Imagine you’re writing an article about a popular policy trend. The trend is expensive to implement, disruptive to normal operations, and—here’s the key part—there’s substantial research showing it doesn’t actually work and can cause other significant problems. How would you structure that article?
One approach: Lead with the evidence. “Despite growing enthusiasm for [policy proposal], studies consistently find it doesn’t accomplish its stated goals.” Put that in paragraph one, maybe paragraph two or three with some lead-up if you’re feeling generous.
Another approach: Spend 13 paragraphs hyping up the trend, listing every conceivable harm it’s meant to address, quoting lawmakers and administrators who support it, and then—only then—casually mention that the evidence shows it doesn’t work.
Mobile phone bans in school and social media bans for kids are increasingly popular around the globe, driven largely by Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book—which remains a bestseller despite actual experts debunking basically everything in it. So when the paper of record wades into this debate, you’d think they might lead with what the evidence actually shows. You’d think wrong.
The article opens with the traditional moral panic opening, playing up all the fear:
Bullying. Sextortion. Body-shaming. Self-harm. Viralstudent-fight videos. Never-ending newsfeeds. Unhealthy relationships with A.I. chatbots. Teenagers who can’t seem to put down their phones.
Parents and teachers are understandably concerned about social media. For all of the community, creativity and just plain fun kids enjoy online, hazards remain all too frequent, some children’s advocates say.
It’s the greatest-hits compilation of every anxiety adults have projected onto kids and technology for decades (centuries, really). Might as well add “Dungeons & Dragons will make them worship Satan” for completeness.
The piece does eventually ask “can these bans actually help?” But not before spending several more paragraphs cataloging every conceivable harm that’s ever been tangentially associated with social media, strongly implying the tech itself is to blame rather than, you know, humanity. Then it dutifully reports that “lawmakers and schools” see bans as the answer.
Only then—14 paragraphs deep—does the Times get around to mentioning:
Wehave limited researchon whether the bans work. After surveying more than 1,200 students in 30 schools across England, researchers at the University of Birmingham recently reported that cellphone bans did not improve students’ mental well-being.
“Limited research”?
No. We have plenty of research. There’s a comprehensive study in Australia that found no evidence bans helped kids. Multiple reports document actual harms from these bans—including privacy violations and safety issues when kids can’t reach parents during emergencies. It appears that the evidence is just inconvenient for the narrative.
But the Times isn’t done. The article includes a section on how bans “may have drawbacks”—and somehow the main drawback they identify is that bans don’t stop social media companies from doing bad things. Not that the bans don’t work. Not that they create new problems. Just that they don’t magically fix the platforms themselves:
Blanket tech bans can be crude instruments. They may make it harder for many young people to have social media accounts. But they often don’t change the underlying app features that many parents are worried about.
Many popular apps use powerful attention-hacking techniques that can hook young people, said Julia Powles, an Australian researcher who is the executive director of the U.C.L.A. Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. This keeps users online longer, she notes, and makes the companies more money from advertising.
This completely misses the point—which, as danah boyd has repeatedly explained, is that adults are confusing risks with harms. Many things are risky. Some can lead to harm. But we generally deal with risky things by teaching people how to manage those risks.
The response to potential harms from social media shouldn’t be to demand bans. It should be teaching kids how to navigate these spaces appropriately—how to recognize manipulation, how to minimize risks, what to do when something goes wrong. Instead, we hide it. We ban it. We shove it under the rug and pretend that if we just keep this scary thing away from kids, they’ll somehow be fine once the ban lifts.
And thus, we get the worst of everything. For every ban out there, kids will find their ways around them. Often, that will involve doing things surreptitiously, in places with fewer controls and less ability for parents and teachers to properly instruct kids how to use those tools appropriately. It actually puts kids in more danger by pretending that if we just “ban” places for them to communicate, that they’ll just become perfect little kids who never look elsewhere.
The Times had a chance here to actually inform the debate—to lead with what the evidence shows, to explain the tradeoffs, to challenge the reflexive push for bans. Instead, they wrote 13 paragraphs of pure moral panic before mentioning that these policies don’t work, then immediately pivoted back to fearmongering about “attention-hacking techniques.”
This all just feeds the moral panic. It gives politicians and administrators cover to implement bans that won’t help kids but will absolutely create new problems. And when those bans inevitably fail, the Times will probably write another breathless piece wondering why kids are still struggling—while once again burying the fact that we never actually tried teaching them how to navigate these spaces in the first place.
A federal magistrate judge just ordered that the private ChatGPT conversations of 20 million users be handed over to the lawyers for dozens of plaintiffs, including news organizations. Those 20 million people weren’t asked. They weren’t notified. They have no say in the matter.
Last week, Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ordered OpenAI to turn over a sample of 20 million chat logs as part of the sprawling multidistrict litigation where publishers are suing AI companies—a mess of consolidated cases that kicked off with the NY Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI. Judge Wang dismissed OpenAI’s privacy concerns, apparently convinced that “anonymization” solves everything.
Even if you hate OpenAI and everything it stands for, and hope that the news orgs bring it to its knees, this should scare you. A lot. OpenAI had pointed out to the judge a week earlier that this demands from the news orgs would represent a massive privacy violation for ChatGPT’s users.
News Plaintiffs demand that OpenAI hand over the entire 20M log sample “in readily searchable format” via a “hard drive or [] dedicated private cloud.” ECF 656 at 3. That would include logs that are neither relevant nor responsive—indeed, News Plaintiffs concede that at least 99.99% of the logs are irrelevant to their claims. OpenAI has never agreed to such a process, which is wildly disproportionate to the needs of the case and exposes private user chats for no reasonable litigation purpose. In a display of striking hypocrisy, News Plaintiffs disregard those users’ privacy interests while claiming that their own chat logs are immune from production because “it is possible” that their employees “entered sensitive information into their prompts.” ECF 475 at 4. Unlike News Plaintiffs, OpenAI’s users have no stake in this case and no opportunity to defend their information from disclosure. It makes no sense to order OpenAI to hand over millions of irrelevant and private conversation logs belonging to those absent third parties while allowing News Plaintiffs to shield their own logs from disclosure.
OpenAI offered a much more privacy-protective alternative: hand over only a targeted set of logs actually relevant to the case, rather than dumping 20 million records wholesale. The news orgs fought back, but their reply brief is sealed—so we don’t get to see their argument. The judge bought it anyway, dismissing the privacy concerns on the theory that OpenAI can simply “anonymize” the chat logs:
Whether or not the parties had reached agreement to produce the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs in whole—which the parties vehemently dispute—such production here is appropriate. OpenAI has failed to explain how its consumers’ privacy rights are not adequately protected by: (1) the existing protective order in this multidistrict litigation or (2) OpenAI’s exhaustive de-identification of all of the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs.
