The Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni PR battle goes to court

Editor’s note, June 10, 10 am ET: On June 9, 2025, a federal judge threw out Justin Baldoni’s countersuit against Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and publicist Leslie Sloane, and the New York Times. Baldoni had filed his $400 million countersuit in late 2024, alleging civil extortion on the part of the Hollywood insiders and defamation by all parties. Lively’s suit is still proceeding. The following story was originally published on December 23, 2024. The dramatic summer feud among the cast of It Ends With Us took a darker turn in December, when Blake Lively accused Justin Baldoni, the movie’s costar and director, of sexual harassment on set and a subsequent plot to tarnish her reputation. Since then, a full blown PR war between the two has been playing out in public. On December 21, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, his studio Wayfarer, Wayfarer CEO Jamey Heath, and others alleging a smear campaign and detailing numerous instances of sexual harassment she allegedly endured while making the film. In addition to the legal complaint filed with the California Civil Rights Department — which precedes a lawsuit — the New York Times published a story that detailed allegations of behind-the-scenes texts and a strategy between Baldoni and his crisis PR firm that expressed a desire to “bury” Lively. “I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted,” Lively said in a statement. In response to Lively’s filing and the accompanying New York Times report, Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit accusing the Times of libel and false light invasion of privacy, among other complaints. In response, Lively filed a competing lawsuit (based on her initial December complaint) alleging mental anguish and emotional distress. Now, a new website is live from Baldoni’s team, while the showdown finally enters a New York City courtroom. Lively and Baldoni’s legal filings shed light on what was previously categorized as a feud between the two stars, as does footage and audio released by Baldoni’s legal team. But the legal case also shows the inner workings of crisis management — the nefarious tactics publicists deploy to shape the narrative around celebrity — and perhaps more strikingly, how incredibly easy their job is when social media users are primed to turn against a female celebrity. Blake Lively’s legal filing alleges a hostile work environment The biggest revelation about the filming experience from Lively’s legal complaint is a January 4, 2024, It Ends With Us “all hands” meeting with high-level executives during the middle of production. At the meeting, Lively claimed that Baldoni and Heath, also a producer of the movie, had created a hostile work environment and subjected her to inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment; she and the rest of the cast and crew would not return to set until their behavior was addressed. Among Lively’s allegations were that Baldoni improvised kissing scenes, that Heath had shown her a nude picture of his wife, that both talked about their past porn addictions, and that Baldoni and Heath had each walked into her trailer uninvited while she was changing, nude, or breastfeeding. According to Lively’s filing, the meeting included a 30-point conduct improvement plan for Baldoni and Heath. The points address the aforementioned alleged behavior and include other guidelines like: “No more pressing by Mr. Baldoni to sage any of BL’s (Blake Lively) employees” and “No more inquiries by Mr. Baldoni to BL trainer without her knowledge or consent to disclose her weight.” [Image: Hugh Jackman, Blake Lively, and Ryan Reynolds attend the It Ends With Us New York premiere. Lively and co-star Baldoni did not attend premieres together. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/12/gettyimages-2165739212.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] After the meeting, Wayfarer brought an intimacy coordinator on set and conditions improved enough that Lively finished filming. Lively also asserts that in the final stages of production, she made her own cut of It Ends With Us — a version that Sony and Wayfarer ultimately went with. That decision gave her a producing credit, a bigger role in the making of the movie. The key to understanding this complaint and, seemingly, the fight over this movie is that Lively claims that Baldoni and Heath were worried that Lively’s allegations would eventually surface and damage their reputations. Because they believed that Lively could pull the trigger at any moment, Lively alleges, Baldoni hired crisis PR to effectively smear her. Justin Baldoni allegedly hired a crisis management firm to employ gross tactics against his costar While Lively and Bandoni are the faces of the It Ends With Us debacle, the most incendiary figure of the complaint is Melissa Nathan, the crisis management expert Baldoni hired. Publicists like Nathan are very important in Hollywood because celebrities’ images are so valuable. Actors’ and actresses’ careers depend on how marketable they are, and bad stories about said actors and actresses threaten their livelihoods. Nathan, who has also helped