Justin Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios must pay New York Times $171K in damages
The decision stems from Justin Baldoni suing the New York Times for libel in December 2024, accusing the journalists of working with Blake Lively to tarnish his reputation.
Justin Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios was ordered to pay the New York Times more than US$171,000 in damages after a judge dismissed its defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for its coverage of Blake Lively’s allegations against Baldoni.
In court documents, obtained by Entertainment Weekly and People, New York Supreme Court Justice Gerald Lebovits granted summary judgment in the newspaper’s favour and said that “NYT Co. is therefore entitled to a total amount in damages of $171,616.20.”
In a statement to , a spokesperson for the New York Times said, “We’re delighted by the court’s decision. The anti-SLAPP statute is designed to combat exactly these kinds of meritless suits brought to silence the press.”
Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) refers to legal rules designed to stop powerful people or groups from using lawsuits to silence critics, protecting public speech, early case dismissal and cost recoveries, according to the Centre for Free Expression.
has reached out to Wayfarer Studios for comment, but has not received a response.
The decision stems from Baldoni suing the New York Times – the outlet that first reported on Lively’s initial complaint – for libel in December 2024, accusing the journalists who reported the story of working with Lively to tarnish his reputation and claiming they glossed over important evidence.
Lively’s suit claimed that Baldoni, the film’s production company Wayfarer Studios and others put together “a carefully crafted, coordinated, and resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her, and others, from speaking out.”
She accused Baldoni and the studio of embarking on a “multi-tiered plan” to damage her reputation following a meeting in which she and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, addressed “repeated sexual harassment and other disturbing behavior” by Baldoni and a producer, Jamey Heath, who is also named in both lawsuits.
The plan, the suit said, included a proposal to plant damaging theories on online message boards, engineer a social media campaign and place news stories critical of Lively.
Baldoni’s lawsuit, meanwhile, alleged that the New York Times “cherry picked” communications from the materials given to it and reported some of the claims “stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”
His lawsuit was asking for a trial by jury and damages of $250 million (C$360 million).
In a statement provided to several news outlets at the time, the New York Times defended its report, saying 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.”
“We published their (Baldoni and his team’s) full statement in response to the allegations in the article as well,” it continued, telling The Associated Press it planned to “vigorously defend” against the lawsuit.
But Baldoni’s lawsuit said that “If the Times truly reviewed the thousands of private communications it claimed to have obtained, its reporters would have seen incontrovertible evidence that it was Lively, not Plaintiffs, who engaged in a calculated smear campaign.”
A judge dismissed Baldoni’s defamation suit in June 2025.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the New York Times, said, “We are grateful to the court for seeing the lawsuit for what it was: a meritless attempt to stifle honest reporting. Our journalists went out and covered carefully and fairly a story of public importance, and the court recognized that the law is designed to protect just that sort of journalism.”
Three months later, the Times filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court against Wayfarer Studios, asking for compensatory and punitive damages to cover $150,000 in costs of defending the defamation claims.
More recently, Baldoni’s legal team made reference to the New York Times’ lawsuit in a legal filing, asking a judge to deny or “substantially reduce” It Ends With Us co-star Lively’s “excessive” request for more than $8 million in legal fees.
In a legal filing, obtained by , Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios referred to Lively’s request as “anything but a typical fee motion.”
“Lively claims that she is entitled to a stunning $7,495,526 in attorney’s fees for 7,070.20 hours billed by no fewer than 82 timekeepers, to obtain the dismissal of a single defamation claim at the pleading stage. In contrast, The New York Times is seeking $181,000 in a fee request filed in state court for its motion to dismiss precisely the same defamation claim,” Baldoni’s lawyers wrote in the legal filing.
Baldoni’s legal team was referencing the Times seeking $181,000 in lawyer fees to dismiss the same defamation claim after Baldoni sued the newspaper for libel over accusations that he engaged in a “smear campaign” against Lively but the lawsuit was dismissed in June 2025.