The judge then quotes the news orgs’ filing, noting that OpenAI has already put in this effort to “deidentify” the chat logs.
Both of those supposed protections—the protective order and “exhaustive de-identification”—are nonsense. Let’s start with the anonymization problem, because it shows a stunning lack of understanding about what it means to anonymize data sets, especially AI chatlogs.
We’ve spent years warning people that “anonymized data” is a gibberish term, used by companies to pretend large collections of data can be kept private, when that’s just not true. Almost any large dataset of “anonymized” data can have significant portions of the data connected back to individuals with just a little work. Researchers re-identified individuals from “anonymized” AOL search queries, from NYC taxi records, from Netflix viewing histories—the list goes on. Every time someone shows up with an “anonymized” dataset, researchers show ways to re-identify people in the dataset.
And that’s even worse when it comes to ChatGPT chat logs, which are likely to be way more revealing that previous data sets where the inability to anonymize data were called out. There have been plenty of reports of just how much people “overshare” with ChatGPT, often including incredibly private information.
Back in August, researchers got their hands on just 1,000 leaked ChatGPT conversations and talked about how much sensitive information they were able to glean from just that small number of chats.
Researchers downloaded and analyzed 1,000 of theleaked conversations,spanning over 43 million words. Among them, they discovered multiple chats that explicitly mentioned personally identifiable information (PII), such as full names, addresses, and ID numbers.
With that level of PII and sensitive information, connecting chats back to individuals is likely way easier than in previous cases of connecting “anonymized” data back to individuals.
And that was with just 1,000 records.
Then, yesterday as I was writing this, the Washington Post revealed that they had combed through 47,000 ChatGPT chat logs, many of which were “accidentally” revealed via ChatGPT’s “share” feature. Many of them reveal deeply personal and intimate information.
Users often shared highly personal information with ChatGPT in the conversations analyzed by The Post, including details generally not typed into conventional search engines.
People sent ChatGPT more than 550 unique email addresses and 76 phone numbers in the conversations. Some are public, but others appear to be private, like those one user shared for administrators at a religious school in Minnesota.
Users asking the chatbot to draft letters or lawsuits on workplace or family disputes sent the chatbot detailed private information about the incidents.
There are examples where, even if the user’s official details are redacted, it would be trivial to figure out who was actually doing the chats:
If you can’t see that, it’s a chat with ChatGPT, redacted by the Washington post saying:
User my name is [name redacted] my husband name [name redacted] is threatning me to kill and not taking my responsibities and trying to go abroad […] he is not caring us and he is going to kuwait and he will give me divorce from abroad please i want to complaint to higher authgorities and immigrition office to stop him to go abroad and i want justice please help
ChatGPT Below is a formal draft complaint you can submit to the Deputy Commissioner of Police in [redacted] addressing your concerns and seeking immediate action:
That seems like even if you “anonymized” the chat by taking off the user account details, it wouldn’t take long to figure out whose chat it was, revealing some pretty personal info, including the names of their children (according to the Post).
And WaPo reporters found that by starting with 93,000 chats, then using tools do an analysis of the 47,000 in English, followed by human review of just 500 chats in a “random sample.”
Now imagine 20 million records. With many, many times more data, the ability to cross-reference information across chats, identify patterns, and connect seemingly disconnected pieces of information becomes exponentially easier. This isn’t just “more of the same”—it’s a qualitatively different threat level.
Even worse, the judge’s order contains a fundamental contradiction: she demands that OpenAI share these chatlogs “in whole” while simultaneously insisting they undergo “exhaustive de-identification.” Those two requirements are incompatible.
Real de-identification would require stripping far more than just usernames and account info—it would mean redacting or altering the actual content of the chats, because that content is often what makes re-identification possible. But if you’re redacting content to protect privacy, you’re no longer handing over the logs “in whole.” You can’t have both. The judge doesn’t grapple with this contradiction at all.
Yes, as the judge notes, this data is kept under the protective order in the case, meaning that it shouldn’t be disclosed. But protective orders are only as strong as the people bound by them, and there’s a huge risk here.
Looking at the docket, there are a ton of lawyers who will have access to these files. The docket list of parties and lawyers is 45 pages long if you try to print it out. While there are plenty of repeats in there, there have to be at least 100 lawyers and possibly a lot more (I’m not going to count them, and while I asked three different AI tools to count them, each gave me a different answer).
That’s a lot of people—many representing entities directly hostile to OpenAI—who all need to keep 20 million private conversations secret.
That’s not even getting into the fact that handling 20 million chat logs is a difficult task to do well. I am quite sure that among all the plaintiffs and all the lawyers, even with the very best of intentions, there’s still a decent chance that some of the content could leak (and it could, in theory, leak to some of the media properties who are plaintiffs in the case).
And, as OpenAI properly points out, its users whose data is at risk here have no say in any of this. They likely have no idea that a ton of people may be about to get an intimate look at what they thought were their private ChatGPT chats.
OpenAI is unaware of any court ordering wholesale production of personal information at this scale. This sets a dangerous precedent: it suggests that anyone who files a lawsuit against an AI company can demand production of tens of millions of conversations without first narrowing for relevance. This is not how discovery works in other cases: courts do not allow plaintiffs suing Google to dig through the private emails of tens of millions of Gmail users irrespective of their relevance. And it is not how discovery should work for generative AI tools either.
The judge had cited a ruling in one of Anthropic’s cases, but hadn’t given OpenAI a chance to explain why the ruling in that case didn’t apply here (in that one, Anthropic had agreed to hand over the logs as part of negotiations with the plaintiffs, and OpenAI gets in a little dig at its competitor, pointing out that it appears Anthropic made no effort to protect the privacy of its users in that case).
There have, as Daphne Keller regularly points out, always been challenges between user privacy and platform transparency. But this goes well beyond that familiar tension. We’re not talking about “platform transparency” in the traditional sense—publishing aggregated statistics or clarifying moderation policies. This is 20 million complete chatlogs, handed over “in whole” to dozens of adversarial parties and their lawyers. The potential damage to the privacy rights of those users could be massive.
Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even more damning story here: how that revelation almost never saw the light of day because of journalistic cowardice.
The smoking gun quote came from Trump’s phone interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor:
“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”
This is an absolutely nuclear quote.
But note that we linked to the local KGW affiliate report on it and not NBC’s.
