Justin Baldoni has launched a $250 million lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging defamation over an article involving Blake Lively.
As per PEOPLE, the actor and director filed 87-page complaint filed on Tuesday, December 31. Along with a group of nine other plaintiffs.
In the complaint, the accused the outlet for libel, false light invasion of privacy, promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract.
"The Article's central thesis, encapsulated in a defamatory headline designed to immediately mislead the reader, is that Plaintiffs orchestrated a retaliatory public relations campaign against Lively for speaking out about sexual harassment—a premise that is categorically false and easily disproven," read the complaint.
According to the report, the respondent claimed that the outlet “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead" in the article
The complainant including Baldoni and It Ends With Us producers Jamey Heath, Steve Sarowitz, along with Jed Wallace, and publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, accuse the Times.
It came after Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, the Times published an article "‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine" on Saturday, December 21.
However the news organization responded by defending its article as "meticulously and responsibly reported."
