When actress Blake Lively went public this month with the explosive accusation that her “It Ends With Us” co-star and producer Justin Baldoni and his team developed a campaign to “smear” her in the press for reporting on-set sexual harassment, she marshaled powerful evidence: her opponents’ own words.
A trove of text messages Lively submitted to California’s Civil Rights Department appeared to show Baldoni, his production company and two publicists affiliated with the company plotting “social manipulation,” among other tactics, to fend off any airing of Lively’s grievances and preserve Baldoni’s reputation.
“All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” Melissa Nathan, one of the crisis publicists, said in a text.
The text messages — rife with bravado, boasts and intrigue — have fueled a scandal that has rocked the entertainment industry and spotlighted the ruthless underbelly of the Hollywood publicity machine.
Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, has denied the existence of a smear campaign and said that the “cherry-picked correspondence” showed normal internal planning for crisis scenarios on a film that grossed more than $350 million. Freedman said the planning came after Lively “enlisted her own representative … to plant negative and completely fabricated and false stories with media.”
Amid the damaging revelations, one question has stood out: How did Lively and her team obtain the candid, private chats of Baldoni’s public relations team?
The answer in part shows the tangled web of personalities and businesses drawn into the dispute, and the confluence of legal and public relations strategies at play.
“I’ve never seen a case like this,” said Neville Johnson, the veteran entertainment litigator who has represented actors, musicians and other artists for nearly 50 years. Calling it “modern warfare in law,” Johnson was surprised on two fronts: the lengths to which publicists allegedly went to protect Baldoni, and that Lively’s team had procured such a potent tranche of text messages before filing their California civil rights complaint. “The biggest battle we face these days is obtaining evidence from the other side.”
Lively’s attorneys have been circumspect about the provenance of the text messages. Her complaint contains a footnote stating that the messages, including a 22-page compendium of texts submitted as an exhibit with the complaint, came through the “legal process, including a civil subpoena.” Some of the messages are redacted or have the senders’ and recipients’ names omitted.
But Stephanie Jones, the founder of Jonesworks — the publicity firm that has represented Tom Brady, Jeff Bezos and, until recently, Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios — effectively outed herself as the source of the damaging communications in a lawsuit she filed Dec. 24.
With Jonesworks as the publicity firm for Baldoni and his company, Jones would seemingly have been aware of the alleged smear campaign against Lively. But Jones disavows involvement and contends that a former subordinate, Jennifer Abel, and others close to Baldoni cooked up the plan as part of a broader “conspiracy,” which also included starting a rival publicity firm.
In her lawsuit, Jones accused Abel of “conspiring” to attack Jonesworks, steal the firm’s clients, coordinate the “media smear campaign” against Lively and then “publicly pin blame for this smear campaign on Jones.”
In addition to suing Abel, Jones sued Baldoni and Nathan, the crisis public relations professional whose blunt text messages have rocketed across social media.
The dizzying set of allegations in Jones’ 52-page lawsuit made clear that after terminating Abel on Aug. 21, Jones had Abel’s company-issued phone “forensically preserved and examined in detail.”
“Abel and Nathan’s covert take down and smear campaigns were revealed in black and white on Abel’s company-issued phone following her termination,” Jones said in her lawsuit.
In a statement, a member of Lively’s legal team confirmed that the text messages in Lively’s complaint were sourced from Abel’s phone and that the material came from a subpoena against Jonesworks.
How, when and where that subpoena was issued remains a mystery.
“The additional details about Ms. Lively’s investigation, including the lawful subpoena, will be produced during discovery,” the statement said.
Experts were at times flummoxed and impressed by how Lively managed to get hold of the text messages in the absence of a lawsuit. The state civil rights complaint she filed, which alleged sexual harassment and retaliation, could be a precursor to a lawsuit.
Some states, including California and New York, allow for discovery, or the gathering of evidence from various parties to learn about the facts of a dispute, before a lawsuit has been filed. But this type of pre-litigation discovery rarely happens in California, attorneys said.
If Lively’s lawyers took that route in California, they would have had to know that the evidence existed in the first place, then petition a judge and argue that there was a risk the evidence could be spoiled or not preserved. A spokesperson for the L.A. Superior Court said the court does not maintain records of such petitions.
“I’ve been doing this for decades and I’ve never seen it done before, but it can be done,” said Johnson, the entertainment lawyer. As an example, he said, lawyers may seek a subpoena to prevent a car involved in a crash from being demolished and request to examine it before filing suit.
James Spertus, a West Los Angeles litigator and former federal prosecutor, said the subpoena was “most likely” issued in another case and “then used in this one.”