And that’s because NBC didn’t even mention the quote at all in its own coverage. As Dan Froomkin highlighted in his article about all this, NBC ran two stories by Alcindor (with Alexandra Marquez) about her interview with Trump, neither of which mentioned that bombshell of a quote.
Instead, it was only because NBC apparently sent the full transcript to affiliates that Evan Watson at KGW picked it up and ran a story about it.
But that raises a ton of questions, including how could NBC and Alcindor not see this as a story? And what is wrong with the mainstream media that it basically skipped over this?
The quote is devastating. It reveals a president who is either completely detached from reality, easily manipulated by advisors feeding him false information, or being deliberately deceived by old Fox News footage (as we now know was happening). It raises fundamental questions about who is actually running the country and whether the person with access to nuclear codes can distinguish between television clips from five years ago and reality. As we detailed yesterday, this quote reveals everything about how Trump ended up threatening military action against an American city based on five-year-old Fox News b-roll.
NBC’s failure to see the story in this is journalistic malpractice of the highest order. When the President admits he can’t tell the difference between Fox News b-roll and reality, that’s not a throwaway line—it’s the story.
But it’s also part of a much larger pattern of media cowardice that’s actively damaging public trust in journalism. The problem isn’t just burying important quotes—it’s the widespread adoption of “view from nowhere” reporting that treats even the most basic facts as matters of debate.
Take this astounding example from a recent New York Times piece about Trump’s use of military force against boats in the Caribbean.
Some legal expertshave called it a crime to summarily kill civilians not directly taking part in hostilities, even if they are believed to be smuggling drugs.
“Some legal experts?” Are you kidding me? Summarily executing civilians is a war crime under international law. This isn’t a matter of debate among competing schools of legal thought. There isn’t another camp of legal experts arguing that, actually, murdering civilians is totally fine. The Times is creating false balance where none exists, making it sound like there’s some reasonable disagreement about whether mass murder constitutes a crime.
Or consider this gem from CNN, fact-checking Trump’s claim that he reduced prescription drug prices by 1500%:
Trump has unveiled a number of moves aimed at cutting drug prices in recent months, but he has yet to move the needle on reducing costs – much less slashing them by 1,500%, which is mathematically impossible,experts say.
Experts say? You need experts to tell you that 1500% is more than 100%? This is elementary school math. A 100% reduction means something is free. A 1500% reduction would mean pharmaceutical companies are paying you a decent sum of money to take their pills. You don’t need to consult the National Academy of Sciences to determine this is bullshit—you need to remember fourth grade.
This kind of reporting is journalistic malpractice disguised as objectivity. When reporters feel compelled to add “experts say” to basic mathematical facts or treat war crimes as matters of legitimate debate, they’re not being neutral—they’re actively misleading their audience into believing basic facts are up for debate among “experts.”
The pattern is clear: mainstream media has become so terrified of appearing biased that they’ve abandoned their basic responsibility to clearly communicate truth to the public. They’d rather hide behind the false comfort of “some say” and “experts disagree” than plainly state obvious facts.
This isn’t objectivity—it’s cowardice. And it’s precisely why trust in media continues to crater.
There’s an old joke in the journalism field (with disputes over where it originated from) but the line is “if one person says it’s raining and another says it’s not, the journalist should look outside and report the truth” rather than suggesting whether or not it’s raining is a matter of dispute.
We’re seeing the opposite from the mainstream media these days.
When the President of the United States admits he can’t distinguish between television and reality, that’s not a “both sides” story, or a cute anecdote not worth mentioning. When someone claims to have reduced costs by 1500%, that’s not a matter requiring expert consultation—it’s a mathematical impossibility. When military officials discuss summarily executing civilians, that’s not a policy debate—it’s war crimes.
The public deserves better than this mealy-mouthed nonsense. They deserve reporters who can recognize when they’re witnessing something extraordinary and have the courage to say so clearly. They deserve news organizations that understand the difference between false balance and actual journalism.
Instead, we get reporters who bury the most important quotes of their own interviews and editors who think basic arithmetic requires expert verification. Is it any wonder people are losing faith in institutions that seem incapable of simply stating reality on its own terms?
The media keeps wondering why trust in journalism is at historic lows. Here’s a thought: maybe it’s because when the President reveals he’s making military decisions based on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors, the reporter who got that admission decides it’s not worth mentioning. Or maybe it’s because the likes of CNN and the NY Times are so worried about angry people attacking them for calling bullshit on the President that they have to cower behind “experts say” on basic objective facts.
That’s not journalism. That’s stenography. And the American people can tell the difference, even when their media apparently cannot.
In what may be a first in American legal history, a sitting president just had his lawsuit struck down by a federal judge before the defendants even had a chance to respond.
Judge Steven Merryday didn’t wait for a motion to dismiss. He didn’t wait for the defendants to file an answer. Four days after Donald Trump’s lawyers filed their 85-page tantrum masquerading as a defamation complaint against the New York Times and Penguin Random House, Merryday struck it sua sponte—essentially telling the President of the United States that his legal filing was so fundamentally defective it wasn’t worth the court’s time.
Sua sponte dismissals are extraordinarily rare. Judges typically bend over backwards to let even the most questionable complaints proceed to motion practice. The fact that a federal judge took the unusual step of striking a complaint without any prompting from defendants signals just how egregiously improper Trump’s filing was.
Last week, we told you about the ridiculously dopey lawsuit that Donald Trump had filed against Penguin Random House, the NY Times, and some reporters over… something. It wasn’t quite clear. But the lawsuit spent many, many pages fluffing Donald Trump’s ego and suggesting that the mere endorsement in the NY Times of Kamala Harris was election interference and suggested that it would break all the laws to criticize Dear Leader Donald J. Trump.
The complaint also betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of defamation law’s “actual malice” standard and bore hallmarks that led many observers to suspect it was AI-generated—a theory that gains credibility when you read Judge Merryday’s scathing analysis of its contents.
The venue choice was transparently strategic. Trump forum-shopped his way to the Tampa division of the Middle District of Florida despite having no meaningful connection there—Mar-a-Lago is in the Southern District, and the defendants are based in New York. The complaint’s assertion that venue was proper because defendants “sell newspapers and books” in the district was laughably weak.
The real reason was likely that four of the five regular judges in that division were Trump appointees. But Trump’s luck ran out when the case landed on the docket of Judge Steven Merryday (who is on senior status), a no-nonsense Bush Sr. appointee who clearly wasn’t impressed by the presidential plaintiff.