rehab clients like Johnny Depp and Travis Scott, makes those stories go away. Nathan’s connections in the media seemed to help facilitate her work — her sister, Sara Nathan, for instance, is a journalist at the New York Post and the two allegedly coordinated on Page Six’s coverage of the feud, according to the filing. Lively’s filing also alleges — via text messages and emails reportedly obtained through a subpoena— an interaction in which Nathan sent around a Daily Mail article with the headline: “Is Blake Lively set to be CANCELLED? String of ‘hard to watch’ videos that have surfaced following ‘tone deaf’ Q&A to promote It Ends With Us could tarnish 36-year-old star’s golden Hollywood image for good.” To be clear, it is not your imagination nor a hallucination; Daily Mail headlines are almost always that long and almost always find a way to mention an actress’s age in a menacing way. “You really outdid yourself with this piece,” a text from Jennifer Abel appears to read, a PR executive working with Wayfarer and Baldoni, to Nathan. “That’s why you hired me right? I’m the best,” Nathan seemingly wrote back. “You know we can bury anyone,” Nathan appeared to write in another message that surfaced in Lively’s filing. In addition, Nathan also allegedly presented Baldoni with an entire takedown plan that included teams that would monitor and post stories on Reddit and social media, as well as the hiring of Jed Wallace, “a Texas-based contractor” who was in charge of creating “content that appeared to be authentic” but was actually Baldoni PR that was designed to go viral. [Image: Justin Baldoni speaks onstage at the Vital Voices 12th Annual Voices of Solidarity Awards. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/12/gettyimages-2189129218.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] While Nathan and her team’s communications appear to be incendiary, sometimes stopping just short of a cartoon villain going “Muahahahaha,” the odd wrinkle to this story is that it seems as though Baldoni needs her services more than ever — the allegations of his film’s toxic work environment are out in the open while Nathan, Wallace, and Abel’s alleged machinations on his behalf have also been made public. Baldoni’s response filing alleges these seemingly over-the-top interactions have been mischaracterized and are actually sarcastic banter; two PR experts marveling at the backlash against Lively’s press tour, branding, and past transgressions — backlash Baldoni and his team say they had nothing to do with. What Baldoni is alleging The crux of Baldoni’s lawsuit is that the Times essentially took Lively’s side and published what he and his attorneys believe is a one-sided narrative favoring his It Ends With Us co-star. “The Times relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives,” the lawsuit states. One of the examples cited is the aforementioned Daily Mail article with that very long headline. Lively’s initial legal complaint asserts that Nathan, the PR crisis manager, took credit for placing the article over text message with Baldoni’s publicist. Baldoni’s lawsuit alleges that the text message and Times reporting on said interaction is missing context, and that the back and forth was actually sarcasm. “Damn. This is not fair because it’s also not me … Everything now looks like it’s me,” Nathan wrote in the exchange later, which the Baldoni lawsuit asserts is Nathan refuting her involvement with the Daily Mail and proving that the earlier messages were in sardonic jest. Text messages that show Baldoni’s PR team baffled at the response Lively was getting online are also cited in the document, evidence Baldoni and his lawyers say proves that the backlash against Lively wasn’t orchestrated by his PR team and organically caught fire on social media. That’s not far off from one of the takeaways of the Times’s initial reporting: Though Baldoni paid people to do a smear job, a lot of people online did a better job for free. The lawsuit also alleges that Lively and her own PR manager were themselves seeding stories ahead of the movie’s release and were mischaracterizing Baldoni’s interactions with Lively as sexual harassment and misconduct. In particular, Lively’s filing claims that Baldoni and Heath both entered her trailer while she was nude — Baldoni refutes this and includes a text message chain in which Lively invited him to her trailer while she was pumping breast milk to work on a scene. “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you want to work out the lines,” Lively writes in her text message. In the weeks following Baldoni’s filing, Baldoni and his team have released what they say is evidence that Lively’s accusations are overblown, if not false, including raw footage from an It Ends With Us slow dance scene. In the video, the two are dancing intimately and seem to be getting along. It’s also a scene in which the two actors are portraying people in love. Lively does pull away from Baldoni in a couple of sequences, but it’s impossible to tell how comfortable or uncomfortable Lively is with Baldoni. Baldoni and his team also released a seven-minute voice note that Baldoni allegedly sent Lively after a disagreement they had on set. “I’m gonna piss you