Did Blake Lively Or Her Team CHANGE Justin Baldoni's Texts With PR People To Hide The Truth?!?

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Blake Lively‘s team has some major explaining to do if what Justin Baldoni is claiming in his new lawsuit is true!

As Perezcious readers know, the Gossip Girl alum sued her It Ends With Us co-star and director for sexual harassment — claiming he launched a smear campaign to hurt her reputation in retaliation for voicing her concerns about the hostile work environment. She and her team provided several receipts, too — text messages between Justin, publicist Jennifer Abel, and crisis management expert Melissa Nathan to back her claims. The New York Times published these texts in an article published on December 21 titled “We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” which used her California Civil Rights Department complaint as its backbone.

Related: Justin Baldoni Accuses Ryan Reynolds Of ‘Berating’ Him For ‘Fat-Shaming’ Blake Lively!

The messages were pretty damning. However, Justin is now claiming they don’t show the full story! That Blake or her team even changed those messages to hide what was really going on behind the scenes! According to Variety, the actor filed a $250 million bombshell lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday against The New York Times for libel and false light invasion of privacy. There are 10 other plaintiffs attached to the suit, including Abel, Nathan, and producers Jamey Heath and Steve Sarowitz. They claimed The Times used “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”

And yes, the group dropped their own receipts to try to prove their case — such as one of completely edited texts between his PR people! In The New York Times article, the complaint showed that Nathan allegedly shared a link to an article from the Daily Mail about how could be “set to be canceled” due to her “tone deaf” promotion of a movie about domestic violence and those infamous resurfaced old interviews. The text exchange in the story showed Abel responding:

“Wow. You really outdid yourself with this one”

To which Nathan replied:

“That’s why you hired me, right? I’m the best.”

That looks like proof the two women were gloating about their work to take down Blake. Right? However, Justin’s lawsuit claimed that the texts were “unscrupulously altered and selectively edited” to propagate the narrative that he and his team were orchestrating a smear campaign against Blake. When in reality? They supposedly were being sarcastic and joking about the whole situation and had no involvement in the piece against Blake.

Providing the full-text exchange in his suit, it appears The Times omitted a text from Nathan that preceded the above iteration. She wrote after Abel sent the link to the article:

“Damn this is unfair because it’s also not me. Everything now looks like it’s me. Maybe not to you.”

The suit shows the original messages — which include an upside-down smiley face emoji in one of the texts. They accused Blake of “deliberately” excluding the emoji, which is “commonly used to convey irony, sarcasm, joking, or a sense of goofiness or silliness.” So removing the emoji in the legal filing — and subsequently the Times piece, Justin and the plaintiffs argue, misled everyone into “interpreting her response as serious” – and not as sarcasm as it was supposedly meant to be. Just like if someone wrote “JK” at the end of their text or “lol but in all seriousness…” He calls the tampering “criminal alteration” of the text she’s quoting.

Check out the receipts for yourself (below):

That emoji being gone is HUGE! This is not a good look for Blake’s case…

Ultimately, they alleged “it was Lively, not Plaintiffs, who engaged in a calculated smear campaign” against Justin — and the publication would have seen that if they “truly reviewed the thousands of private communications it claimed to have obtained.” The plaintiffs insisted they never had any plans of “‘destroying’ or ‘burying’” Blake through aggressive tactics. In fact, they allegedly wanted to make sure quite the opposite happened, as Justin “consistently expressed his desire to avoid harming Lively and protect the Film.”

However, at the same time, they “also recognized a legitimate need for public relations protection in light of Lively’s false and damaging claims.” The proof? In one message that Justin sent to Nathan about using a “bot team,” he asked:

“How can we say somehow that we are not doing any of this – it looks like we are trying to take her down.”

Another one shows Abel replying:

“Things I’m more worried about is that we are planting these stories which is not true obviously.”

In another text Justin asks Nathan directly if their PR team was responsible for a TikToker claiming she was directed on how to talk about the Justin/Blake drama. He asks:

“This is not us correct? Assuming the guy we brought in would never do this….”

Responding, Nathan states explicitly:

“None of us would ever do this… It’s organic she’s blown herself up by her own actions.”

She then sends Justin an article about that interview everyone thought made Blake look like a mean girl. She wrote:

“This just ran – obviously none of us knew about this either. But once media goes in, they go in… The content creators are on fire, and Justin, she has handed it to them all on a plate.”

She also advised that “the best thing we can do right now is be quiet”:

Melissa Nathan text messages Justin Baldoni lawsuit

And there are other examples Justin and his team included to show that Blake and The Times may have glossed over some text exchanges proving they possibly weren’t out to get her! You can choose to believe they were lying — but if that’s true, the PR folks were lying to each other and to Justin. And Blake’s receipts suddenly no longer look like a smoking gun proving some smear campaign. At best, it’s muddy water — and not a clear case of anything.

You can read a look at the full complaint HERE.

A spokesperson for The New York Times shut down Justin’s allegations and insisted the outlet quote “accurately” in the piece, saying:

“The role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead. 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. To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni, the other subjects of the article and their representatives have not pointed to a single error. We published their full statement in response to the allegations in the article as well. We plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”

Hmm. And yet the receipts from Justin would say otherwise…

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