The New York Times just handed Justin Baldoni a reality check with express shipping and no return policy.
Over the weekend (because, of course, drama can’t take a day off), Baldoni—actor, director, and apparently amateur internet detective—updated his lawsuit against Blake Lively. He now claims that she and The New York Times were basically in a secret book club, working together for months before the article accusing him of sexual harassment was even published.
His team’s “big evidence”? Some HTML source code (because nothing screams “courtroom drama” like squinting at a webpage’s backend). According to Baldoni’s legal squad, buried in the digital depths was a reference to a “message-embed-generator” with the date October 31, 2024—as if The New York Times got the complaint early, maybe from a time machine? Meanwhile, the article actually dropped in December 2024.
Once this wild claim hit the internet, The New York Times fired back with the energy of a teacher correcting a student who insists 2+2 is 5.
The Times to Baldoni: “You Played Yourself”
“The Baldoni/Wayfarer legal filings are bursting at the seams with inaccuracies,” a NYT spokesperson said, probably while rolling their eyes so hard they saw the back of their own head. “For example, the totally bogus claim that The Times had early access to Ms. Lively’s state civil rights complaint.”
And just when you thought it couldn’t get more embarrassing, The Times revealed that Baldoni’s crack team got their conspiracy from… internet sleuths. You know, the same group of people who once mistook a blurry squirrel for the Loch Ness Monster.
“These internet detectives pointed out that The Times’ version of the complaint had a timestamp of December 10, even though it wasn’t officially filed until over a week later,” the spokesperson continued. “But—plot twist—that date was generated by Google software and has absolutely nothing to do with when The Times received or published the document.”
Translation: Justin, put down the magnifying glass.
To hammer the point home, The Times pulled receipts from the actual metadata (a.k.a. the digital birth certificate of the document), which confirmed that the article only went live after Lively officially filed her complaint with the California Civil Rights Department.
At this point, it looks like Baldoni’s legal argument is held together with hopes, dreams, and a few YouTube conspiracy videos. Will he drop this lawsuit, or will he keep doubling down? Stay tuned for the next episode of This Lawsuit Makes No Sense But Here We Are.