As every member of the bar of every federal court knows (or is presumed to know), Rule 8(a), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, requires that a complaint include “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” Rule 8(e)(1) helpfully adds that “[e]ach averment of a pleading shall be simple, concise, and direct.” Some pleadings are necessarily longer than others. The difference likely depends on the number of parties and claims, the complexity of the governing facts, and the duration and scope of pertinent events. But both a shorter pleading and a longer pleading must comprise “simple, concise, and direct” allegations that offer a “short and plain statement of the claim.” Rule 8 governs every pleading in a federal court, regardless of the amount in controversy, the identity of the parties, the skill or reputation of the counsel, the urgency or importance (real or imagined) of the dispute, or any public interest at issue in the dispute.
In this action, a prominent American citizen (perhaps the most prominent American citizen) alleges defamation by a prominent American newspaper publisher (perhaps the most prominent American newspaper publisher) and by several other corporate and natural persons. Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes eighty-five pages. Count I appears on page eighty, and Count II appears on page eighty-three. Pages one through seventy-nine, plus part of page eighty, present allegations common to both counts and to all defendants. Each count alleges a claim against each defendant and, apparently, each claim seeks the same remedy against each defendant.
But the judge doesn’t mince words about how “improper” the complaint is beyond just the length:
Even under the most generous and lenient application of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible. The pleader initially alleges an electoral victory by President Trump “in historic fashion” — by “trouncing” the opponent — and alludes to “persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.” The pleader alludes to “the halcyon days” of the newspaper but complains that the newspaper has become a “full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat party,” which allegedly resulted in the “deranged endorsement” of President Trump’s principal opponent in the most recent presidential election. The reader of the complaint must labor through allegations, such as “a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady.’” The reader must endure an allegation of “the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass” and an allegation that “the false narrative about ‘The Apprentice’ was just the tip of Defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.” Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, “‘The Apprentice’ represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time.”
And also points out how “tedious” the complaint is and points out that a civil complaint is no place for ranting and raving about how mean people are to you, with the main target being the PR value over having a legitimate complaint:
As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.
That’s basically: “your complaint is the legal equivalent of the guy screaming out conspiracy theories on the street corner.”
The judge, as he should, gives Trump 28 days to amend the complaint, which is likely to happen. Whether or not his lawyers can actually follow the local rules and properly state a claim will remain only conjecture until that time.
Meanwhile, Trump appeared wholly unaware that the case was tossed on Friday while meeting with the press. He started bragging about the case and when ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl pointed out that the case had been tossed, Trump responded “I’m winning, I’m winning the cases.” He’s not.
TRUMP: That's why I sued the New York Times two days ago for a lot of moneyKARL: A judge just threw that outTRUMP: I'm winning. I'm winning the cases.
The disconnect between Trump’s perception and legal reality perfectly encapsulates his approach to litigation: file theatrical lawsuits designed more for headlines than legal success, then either attack judges or (as here) just deny reality when courts treat them as actual legal documents that must follow rules. It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly—lawsuits that work better as press releases than as instruments of justice.
Having a President who operates in an alternate reality where judicial smackdowns count as victories is, to put it mildly, concerning. But these days, it’s just a Friday.
Even by Donald Trump’s standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times—this time seeking $15 billion over a book that claims he’s not quite as successful a businessman as he pretends to be.
The timing is almost comically bad. Trump is suing over allegations that he’s not actually that successful… right after winning the presidency in a landslide and making absolute bank while doing it. Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? You’re the fucking President. Get over the fact that some people criticize you already.
Trump has a decently long history of suing media outlets over unflattering coverage, including multiple failed attempts against the Times. Just last year, he had to pay nearly $400k in legal fees after another bogus lawsuit against the Times failed. But why let past failures slow you down when you can file an even dumber one?
The lawsuit is against the NY Times and book publisher Penguin Random House, along with some reporters at the NY Times. The complaint is… well… it is not the most organized or professional of complaints. It is, as so many Donald Trump lawsuits seem to be, political documents designed to please Donald Trump and his legally ignorant MAGA base, rather than convincing judges.
The complaint reads more like a press release than a legal document, packed with ego-stroking passages that reveal just how pathetically thin-skinned Trump remains. Consider this actual paragraph from a federal lawsuit:
Thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen, “The Apprentice” generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and remained on television for over thirteen years, with nearly 200 episodes. “The Apprentice” represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time.
And, yes, that picture is included.
The complaint starts out by claiming that the NY Times endorsing Kamala Harris was a form of “election interference” which is not how anything works.
President Trump trounced Harris with 312 electoral votes and a sweep of all seven “battleground” states. This victory was remarkable for many historic reasons, including because President Trump had to overcome persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.
That’s literally in the first paragraph of the complaint (though the claims themselves do not revolve around election interference, but even weaker claims of defamation). But, admitting that you won the election already undermines the idea that there was any damage done to Trump’s reputation from [checks notes] political reporting on him (historically some of the most protected of speech under the First Amendment.)
Indeed, Trump is going to have a pretty difficult time showing “damage” done to his reputation here. He claims that the NY Times tried to do three things:
Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference.
If that were true (and it isn’t) then they failed on all three counts. Trump won the election easily in 2024, he’s making absolute bank while being President (perhaps more than doubling his wealth) and all of the lawsuits against him have basically been shut down with Trump coming out on top.
Also, for anyone who has followed the NY Times’ repeated (and somewhat pathetic) attempts to bend over backwards to appease Trump and sanewash his attempt to bring fascism to America by pretending it’s politics-as-normal, this following sentence is ridiculous:
Today, the Times is a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.
There is no one who has followed the NY Times’ willingness to “both sides” every crazy thing Trump does who actually believes that.
Then, after nearly five pages of screaming about how liberal the NY Times is, the lawsuit finally says that this lawsuit is not really about the NY Times at all, but rather a book written by two of its reporters (hence the Penguin Random House inclusion on the defendants list).
The subject matter of this action—a malicious, defamatory, and disparaging book written by two of its reporters and three false, malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles, all carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump, and all published during the height of a Presidential Election that became the most consequential in American history—represent a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished “Gray Lady.” Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference. With President Trump having won the Presidency, Defendants’ goals remain similar and unlawful: tarnish his legacy of achievement, destroy his reputation as a successful businessman, and subject him to humiliation and ridicule.
Specifically, on September 17, 2024, Penguin published a false, malicious, and defamatory book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” (the “Book”), authored by Craig and Buettner.
Dude. You won! Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? My goodness.
Before diving deeper into this mess, it’s crucial to understand what Trump actually needs to prove. As a public figure, he must show “actual malice”—and despite what Trump’s lawyers seem to think, that’s not about being mean to him.
