Over three months after Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation suit against Blake Lively, The New York Times, Ryan Reynolds, and others was dismissed, the Gray Lady is now seeking reimbursement for some costs. The newspaper is asking the much-accused *It Ends With Us* director to pay approximately $150,000 in attorney fees, damages, and more.
A September 30 filing in New York state court from The Times and its in-house counsel makes clear that Baldoni’s production company, Wayfarer Studios, and its affiliates both initiated and continued the lawsuit against The Times without a substantial basis in fact or law.
Following the initial $250 million lawsuit against The Times, Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios included the paper in their January countersuit against the *It Ends With Us* star Blake Lively, her *Deadpool* husband Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist Leslie Sloane regarding Lively’s sexual harassment and retaliation allegations. These allegations, first reported to California’s Civil Rights Department late last year, were further detailed in a New Year’s Eve lawsuit.
On December 21, The Times published a deeply researched story on Lively’s Civil Rights Department filing, just hours after the documents were handed over to California officials.
After issuing a comprehensive 132-page order on June 9, dismissing the Wayfarer countersuit and critiquing journalistic ethics, Judge Lewis Liman offered Baldoni, his executives, financiers, and PR team the opportunity to file an amended complaint. However, after some deliberation, they declined to submit a new version of the complaint.
The District Court held that any statements in The Times’ article and accompanying video reporting on the alleged sexual misconduct experienced by Lively were not actionable. Since these were based on the Civil Rights Department complaint, they were protected by New York’s fair report privilege. Moreover, the court found they were not made with “actual malice,” a key component required to prove defamation.
Regarding The Times’ statements about a smear campaign, the court found that, to the extent these fell outside the privilege because they relied on communications not included in the Civil Rights Department complaint, they also were not plausibly made with actual malice.
With depositions and discovery now underway, and occasional cameos from figures such as Taylor Swift, Lively’s action against the no-longer WME-represented Baldoni and Wayfarer is set for trial starting March 9, 2026.
In the meantime, The Times made it clear that this pursuit is about defending their journalists, perhaps even more than recovering their costs.
“The New York Times filed a suit against Justin Baldoni’s production company, Wayfarer Studios, to obtain reimbursement of The Times’ legal fees from their baseless libel suit, which has now been dismissed by a federal judge,” said the company’s Communications SVP Danielle Rhoades Ha in a statement to Deadline.
“New York law allows publishers to recover their fees when they are targeted by suits designed to silence them. That is precisely what happened here. Our journalists covered carefully and fairly a story of public importance, and Wayfarer and Baldoni should pay for having tried to misuse the courts and mislead the public.”
On the other side, Baldoni and Wayfarer’s lead attorney Bryan Freedman offered his perspective:
“Perhaps what constitutes justice in this particular matter needs to be reexamined. Win, lose, or draw, we refuse to cave to power brokers even in the face of seemingly impossible odds,” Freedman said Wednesday.
“We continue to stand tall for a reason: the pursuit of truth, in the face of giants. Our unwillingness to compromise our values, no matter the odds or the outcome, reflects a simple conviction that standing up for the truth and what is right matters. If the current laws protect legacy media in this manner, perhaps it’s up to us to ignite that change.”
To paraphrase The Times: all the lawsuits that are fit to be filed.
https://deadline.com/2025/10/justin-baldoni-new-york-times-attorney-fees-blake-lively-1236567582/