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

A former publicist for actor and director Justin Baldoni filed a lawsuit Tuesday that adds a new dimension to an alleged campaign to undermine actor Blake Lively. The publicist, 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.

Jones’ lawsuit, filed in New York and alleging breach of contract, follows a separate legal complaint in California on Saturday by Lively. The actor 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 “It Ends With Us.”

Lively’s legal complaint included excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and emails she had obtained through a subpoena. Jones’ lawsuit reveals that those messages came from a company phone used by one of her former employees, Jennifer Abel, who was among those Lively accused of helping to orchestrate a smear campaign against her.

Jones said she fired Abel last summer after discovering that 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 Jones’ company, Jonesworks, “in the presence of an employment lawyer,” and the messages and emails “were forensically extracted directly from that company phone” and “have been preserved in their original state.”

Abel had been the Jonesworks point person for Baldoni and Wayfarer, and the messages show that she worked closely with Melissa Nathan, a crisis communications manager, as soon as Wayfarer and Baldoni hired her. The lawsuit says that Jones saw the messages from the phone after she fired Abel and Wayfarer stopped working with Jonesworks.

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. Abel has since opened her own firm and has continued working for Wayfarer.

As the release of “It Ends With Us” neared this past summer, Baldoni began to fear that allegations about his on-set misbehavior would come out, the lawsuit says. The suit says that without Jones’ knowledge or approval, and with encouragement from Jamey Heath, another head of Wayfarer, Nathan and Abel began “to formulate a no-holds-barred strategy to discredit and suppress any potential revelations about Baldoni’s on-set behavior.” The suit says they launched “a smear campaign against Lively.”

Jones alleges in her lawsuit that Abel and Nathan “secretly conspired” to undermine Jones’ reputation, steal clients from her firm and blame her for the campaign against Lively. She also accuses Baldoni, Wayfarer and Abel of breaching their contracts with her company. Bryan Freedman, a lawyer representing the defendants, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Since news of Lively’s allegations broke Saturday, there have been cascading consequences for Baldoni and Wayfarer. Within hours, talent agency William Morris Endeavor dropped him as a client.

Colleen Hoover, author of the book “It Ends With Us”; Jenny Slate and Brandon Sklenar, cast members of the movie; and Alex Saks, one of the producers, are among those who have publicly supported Lively.

On Monday, Liz Plank, who has co-hosted the “Man Enough” podcast with Baldoni and Heath, announced she would no longer be appearing on the show. And Vital Voices, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women, rescinded an “ally” award it had presented to Baldoni this month for “advocating on behalf of women and girls.”

For their part, the defendants in the legal complaints by Jones and Lively have remained mostly silent. In an initial statement in response to Lively’s legal filing, Freedman said the claims were “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious.” He also has suggested that the text messages cited were “cherry-picked” to make his clients look bad and that the plans his clients drafted proved unnecessary because organic criticism against Lively took off and received media attention.

The text messages and other documents show that Abel was part of the discussions as Baldoni and Wayfarer hired first Nathan and then Jed Wallace, a self-described “hired gun,” who led a digital strategy that included boosting social media posts that could help their cause. There are references in emails to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” and text messages cite efforts to “boost” and “amplify” online content that was favorable to Baldoni or critical of Lively.

One of Nathan’s employees wrote in a text message that included Abel, “We’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative.”