Actual malice requires proving the defendants published something they knew was false or with reckless disregard for the truth (and reckless disregard also means something different than most people assume: it means you have to have ignored evidence that what you were publishing was false). It’s an extremely high bar, deliberately designed to protect robust debate about public figures. It has absolutely nothing to do with being angry or hostile—which is what Trump’s very bad lawyers seem to think it means.
Defendants each desire for President Trump fail politically and financially. Each feels actual malice towards President Trump in the colloquial sense: that is, each—Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, as individuals, and the Times and Penguin’s relevant executives as corporations—subjectively wishes to harm President Trump, and each wish to manipulate public opinion to President Trump’s disadvantage to worsen his current and future political and economic prospects. Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.
That final sentence—”Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”—reads like it was written by a sixth grader having a tantrum, not a lawyer filing a federal lawsuit. More importantly, nowhere in this 85-page screed do Trump’s lawyers actually demonstrate the knowing falsity or reckless disregard that the law requires.
They describe completely typical best practices in reporting as if they’re nefarious, such as the following:
Likewise, the Times and its reporters, including Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, have a pattern and practice of contacting President Trump and his team regarding negative stories on a short timeline so as to be able to state that they sought comment—in order to preserve a scintilla of the pretense of neutrality—while making it functionally impossible for President Trump to comment on stories with factual errors, correct those errors, or provide a responsive quote before publication. This policy further enables the Times and its reporters to publish negative assertions about President Trump about which they subjectively harbor doubts as to their truthfulness by permitting them to claim that they sought factual confirmation or denial regarding their stories, even when they subjectively realize that they did not do so in good faith.
Again, that’s not how any of this works, and it’s certainly not how the NY Times’ reporting works. I have plenty of criticisms about the NY Times and its coverage, but the idea that they do this for the reasons stated is ludicrous.
The incredibly weak attempt to argue for reckless disregard… is to claim that because they didn’t interview producer Mark Burnett about Trump’s time on The Apprentice, that’s a form of ignoring counter evidence.
For non-exhaustive examples, and as detailed supra, Defendants published numerous statements regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” without first securing an interview from primary sources senior to the production of The Apprentice, such as Burnett. Defendants knew that Burnett would likely have contradicted numerous specific false, malicious, and defamatory purported statements of fact that they made regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” as well as their general narrative regarding President Trump’s role in the show’s success. Defendants therefore did not sufficiently pursue speaking with Burnett even after he did not grant an interview, did not sufficiently seek to obtain his original notes or records, and otherwise failed to engage with Burnett and other potential insiders with “The Apprentice” because they subjectively believed that these sources would have tended to contradict the defamatory lies that they wished to publish about President Trump.
Again, this is not how the NY Times works. If Burnett would have spoken to them (and historically he has refused to talk to the media about Trump beyond a single press statement he made before the 2016 election), the NY Times would have loved it and would have quoted him extensively, as that would be a huge scoop, given how often Burnett has refused to comment on Trump.
There’s also a whole tangent building off of Tulsi Gabbard’s ridiculously misleading statements earlier this year, falsely claiming that the Obama administration tried to fake Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, even though multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans) have found that Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, even if it didn’t have much actual success.
The lawsuit then asks for… $15 billion dollars. How very Dr. Evil. The NY Times, for what it’s worth, is currently valued at less than $10 billion.
A lot of people discussing this lawsuit are claiming two things: that it’s really all about getting a settlement out of the NY Times like he’s been getting out of others, and second that it’s an attempt to get NYT v. Sullivan (the key case that established the actual malice standard) overturned.
While that may be the intent behind this lawsuit, I find both unlikely. Yes, in the lawsuit, Trump lists out a bunch of those corrupt settlements, as if they’re somehow relevant here. But plenty of people have observed that those settlements had nothing to do with the merits of the cases, but rather were entirely about capitulating to a bully and trying to get him off their backs. And, in the case of CBS, it seemed quite clear that the settlement was so that Shari Redstone could get her deal to sell Paramount/CBS to Larry Ellison’s son.
And, when it comes to the NY Times, they have a very good legal team that tends to relish taking on bad faith, bullshit SLAPP style lawsuits. They have a very good track record on those, and don’t often roll over. I would imagine that the legal team feels pretty strongly about defending this case rather than settling.
As for the attack on the actual malice standard, that’s the same thing people claimed about the last Trump lawsuit against the NY Times and it went up in smoke. It’s what people seem to want to claim about a bunch of frivolous defamation claims lately, and while it may be what the lawyers want, they seem like really bad cases to make these arguments. Because the underlying facts are so silly and so obviously bullshit, that the facts make for really bad cases to argue that the NYT v. Sullivan standard is somehow unfair.
Honestly, this just feels like so many of Trump’s lawsuits: engaging in pointless vexatious SLAPP lawfare just to punish media properties that publish negative stories about him. He has long admitted that he enjoys filing such lawsuits. Famously, he once said:
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
That’s the very definition of a SLAPP suit. And, if you’re wondering, Florida does have an anti-SLAPP law, though it’s a bit quirky compared to other states. Also (more importantly) the Eleventh Circuit (which covers Florida) has said that you can’t use anti-SLAPP laws in federal court.
But, really, if you want proof that this is just Trump trying to punish those who dare to report on him accurately, just witness how he responded to a question about how he felt about Pam Bondi’s unconstitutional claims of punishing people for hate speech, by immediately threatening to go after the journalist who asked the question.
JON KARL: What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she's gonna go after hate speech? A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speechTRUMP: We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. You have a lot of hate in your hate. Maybe they'll have to go after you.
The New York Times has had a rough few decades when it comes to being manipulated by bad actors. But their latest embarrassment—a complete non-story about NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s college application to Columbia University from 2009—represents a new low in journalistic malpractice that combines hacked materials, racist sources, and a breathtaking willingness to be used as a vehicle for right-wing propaganda. Oh, and all for a story that has zero news value and zero insight into Mamdani’s qualifications to be mayor of New York City.
Here’s what happened: The Times published a story claiming that Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent, checked both “Asian” and “Black or African American” boxes on his Columbia University application all the way back in 2009. The implication, pushed by the story’s framing, was that this was somehow scandalous—a case of gaming the system for affirmative action benefits.
As he runs for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has made his identity as a Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent a key part of his appeal.
But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.
Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.
I’m genuinely curious about the Times’ logic here. Person born in Uganda checks “African American” box. Where’s the lie? Did Uganda move? Is it not in Africa anymore? Are we really going to pretend that America’s racial categories, designed primarily for descendants of American slavery, map perfectly onto the global complexity of human identity?
