Justin Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios has been ordered to pay $171,000 (\u00a3128,000) in legal fees to The New York Times.
In December 2024, the actor-director filed a $250 million (\u00a3188 million) defamation lawsuit against editors at the newspaper regarding an expos\u00e9 that detailed court documents and allegations made against him by his It Ends with Us co-star, Blake Lively.<\/p>\n
But in June 2025, a judge dismissed the complaint, with a representative for the outlet calling the lawsuit “a meritless attempt to stifle honest reporting” at the time.<\/p>\n
Later, executives at The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios in which they sought to recoup costs, and on Monday, the judge ruled in favour of the outlet on anti-SLAPP grounds, also known as strategic lawsuits against public participation.<\/p>\n
Representatives for Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, and The New York Times have not yet commented on the update.<\/p>\n
In May, the 42-year-old and Lively announced that they had settled a lawsuit over allegations of smear campaigns and a hostile work environment on the set of the 2024 film. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.<\/p>\n
But negotiations over the case continue, and earlier this month, Baldoni asked a judge to deny Lively’s request that he and Wayfarer pay more than $8 million (\u00a36 million) toward her legal bills.<\/p>\n
Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, filed a motion asking the judge to either reduce or deny the application.<\/p>\n
In the original request, the A Simple Favor star’s lawyers argued that the work involved in defending the lawsuit was “comprehensive and necessary to achieve the complete win that was secured”, adding that the 38-year-old “has paid, and continues to pay” her legal bills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justin Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios has been ordered to pay $171,000 (\u00a3128,000) in legal fees to The New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8860,46515,46107,9,11,10],"class_list":["post-307442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-blake-lively","tag-defamation-lawsuit","tag-justin-baldoni","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}