For example, the subpoena could have been issued during a closed-door arbitration proceeding, attorneys said. Lively’s complaint named several firms and PR professionals involved in “It Ends With Us” as well as Baldoni’s production company, but Jones and Jonesworks were notably absent. Attorneys for Jones did not respond to an email seeking comment about the subpoena.
Some attorneys speculated that the subpoena had the hallmarks of a so-called “friendly subpoena,” where one side is seeking records from another party, who can use the subpoena as legal cover. Put another way, the owner of the records may want to give them up, and the subpoena allows them to say they were forced to comply.
Whatever the origin story, the texts have been curated and released by both Jones and Lively, effectively torpedoing their adversaries in one fell swoop.
The potency of the texts derives from their moment-to-moment chronicle of how Baldoni and his team discussed Lively. In a strategy document for Baldoni that Lively filed with her complaint, his publicity team identified “several potential scenarios at play here which we should be prepared for, should [Lively] and her team make her grievances public.”
“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” Abel wrote of Baldoni in a text message.
“We can’t write it down to him. We can’t write we will destroy her,” Nathan replied to Abel. “You know we can bury anyone. But I can’t write that to him.”
The precise nature of the help that Nathan and her firm, The Agency Group PR, provided to Baldoni and his production company is unclear. The text messages suggest that the publicists pitched negative stories about Lively to friendly media outlets. In her complaint, Lively alleged that Nathan enlisted Jed Wallace, formerly of Southern California and now based in Texas, who in turn “weaponized a digital army … to create, seed and promote content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums.”
Then, Baldoni’s team supplied the “manufactured content to unwitting reporters,” propagating a narrative that was negative toward Lively and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds.
A Daily Mail piece from this summer was published with the headline, “Is Blake Lively set to be CANCELLED?” and noted “hard to watch” videos of Lively that had surfaced online, triggering “a growing backlash against apparently diva-style behaviour caught on camera.”
Abel texted Nathan, “You really outdid yourself with this piece.”
“That’s why you hired me right? I’m the best,” Nathan replied.
According to Lively’s complaint, Baldoni’s team was trying to keep Lively’s allegations about his improper behavior from leaking online and in the press. In text messages cited in the complaint, Nathan appears to indicate that news coverage of human resources complaints stemming from “It Ends With Us” was scuttled through the team’s efforts.
Lively’s complaint asserted that Baldoni criticized her body and weight, was “constantly hugging and touching cast and crew” and inserted “improvised gratuitous sexual content” into the film, which is about a woman overcoming domestic abuse.
Lively also said that Baldoni “pressured” her into adding nudity into a scene where her character was to give birth and that the “chaotic” set was open to cast and crew; that Baldoni’s production partner, Jamey Heath, had showed Lively a video of his own wife’s naked body as she gave birth, which Lively initially thought was pornography; and that Baldoni had his “best friend” play the role of gynecologist, which was “invasive and humiliating.”
Before the cast resumed filming after the Hollywood strikes, Lively initiated a meeting about her allegations, according to the complaint. Other female cast and crew members had also reported concerns about the work environment, including sexual harassment. The producers agreed to institute protections against this behavior.
Baldoni’s representatives have denied misconduct and called the allegations against him and his team “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious.”
Freedman, the attorney, said in a statement that Lively’s “negative reputation” derived from “her own remarks and actions during the campaign for the film” along with “interviews and press activities that were observed publicly, in real time and unedited, which allowed for the internet to generate their own views and opinions.”
The high-profile case — a decade after the hack and release of Sony Pictures executives’ crude and frank emails — has offered an evergreen reminder: Be careful what you put in writing.
ABC News recently paid $15 million to settle a case filed by President-elect Donald Trump, who alleged that anchor George Stephanopolous defamed him. The settlement talks came after the judge ruled that Stephanopoulos and Trump had to sit for depositions and turn over emails and text messages.
In a lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, internal emails and text messages emerged that showed the unvarnished opinions of Tucker Carlson and other Fox personalities around Trump’s bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “Do the executives understand how much trust and credibility we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real,” Carlson texted colleagues.
In the dispute between singer Kesha Sebert and the songwriter and producer Lukasz Gottwald, known as Dr. Luke, whom she accused of sexually assaulting her, the producer’s harsh comments about the singer’s weight became public during litigation.
“Please keep her on her diet. No need to reply further. THANKS!” Gottwald wrote.
The dispute also unearthed the public relations plan that Sebert’s team devised to help amplify her case, incite “a deluge of negative media” on Gottwald, fuel the #FreeKesha movement and secure a more favorable contract arrangement.
To Melanie Cherry, the associate director of the Public Relations and Advertising program at USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, the Lively case will further reinforce “why publicists and crisis PR teams must be diligent in keeping communications with clients and internal teams secure and private.”
“The role of a publicist should remain in the background,” she said, “rather than becoming part of the story.”
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