If there is a story, it is solely about the Times’ decision and later justification for publishing this non-story.
Mamdani has a complex racial and ethnic background that doesn’t fit neatly into America’s crude racial categories. As he told the Times: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.” He also noted that he wrote in “Ugandan” in the space provided for additional information.
Oh, and for all the “could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani” reporting in the piece: it didn’t. He didn’t even get into Columbia. Even though his father is a professor there.
So much for gaming the system.
But here’s where it gets really ugly: The Times obtained this information from a massive hack of Columbia’s database, and their source was Jordan Lasker, who goes by the online handle “Cremieux” and whose hobbies include arguing that Black people are genetically inferior. Yes, really. The Times initially described him merely as “an academic who opposes affirmative action,” but as The Guardian previously reported, Lasker regularly argues that Black people are mentally inferior to other races and has written posts defending the idea that African countries have “average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.”
But wait, it gets worse. The NY Time’s description of him as “an academic” is generous at best (or perhaps just credulous). His own sister claimed that the family has no evidence he ever graduated and that he didn’t walk at the graduation ceremony that year and his name wasn’t listed in the graduation program. An analysis by another account noted that while he was a PhD student between 2021 and 2024 at Texas Tech, the only academic publication they could find by him turned into a huge scandal that got the professor he co-authored with fired. The paper was not just racist pseudoscience—it also involved lying to the NIH to get access to data. Two-fer!
That article also suggests Lasker (in that paper) lied about his supposed affiliation with the University of Minnesota. When asked about it, the University of Minnesota revealed that Lasker had been a “non-employee” “data consultant” and they had asked him not to claim an academic affiliation:
So, to summarize the Times’ sourcing: They granted anonymity to a person whose identity was already publicly known, who promotes ideas about racial hierarchy that would make a 1930s eugenicist blush, who may have lied about his academic credentials, and whose main claim to fame is getting a professor fired for publishing racist garbage research. And this seemed like a credible source to them for a story attacking a Muslim candidate of color.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Rufo Connection Makes It Even Worse
If this sounds familiar, it should. As Semafor reported, the Times rushed to publish this non-story because they were afraid of being “scooped” by Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist who has openly bragged about manipulating mainstream media to advance his culture war agenda.
The paper believed it had reason to push the story out quickly: It did not want to be scooped by the independent journalist Christopher Rufo. Two people familiar with the reporting process told Semafor that the paper was aware that other journalists were working on the admissions story, including Rufo, a conservative best known for hiscrusade against critical race theory.
Rufo literally announces his manipulation tactics on Twitter. He’s written about how he plans to get outlets like the Times to amplify his disingenuous and misleading campaigns. And yet, the Times still falls for it every single time, then acts surprised when people point out they’re being played.
As Jamison Foser noted months ago about this dynamic, this isn’t really about the Times being “manipulated”—it’s about the Times wanting to publish these stories and using figures like Rufo as an excuse to do what they already wanted to do.
The Times had a choice: they could have ignored this obvious non-story, or they could have served as a willing vehicle for racists and right-wing propagandists to manufacture a fake scandal. They chose the latter. And then they doubled down on it.
But here’s what kills me: they could have written a fascinating story about how a network of racist activists was trying to weaponize hacked university data that revealed nothing particularly interesting to attack a Muslim mayoral candidate. They could have exposed the whole operation. Instead, they decided to become part of it. It’s like if Woodward and Bernstein, upon discovering Watergate, had decided to focus their expose on how the security at the Watergate Hotel was top notch, with an anonymous quote from G. Gordon Liddy.
The Double Standard Is Glaring
The Times’ decision becomes even more indefensible when you consider their recent editorial choices. They refused to publish hacked materials about JD Vance during the 2024 election and declined to explain why. But when a racist hands them a hacked college application from 2009 that reveals nothing of public interest, suddenly those ethical concerns disappear.
The paper also famously decided not to endorse candidates in local elections—except when it came to Mamdani, whom they specifically urged voters not to rank at all on their ballots. Interestingly, they didn’t issue similar “please don’t vote for this person” guidance about Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who resigned over sexual harassment allegations and has been plagued with scandals from his mismanagement during the pandemic. Apparently checking the objectively accurate box on a college application is more disqualifying than a pattern of sexual misconduct and mismanagement.
Manufacturing Controversy To Justify Bad Journalism
Perhaps most galling is the Times’ response to criticism. When readers and media critics pointed out how absurd this story was, an anonymous Times source told Semafor that the controversy proved they were right to publish this:
“The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting,” one senior reporter told Semafor.
But that’s not how any of this works. At all. Sometimes the “conversation and debate” is about how you should have known better.
Times editor Patrick Healy also doubled down, claiming—in a lengthy rambling thread on ExTwitter—that Mamdani responding honestly to their questions about this made it into a story.
The Times then published a follow-up piece asking readers about frustrations with racial categories on forms—a transparent attempt to retroactively justify their original story by suggesting there’s some broader conversation about racial identity that needed to be had.
But there was already a conversation about racial identity. It’s been going on for centuries. The Times didn’t need to platform a racist and manufacture a fake scandal to contribute to it.
The Real Story They Missed
As Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ former public editor, noted in The Guardian, this story tells us nothing about Mamdani’s qualifications or policy positions. It’s the journalistic equivalent of spending your time investigating whether someone returned their elementary school library books on time instead of, you know, whether they’d be competent at running a city.
Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.
The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.
The real story here is how easily America’s supposed “paper of record” can be manipulated by bad actors who openly announce their manipulation tactics. It’s about how the Times’ apparent opposition to certain candidates leads them to abandon basic journalistic standards. And it’s about how the paper’s desperate desire to appear “balanced” makes them perfect marks for right-wing propagandists who understand exactly which buttons to push.
As Hell Gate put it: “The failing, bumbling New York Times” has become a vehicle for race science and manufactured outrage, all while pretending they’re just doing journalism.
So who does this put the Times in league with? Much likeits coverage of trans youth, it’s helpful to look around and see who else is pushing the same line of coverage. It’s hard-right ideology laundered as legitimate journalistic inquiry. The article’s print edition on Sunday ran under the title “Mamdani Faces Scrutiny Over College Application.” From who? For what? The Times clearly doesn’t feel all that interested in answering these questions, other than its providing cover for fascistic ideologues. The Times is coordinating with people whose work is actively eroding what’s left of America’s attempts at racial equity.
