from the inevitable dept
As we’ve been following along to some degree with the whole Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni legal mess, the more recent stories have been about Baldoni’s attempt to go after protected creative speech in a Deadpool movie, the choice of waging a PR war before the trial even starts, and the Streisand Effect nature to his actions. While the salacious accusations from each side towards the other aren’t really something we cover here at Techdirt, the online shenanigans and speech implications absolutely are.
Which is why I am going to remind you that the first lawsuit Baldoni filed wasn’t against Lively, Ryan Reynolds, Marvel, or Disney. It was against the New York Times, which Baldoni’s suit argued was liable for defamation and fraud because the news organization reported on the news.
We said at the time that the suit against the paper would almost certainly not get very far. And now we have our first inclination that it might get dismissed in fairly short order, given the judge has put a pause on the discovery phase of the trial pending the Times’ motion to dismiss.
In an order issued Tuesday and obtained by USA TODAY Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Liman approved the Times’ motion for a stay of discovery — evidence-gathering among the case’s parties — pending his review of the company’s motion to be dismissed as a defendant in the case.
“The NY Times’s motion presents ‘substantial grounds for dismissal’ and the NY Times has made a strong showing that its motion to dismiss is likely to succeed on the merits,” Liman wrote.
The court might has well have put its intentions in big shining lights. This is a suit that never should have been filed and the idea that Baldoni’s team can go on a fishing expedition, potentially to find more personal communications to display to or leak to the public, is silly. The Times has robust First Amendment protections on its reporting. The bar for fraud and defamation is quite high.
In other words, Baldoni’s team probably would be better off cutting its losses and dropping the suit itself.
In its dismissal motion last week, the Times said it merely engaged in newsgathering with its publication of the viral article, adding that plaintiffs did not show the outlet acted with malice. The newspaper also said the sole alleged defamatory statement in the article — that the plaintiffs orchestrated a “smear campaign” in retaliation for Lively complaining about sexual harassment — was protected opinion.
“We appreciate the court’s decision today, which recognizes the important First Amendment values at stake,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement to Reuters. “The court has stopped Mr. Baldoni from burdening The Times with discovery requests in a case that should never have been brought.”
At this point, the suit against the New York Times is probably most useful as a betting mechanism, in which we set an over/under on the date that the court will dismiss the case. Anything else would come as a complete surprise to this writer.
Filed Under: blake lively, defamation, justin baldoni
Companies: ny times
