analysis of the article’s HTML source code revealed references to a “message-embed-generator” dated “2024-10-31,” despite the article not being published no before than December 2024.
In response, The New York Times stated, as per JustJared, “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.”
“Mr. Baldoni’s lawyers base their erroneous claim on postings by amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong,” they continued.
The spokesperson for The New York Times also clarified, “The problem: that date is generated by Google software and is unrelated to the date when The Times received it and posted it. A look at the metadata from the posted document correctly shows it was posted after Ms. Lively filed it with the California Civil Rights Department.”
This comes in response to Justin Baldoni and his legal team, mentioning in their countersuit against It Ends With Us co-star, Blake Lively, “Of course, it may be the case that the New York Times just happened to load a new tool for embedding text messages within an article as part of routine system upgrades, only to stumble six weeks later upon the perfect opportunity to show off this new graphic tool in an article that relied heavily upon cherry-picked and misleadingly reframed text messages.”
“But the simpler explanation is that the New York Times had already begun building its defamatory article no later than October 31, 2024, including developing a slick new graphic display module to prominently feature the misleadingly edited and context-stripped text messages centered in the article,” the suit further read.
