Justin Baldoni sued The New York Times for $250 million on Tuesday over its "defamatory" reporting on his alleged smear campaign against Blake Lively.

The "It Ends With Us" director and star is one of 10 plaintiffs on the libel and invasion of privacy suit, which along with publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan accuses the paper of relying on "'cherry-picked' and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead" in its bombshell Dec. 21 report, "'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine."

The lawsuit came just shy of two weeks after Lively, Baldoni's co-star in "It Ends With Us," filed a Dec. 21 sexual harassment complaint against the director, leading to an ongoing media frenzy and professional fallout.