The 2024 box office featured a few really surprising headlines. On top of Inside Out 2 becoming the year’s biggest hit and three of the year’s four biggest films being animated sequels, one of the more bewildering stories revolved around the romance flick It Ends With Us. The film starred Blake Lively as the lead actress and Justin Baldoni as the director/lead actor, and while the film was quite successful in cinemas, raking in around $350 million globally, it has been overshadowed by a very toxic relationship between its leading figures.
Lively and Baldoni have been at each other’s throats for months now following Baldoni being accused of sexual harassment by Lively for actions and behaviour on-set and during the creation of the film. This all came out in a New York Times article that claims that Baldoni launched a smear campaign against Lively, something that Baldoni is now taking action against in a massive lawsuit against the publication.
Variety reports that Baldoni has launched a $250 million claim against the New York Times, stating that the Lively article “cherry-picked” information and “altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”
The New York Times intends to defend itself in court, with a spokesperson for the publication adding: “Our story was meticulously and responsibly reported. It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article.”
The claim against the New York Times also features additional plaintiffs, including publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, who are suing the publication for libel and light invasion of privacy.