Again, it’s hard to tsk-tsk a newspaper that said it wasn’t endorsing candidates in local elections anymore, andthen revised that to actually be like, “unless you’re thinking of electing a socialist, which in that case do not do that and instead vote for this sexual harasser.” Having failed spectacularly at stopping Mamdani, the Times is now unveiling its tried-and-true strategy to drum up controversy—and question the legitimacy of a person’s humanity—by doing the dirtiest of work for the worst-faith actors.
The Times owes its readers an explanation for why they thought this was a story worth telling. Why they granted anonymity to a person who promotes racial pseudoscience. Why they rushed to publish obvious non-news to avoid being “scooped” by a known manipulator. And why they continue to provide aid and comfort to people whose stated goal is to manipulate them.
But the paper has shown no inclination toward introspection. Instead, they’ve doubled down, claiming that the controversy they manufactured proves they were right to manufacture it.
In the meantime, the rest of us can learn something from this debacle: when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Chris Rufo has told us he manipulates mainstream media. Jordan Lasker has told us he believes in debunked racist pseudoscience about “racial hierarchy.” And the New York Times has told us that they’re willing to amplify both of them if it serves their editorial agenda.
While the Justin Baldoni legal fight with Blake Lively is still going on, one half of the dispute has been thrown in the dumpster… for now. If you’re not up on the case, here is the TL;DR version. Baldoni and Lively costarred in the movie It Ends With Us. Lively filed a claim of workplace harassment for inappropriate behavior on set by Baldoni, leading to an explosive public feud between the two. Eventually, Lively sued Baldoni over the claims, with Baldoni countersuing her and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for defamation and other claims. He also sued the New York Times for its reporting on the dispute. Baldoni’s legal team engaged in some fairly silly behavior on top of all of that. We said at the time that the suit against the New York Times in particular appeared destined for the aforementioned dumpster when the judge paused discovery to consider the Times’ motion to dismiss.
Well, it seems I was more correct there than I had intended to be. The judge has not only dismissed the suit against the New York Times, but Baldoni’s suit against Lively and Reynolds as well. As to his claims of defamation and that Lively stole the movie out from under him and his company, the judge had this to say.
Baldoni’s lawsuit centred on two claims: that Lively “stole the film” from him and his company Wayfarer by threatening not to promote it, and that she and others promoted a false narrative that Baldoni sexually assaulted her and launched a smear campaign against her, Judge Liman explained in his opinion.
But Baldoni and his production company “have not adequately alleged that Lively’s threats were wrongful extortion rather than legally permissible hard bargaining or renegotiation of working conditions”, he wrote.
Additionally, the judge wrote, Baldoni and his company had not proved defamation because the “Wayfarer Parties have not alleged that Lively is responsible for any statements other than the statements” in her lawsuit, which are privileged.
Defamation is notoriously hard to prove in court in America — for good reason. Of course, it gets all the more difficult when you can’t be bothered to make such a claim about specific statements other than those in the actual lawsuit itself. The lack of valid claims against Reynolds and others likewise resulted those suits being dismissed as well.
And, really, attempting to sue over the time-honored Hollywood tradition of wrestling for creative control over a movie is more than a bit laughable.
As for the New York Times, the court essentially told Baldoni that he can’t sue the media just because he doesn’t like their good faith reporting.
The judge also determined that evidence did not show that the New York Times “acted with actual malice” in publishing their story, dismissing that $250m suit as well.
“The alleged facts indicate that the Times reviewed the available evidence and reported, perhaps in a dramatized manner, what it believed to have happened,” he wrote. “The Times had no obvious motive to favor Lively’s version of events.”
Now, you can read the entire judgment below for yourself, if you choose. It is quite long and, frankly, filled with content in the early pages that is not particularly flattering to Lively and Reynolds. That’s only important insofar as the court appears to have looked at the facts in a clear-eyed manner before pivoting to what the actual law says about the various claims Baldoni made, which ended up lacking merit.
Now, while the court did give Baldoni leave to refile some of his claims, but only those that revolve around contract interference. And here’s where I’d like to remind you that we started covering this whole celebrity fiasco as a Streisand Effect story. Baldoni could have attempted to manage what is admittedly a difficult situation for him, self-made or otherwise, in a quiet and respectful matter. Instead, he went legal and very, very public with this whole dispute and, as a result, the dismissal of his claims is equally public.
It’s not a good look. At this point, hard as it may be, the best course would probably be to not file some amended suit or appeal the decision. Given how Baldoni’s side has behaved thus far, however, I doubt they’ll take that course.
We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts, with Lively initially alleging several instances of inappropriate workplace behavior by Baldoni, has now exploded into a Hollywood court case with competing lawsuits from both parties. While I tend to shy away from the idea of parties purposefully employing the Streisand Effect for wanted attention, as opposed to inadvertently generating unwanted visibility, that sure looks like this is a case of the former. Baldoni and his legal team have taken every step possible to make every bit of this as public as possible, while Lively has done the opposite.
Now, I want to make clear that I don’t really have much of a take as to the merits of the case on either side. I just don’t know enough to have an opinion on the legal drama itself. That is what trials are for, after all.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some silliness to talk about as an update here. And when it comes to the status of the trial and what’s happening within it, there are several things going on.
First, like the New York Times before him, Ryan Reynolds has been attempting to exit this whole thing. Lively’s husband was sued alongside his wife for defamation and for interfering in Baldoni’s business relationships. Unfortunately, it appears that Baldoni’s suit may not have met some pretty basic threshholds for making such claims.
“The entirety of Mr. Baldoni’s case appears to be based on Mr. Reynolds allegedly privately calling Mr. Baldoni a ‘predator,’ but here is the problem, that is not defamation unless they can show that Mr. Reynolds did not believe that statement to be true,” Reynolds’ attorneys Mike Gottlieb and Esra Hudson told Us in a statement. “The complaint doesn’t allege that, and just the opposite, the allegations in the complaint suggest that Mr. Reynolds genuinely believes Mr. Baldoni is a predator.”
The statement continued: “Mr. Reynolds’ wife has accused Mr. Baldoni — privately and in multiple complaints — of sexual harassment and retaliation, and as pointed out by Mr. Reynolds’ motion, Mr. Baldoni has also openly spoken about his past of mistreating women and pushing the boundaries of consent. Mr. Reynolds has a First Amendment right to express his opinion of Mr. Baldoni, which should be comforting to a group of people who have repeatedly called Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds ‘bullies’ and other names over the past year.”
This is the “actual malice” requirement for defamation at work. Baldoni’s lawyers would need to prove not that Reynolds made the statements they claim he made about Baldoni, but rather that he made them knowing they were false in order to prove defamation. And that is notoriously difficult to prove. Save any smoking gun evidence of Reynolds openly admitting he was spreading lies, it’s very unlikely the defamation claims are going anywhere.
