Justin Baldoni’s ex-publicist sues over alleged Blake Lively smear campaign

NEW YORK – A former publicist for actor-director Justin Baldoni filed a lawsuit on Dec 24 that adds a new dimension to an alleged campaign to undermine actress Blake Lively. The publicist, Ms Stephanie Jones, said she was forced out of representing Baldoni and his film studio amid concerns that Lively would go public with accusations of misconduct against him.

Ms Jones’ lawsuit, filed in New York and alleging breach of contract, follows a separate legal complaint in California on Dec 21 by Lively. The actress asserted that Baldoni; his film studio, Wayfarer; and their public relations representatives retaliated against her after she raised her misconduct allegations during the filming of romance drama It Ends With Us (2024), which Baldoni directed and starred in. She also

accused him of sexual harassment.

Lively’s legal complaint included excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and e-mail she had obtained through a subpoena. Ms Jones’ lawsuit reveals that those messages came from a company phone used by one of her former employees, Ms Jennifer Abel.

Ms Jones said she fired Ms Abel in 2023 after discovering that Ms Abel had been stealing documents from her firm as she prepared to start her own business. According to the lawsuit, the phone was voluntarily returned to Ms Jones’ company, Jonesworks, “in the presence of an employment lawyer”, and the messages and e-mail “were forensically extracted directly from that company phone”.

Ms Abel had been the Jonesworks point person for Baldoni and Wayfarer, and the messages show that she worked closely with Ms Melissa Nathan, a crisis communications manager. The lawsuit says that Ms Jones saw the messages from the phone after she fired Ms Abel and Wayfarer stopped working with Jonesworks. Ms Jones says in the lawsuit that in reviewing the messages, she discovered that her former employee had been involved in a retaliation campaign against Lively.

As the

release of It Ends With Us

neared earlier in 2024, Baldoni began to fear that allegations about his on-set misbehaviour would come out, the lawsuit says. The suit says that without Ms Jones’ knowledge or approval, and with encouragement from producer Jamey Heath, another head of Wayfarer, Ms Nathan and Ms Abel began “to formulate a no-holds-barred strategy to discredit and suppress any potential revelations about Baldoni’s on-set behaviour”. The suit says they launched “a smear campaign against Lively.”

Jones alleges in her lawsuit that Ms Abel and Ms Nathan “secretly conspired” to undermine Ms Jones’ reputation, steal clients from her firm and blame her for the campaign against Lively.

For their part, the defendants in the legal complaints by Ms Jones and Lively have remained mostly silent. In an initial statement in response to Lively’s legal filing, Mr Bryan Freedman, a lawyer representing the defendants, said the claims were “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious”. NYTIMES