On June 2, 2023, Blake Lively began a text exchange with her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni that blamed her assistant for not getting her an updated batch of script pages. “She didn’t realize they were new,” Lively wrote. “New pages can always be sent to me as well please.” The actress signed the missive with an “X” — the universal symbol for a kiss. Lively followed up with another text shortly thereafter. “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.” Baldoni responded: “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.” Eighteen months later, that interaction was depicted in a New York Times bombshell report in a far more sinister light. The Times wrote: “[Baldoni] repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”

That discrepancy is one of many highlighted in a scathing $250 million lawsuit filed Tuesday afternoon by Baldoni against the Times in Los Angeles Superior Court. Baldoni is among a group of 10 plaintiffs that also includes publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel who are suing the newspaper for libel and false light invasion of privacy over the Dec. 21 article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The parties, which also include “It Ends With Us” producers Jamey Heath and Steve Sarowitz, claim that the Times relied on “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”

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The 87-page complaint, which also accuses the Times of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract, offers a rebuttal of the narrative set forth in the 4,000-word article that has rocked Hollywood and led to WME dropping Baldoni as a client hours after publication. Written by Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the piece painted Lively as an actress who allegedly endured months of sexual harassment from Baldoni and Heath and supposedly faced retaliation in the form of a smear campaign because she voiced her concerns. But according to the lawsuit, it was Lively who embarked on a “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign of her own and used false “sexual harassment allegations to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production.” And according to the suit, Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, allegedly berated Baldoni in an aggressive manner during a heated meeting at their Tribeca penthouse in New York, “accusing him of ‘fat shaming’” his wife. The suit claims that the A-list actor also pressured Baldoni’s agency, WME, to drop the director during the “Deadpool and Wolverine” premiere in July, well before Baldoni enlisted crisis PR.