Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. We are Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya. If this email has been forwarded to you can subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

We have been overwhelmed with subscribers and tips since we launched two weeks ago. Thank you! So we are increasing the frequency of Breaker to two newsletters a week (plus our podcast). One on Tuesdays, and one on Thursdays. (That also means you'll be getting stories and scooplets almost as soon as we do.) 

In today's letter, we reveal a raft of new information on the seismic media event masquerading as internet fluff that is the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni lawsuitverse. (We like "Baldively" as a portmanteau.) It involves The New York Times, Endeavor chief executive Ari Emanuel, Hollywood attorney Bryan Freedman, an ex-CIA employee turned crisis PR operative named Nick Shapiro, Lively's husband Ryan Reynolds, Taylor Swift, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, more internet personalities than we can list here, and a heady dose of conspiracy theory.

We've also found unlikely global connections between Brett Ratner, the filmmaker who is coming back from Me Too allegations with a Melania Trump documentary, Australian billionaire James Packer and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And we have more on the "Careful reader" mini-scandal at the New York Times (involving Pulitzer prize winning reporters Walt Bogdanich and Pam Belluck) that we broke news of two issues ago.

Plus scooplets about newsroom changes at the Washington Post, what happened when a feuding Bill Murray and Bob Woodward came face-to-face, and Vox’s AI entanglements.

Into the Baldivelyverse

(Exclusive.) It's the workplace dispute that took over the world. The actor Blake Lively hated her experience working on the domestic abuse movie It Ends With Us, directed by her co-star, Justin Baldoni. She hated the public backlash to her upbeat and floral-dominated publicity tour for the film even more. 

In Lively's account, detailed in a legal complaint and a bombshell New York Times story in late December of last year, Baldoni's behaviour amounted to clear abuse and harassment, and the backlash was in fact a secret smear campaign instigated by the director. In Baldoni's account, Lively escalated minor on-set scuffles and the fallout from her own misguided publicity plan into a scandal that never existed.

Baldoni is suing Lively and the New York Times. Lively is suing Baldoni. Taylor Swift, a friend of Lively's, is under threat of deposition. (And may be more involved in the case than has been previously reported.) Ari Emanuel, whose WME agency represented both parties and Lively's husband Ryan Reynolds, has dropped Baldoni and become an online...

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