Hollywood is in chaos mode as Justin Baldoni faces more legal battles amid the Blake Lively scandal. Baldoni’s former publicist, Steph Jones, has launched a lawsuit at the It Ends With Us star.
Jones, who owns the PR firm Jonesworks, is suing Baldoni, his company, and his current publicity team after he dropped her firm in August. She claims that Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan, key members of Baldoni’s PR team, were secretly plotting against her.
Jones said she fired Abel last summer after discovering she was stealing company documents in an attempt to start her own business. When Abel returned her company phone, Jones found text messages and emails that revealed Abel’s involvement in a retaliation campaign against Lively.
“Jones discovered the breadth and intensity of Abel and Nathan’s duplicity from these records,” her lawsuit explains, per Variety.
The lawsuit alleges that around the time of the release of It Ends With Us in August, Baldoni was worried that Lively would go public with sexual harassment allegations against him.
In response, Abel, Nathan, and Jamey Heath from Wayfarer Studios (Baldoni’s production studio) allegedly worked together “to formulate a no-holds-barred strategy to discredit and suppress any potential revelations about Baldoni’s on-set behaviour,” and launched “a smear campaign against Lively”.
Jones asserts that she had no knowledge of these actions and that Abel and Nathan “secretly conspired” to undermine her reputation while blaming her for the campaign against Lively.
“To this day, Abel and Nathan continue to point the finger falsely at Jones now that their own misconduct is coming to light, and to defame and attack Jones in the industry,” the lawsuit states.
This legal drama is happening alongside Lively’s complaint filed with the California Civil Rights Department, where she accused Baldoni of sexual harassment and alleges that his team attempted to “bury” her reputation. Lively’s claims include inappropriate comments made by Baldoni during filming and a hostile work environment.
This legal drama comes right after Blake Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department, accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment and claiming his team was trying to “bury” her reputation. The PR team mentioned in Lively’s lawsuit is in fact Jonesworks.
Baldoni is also accused of breaching his contract with Jonesworks in this new lawsuit, which required him to pay $25,000 per month after he left the firm just a few months into their year-long agreement.
In a notable connection, Nathan has previously worked for Johnny Depp during his high-profile defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard in 2022. Heard has claimed that a similar smear campaign was instigated against her by Nathan’s agency TAG PR.
Heard has also voiced her support for Lively calling the situation “as horrifying as it is destructive”.
In response to the current allegations, Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s lawyer 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.”
Freedman has also called Lively’s allegations “categorically false”.
Baldoni’s lawyers have not formally released a statement about this new lawsuit at the time of writing, but you can see the statement they released about Blake Lively’s lawsuit HERE.
