Justin Baldoni’s former publicist Stephanie Jones is suing the actor and director for breach of contract in a new lawsuit that links her dismissal to the alleged smear campaign against Baldoni’s It Ends With Us co-star Blake Lively.
This weekend, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment during filming as well as organizing a “smear campaign” against her in the months that followed.
The New York Times reports that the new lawsuit by Jones claims that her former employee Jennifer Abel was one of those involved in the alleged campaign against Lively.
Jones says she fired Abel last summer after learning she was stealing company documents in an attempt to start her own business.
When Abel returned her company phone to Jones, Jones says she discovered text messages and emails related to Abel’s work with Baldoni and his studio Wayfarer at which point she realized her employee had been involved in a retaliation campaign against Lively.
The lawsuit states that the messages show Abel was working closely with Melissa Nathan, a crisis communications manager hired by Baldoni.
The suit alleges that around the time of the release of It Ends With Us in August, Baldoni began to fear that Lively would go public with sexual harassment allegations against him.
It claims that Abel, Nathan and Wayfarer’s Jamey Heath worked together “to formulate a no-holds-barred strategy to discredit and suppress any potential revelations about Baldoni’s on set behavior,” and that to do so they launched “a smear campaign against Lively.”
Jones says she had no knowledge of these actions, and that Abel and Nathan “secretly conspired” to undermine her reputation, steal her clients and then blame her for the campaign against Lively.
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The Independent has approached Nathan and Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman for comment.
It emerged yesterday that Nathan had also worked for Johnny Depp during his high-profile defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard in 2022. Heard claims a similar smear campaign was instigated against her by Nathan’s agency TAG PR.
In a statement in response, Freedman told The Independent: “TAG PR must be the most powerful group of publicists the world has ever seen for it to be able to completely change the perception of both Amber Heard and Blake Lively.
“The only correlation between both individuals was that for decades every move they have made has been out there for everyone to see, widely filmed and documented for the public to make up their own minds – which they did, organically.
“All you have to do is watch the interviews that still remain if they have not already been scrubbed by their crisis pr teams (which is apparently their crisis teams next move since that’s what crisis teams do, they protect their clients).”
Freedman has called the allegations in Lively’s complaint “categorically false.”