off, probably, but I will always apologize and find my way back to center. I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I will, for sure, do better,” he says. “I’m really sorry. I fucked up. I will admit and apologize when I fail. I’m a very flawed man, as my wife will attest.” Lively, Reynolds, and their legal teams have asked for a gag order, stating that Baldoni’s leaks could influence a jury. A hearing for that request was set for February 3. On February 1, prior to that hearing, Baldoni’s team launched a website titled “LAWSUIT INFO” with the text of his updated legal claim and a “timeline of relevant events,” including previously unseen texts from Reynolds. The website purports to include a statement from August 2024, written by representatives for Lively and Reynolds, that their team intended for Baldoni and Wayfarer to release. In the proposed statement — which the Wayfarer team refused to release — the actor-director and associates would take responsibility for the “troubled production.” The statement read in part, “We hold ourselves accountable, it’s not anyone’s job but ours and that’s part of being ‘man enough.’ We will practice what we preach. We are learning and growing from the experience and we thank everyone for their patience as we find a better way to proceed.” (A previous Vox story appears on Baldoni’s timeline of events.) At the February 3 hearing, which neither actor attended, Judge Lewis J. Liman did not go so far as to grant Lively’s request for a gag order — but did insist that attorneys for both parties adhere to standard court rules about public statements, in order to ensure a fair trial. The trial between Lively and Baldoni is scheduled for March 9, 2026, provided both parties do not settle before then. How much of Blake Lively’s reputational hit was a smear campaign and how much of it is misogyny Lively’s filing argues that the work of Nathan and her associates is directly responsible for the tarnishing of her reputation. The filing alleges that Nathan delivered a proposal to Baldoni detailing how her team would shift the narrative against Lively — “engage with audiences in the right way, start threads of theories … this is the way to be fully 100% protected.” But it’s a little difficult to parse who was doing what and how much of a hand Nathan, Abel, and Wallace had in public opinion. Aside from a few instances of stories showing up in trade and tabloid publications, the legal filing doesn’t specifically get into what Nathan and Wallace did and didn’t seed. And while Lively’s assertion that Nathan is a master social media manipulator, it is giving a lot of credit to someone who allegedly gave the Daily Mail a tip. Further, Lively’s It Ends With Us promotion was a disaster, partly due to the fact that a film about domestic violence and Lively’s desire to simultaneously promote her other ventures — a hair care company, an alcohol company, her husband Ryan Reynolds’s projects — were always going to be at odds. (The filing alleges that the marketing directive was to focus on the more hopeful and empowering aspects of the movie rather than the film’s serious, domestic violence subject matter.) While Nathan seemingly was, to whatever degree, trying to manipulate the press, she wasn’t responsible for Lively’s conduct or the fact that her reputation already seemed to be on the downturn. Plus, Nathan’s alleged campaign was no doubt helped along by social media’s ingrained misogyny and its habit of cyclically turning on female celebrities. At one point during the initial release of the film, Nathan appeared to express her glee and surprise at how the narrative had shifted. Baldoni “doesn’t realise how lucky he is right now. We need to press on him just how fucking lucky,” Nathan allegedly wrote to Abel in October 2024. “The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don’t even agree with half of them lol,” Nathan added that same month. Nathan and Abel’s surprise is the entire argument of Baldoni’s lawsuit. Lawyers for the director allege that his PR team had no reason to employ a well-orchestrated smear campaign against Lively because, to their amazement, the public had already done so. The socials Nathan is referring to seem to be, in some part, stan accounts — social media fan accounts run by people online who relentlessly attack others who don’t share their point of view about a given celebrity or cultural property. In response to Baldoni’s lawsuit against the Times, Lively filed a federal complaint in addition to her previous December filing. Her lawyers said in a statement obtained by the New York Post: “Nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms. Lively’s California Civil Rights Department Complaint, nor her federal complaint … We look forward to addressing each and every one of Wayfarer’s allegations in court.” Update, February 3, 2025, 6:20 pm ET: The story was originally published on December 23, 2024, and has been updated multiple times, most recently with news that while a gag order has not been granted, attorneys for both parties were told to adhere to court standards for public statements.

This moment demands more than headlines

The Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni PR battle goes to court