“Earlier today we moved for sanctions against the lawyers and parties responsible for the utterly frivolous claims brought against Ryan Reynolds,” Reynolds’ legal team said in a statement to Us Weekly on Tuesday, May 20. “Justin Baldoni’s lawyer and his clients filed a preposterous lawsuit falsely claiming that Ryan Reynolds extorted people he had never met, that he allegedly interfered with business relationships that do not exist, and somehow defamed people he never said a word about based on unspecified statements that do not appear anywhere in their 391-paragraph complaint. These are not serious claims—they are a desperate ploy for clickbait headlines that have no place in federal court.”
“Mr. Reynolds provided the Rule 11 Plaintiffs and their counsel an opportunity to save face, explaining these claims’ glaring and fundamental defects and urging that they be withdrawn more than 21 days ago,” the docs read. “Unfortunately, the Rule 11 Plaintiffs and their counsel unequivocally refused to do so, offering no response on these defects except to argue that these issues are appropriately resolved by motion to dismiss and may later be supported by discovery. But these claims’ fundamental failings are not about the parties’ dispute as to the legal arguments relating to their claims, or the facts, or even that all of their claims are weak and meritless (which, they are).”
If Baldoni’s real aim in all of this was to make all of this as public and publicity-driven as possible, well, it all kind of tracks from there.
And that’s further backed up by some truly absurd claims that Baldoni’s legal team have made about how to conduct Lively’s deposition. One lawyer said, I suppose perhaps in jest, that Lively’s deposition should be an event the public can attend or see for a fee.
“Since Ms. Lively is open to testifying, let’s make it count,” Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman tells PEOPLE. “Hold the deposition at MSG, sell tickets or stream it, and donate every dollar to organizations helping victims of domestic abuse.”
Here again we see the legal team from one side behaving in a serious way, while the other is not. Whatever the truth of their competing claims against the other, it is certainly not a good look for one side coming off as professional and the other, well, not.
And, frankly, recent news about how Baldoni is stressed over the public legal drama seems quite odd coming from the person who made this very, very public in a way it hadn’t been previously. As entertaining as this all might be, there must certainly be a better way this all could have been handled than whatever this fiasco has turned into.
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 BestNetTech, 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.
There have been very few times I’ve encountered something in life that feels like it was absolutely made specifically for me. The Deadpool movie series is one of those few things. For my sensibilities, they’re just about perfect. And one of my favorite aspects of the films is the fourth-wall-breaking nature of the main character. Deadpool will often look into the camera and talk to the audience in a way that acknowledges that he’s in a movie. Examples of this are legion: Deadpool referring to the X-Men house smelling like Patrick Stewart, complaints in movie about licensing restrictions preventing cool cameos by other Marvel characters, or the narration in the 2nd film’s opener about how the entire movie was in a fact a “family movie.”
The point here is that cultural references that would normally have no place in a superhero movie abound. Some of those references even revolve around lead actor Ryan Reynold’s personal life. For instance, in Deadpool & Wolverine, a multiverse version of Deadpool that is female, Ladypool, was played by Reynolds’ wife, Blake Lively. Lively recently sued a director and co-star of a film she was in, Justin Baldoni, and while Baldoni had threatened to sue her back, instead he… sued the NY Times for reporting on Lively’s accusations. Lively sued over accusations of some very gross workplace behavior, among other things, whereas Baldoni is arguing, um, that the NY Times reporting on Lively’s accusations is defamation and… fraud?
Those accusations included, for instance, Baldoni attempting to pressure Lively over her physique in the movie shortly after she had a child, sharing inappropriate content with castmembers, and talking openly about sexual topics. Baldoni, meanwhile, has been quite famous for portraying himself as a really nice guy and talking openly about how he’s a “feminist.”
What does any of this have to do with Deadpool? Well, another multiverse character that shows up is Nicepool, an unmasked, long-haired version of the titular character. And fans noticed some similarities to the details surrounding the accusations Lively has made against Baldoni.
The particular moments in Deadpool & Wolverine that echo Lively’s claims against Baldoni include Nicepool’s lines about Ladypool “snapping back” into shape after having a baby and following that up with “It’s okay, I identify as a feminist”—since Baldoni touts his status as a feminist in his podcast. A deleted scene in Deadpool & Wolverine also saw Nicepool making reference to a feminist podcast; that latter scene in particular helped the “Baldoni is Nicepool?” theory go viral.
And viral it went, indeed. Major entertainment media sources even picked this up and ran with it.
I will make no claims as to the veracity of Lively’s claims for the purposes of this post. I will say that every action Baldoni has taken since appears to be designed to keep those claims in the headlines for as long and as loud as possible. And the fact that, despite suggesting he would sue Lively directly, he hasn’t… seems telling. Also, suing the New York Times for reporting on all of this? That is a very silly gambit unlikely to end in any kind of victory for Baldoni and most certainly Streisanding the attention on the accusations against him through the proverbial roof.
But Baldoni wasn’t done there. Once the speculation about Nicepool started, he fired off a litigation hold to Disney and Marvel, once again propelling all of this back into the news.
According to Variety, Baldoni’s lawyers are using the accusation as grounds for issuing a litigation hold letter which calls on Disney and Marvel Studios to retain “documents and data” in regards to Baldoni and “Nicepool.”
The litigation letter presented by Baldoni’s team asks Marvel and Disney to preserve “any and all documents relating to the development of the ‘Nicepool’ character” in addition to “communications relating to the development, writing, and filming of storylines and scenes featuring ‘Nicepool’” and “all documents relating to or reflecting a deliberate attempt to mock, harass, ridicule, intimidate, or bully Baldoni through the character of ‘Nicepool.’”
It’s hard to see the strategy here. I suppose that perhaps there might be some utility in building towards a defamation and/or harassment case using whatever can be dug up from Disney and Marvel. But, frankly, I doubt it will be much. And the content that appears in the movie is very much going to be protected speech on First Amendment grounds, given its parody nature and the extremely veiled references it makes (if it’s even making those references at all).
Using myself as a convenient test case, I had zero idea who Baldoni was until I caught wind of this whole mess with Lively, his suit against the New York Times, and most recently this legal notice sent to Disney and Marvel. Now I don’t know that I could forget his name, his image, nor the accusations leveled against him even if I tried.
So if the impetus for all this action by Baldoni was over anger at the public nature of these accusations, well, it seems he is working against that purpose at the moment.
