Blake Lively’s legal complaint against co-star Justin Baldoni and his team of operators exposes the sinister subset of the crisis communications industry that seeks to attack and misinform, even as Lively’s own tactics, and the role of notorious publicist Stephanie Jones, come further into focus.
Among the many ways that the internet has destroyed traditional Hollywood: What used to constitute public relations doesn’t really work anymore. The notion of a celebrity persona crafted solely via occasional media appearances seems about as quaint and outdated as a black-and-white movie or a print magazine. What matters now, in many circles, is the conversation, the constant churn of a carefully curated digital profile: media hits, social chatter and comments, video clips, and searchable content—both seeded and unseeded—that together comprise an evolving perception of a public person.
The old P.R. system obviously had its flaws. But it has been replaced by, essentially, guerrilla warfare—a 24/7 battle for attention, impressions, and sentiment, all of it subject to manipulation and, in moments of crisis or vulnerability, outright implosion. The new, expanded battlefield has also empowered some of the world’s worst people, trained in the dark arts of media machinations and less constrained by the guardrails of traditional journalists and other gatekeepers. They call themselves crisis communications experts or reputation management consultants, but they are really a subset of those people, political operatives trained to attack, obfuscate, misinform, flood the zone, and, if necessary, to destroy for a price.
At the same time, film and television stardom is much more ephemeral, both financially and culturally, than it used to be. The celebrity industrial complex pot of gold can now generally be found at the end of the personal brand rainbow, via the leveraging of those amorphous qualities: public persona, goodwill, aspiration, and, for some, talent. Commoditization has always been a mostly beneficial byproduct of celebrity, but now the cultivation of a personal brand is what matters above all else. It creates value amid the noise and, when managed particularly well, can turn average celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Selena Gomez and Ryan Reynolds into billionaires.
This is all a long way of explaining why the wars of perception being waged online matter so much. Or why astroturfing—flooding the web with content that appears to be organically produced but is actually part of a paid campaign to push an agenda, often to smear someone or fire back against an attempted smearing—is now a service that certain P.R. firms casually offer on their menu, like a side of fries with a Double Double. And it’s why the battle behind the scenes, and now completely engulfing, the summer hit movie It Ends With Us has become the saddest, nastiest, and unfortunately most cutting-edge public relations war of 2024.
For these reasons, the publicists leading this fight—mostly the team allegedly smearing star Blake Lively on behalf of her co-star and producer-director Justin Baldoni, but also many others involved here, both directly and tangentially—are Hollywood’s Villains of the Year.
“We Can Bury Anyone”
Have you actually read the complaint in Blake Lively v. Wayfarer Studios LLC et al.? Grossness all around. Yes, there are the scheming texts from the Baldoni operatives, including Melissa Nathan—last seen sliming Amber Heard out of Hollywood on behalf of Johnny Depp during their defamation trial—and Jen Abel, who worked alongside my old buddy Stephanie Jones, a publicist so vindictive and dishonest that Business Insider recently devoted 3,500 words to her behavior. The texts seem lifted from a mustache-twirling cartoon nemesis: “We can bury anyone” … “I think we need to put the social combat plan into motion” … “We can’t write we will destroy her.” Plus Jed Wallace! A notorious figure in crisis P.R. who positions himself as a master manipulator of “the narrative,” all on behalf of a guy, Baldoni, who stands accused of sexual harassment (which his lawyer denies) despite repeatedly calling himself a “feminist ally” and hosting a podcast where he talks about his activism all the time. Can’t make this stuff up.
As enjoyable as it is to see gross texts and awful people exposed in The New York Times and now across the media, their strategies aren’t too shocking given the modern realities of high-stakes P.R. wars. Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve been on the receiving end of these campaigns, but lots of publicists and lawyers are aggressive in a crisis—you get fired these days if you aren’t—and Abel claimed in a Facebook post that the machinations were mostly preparation: “There was no ‘smear’ implemented.”
I seriously doubt that… Case in point: On August 10, the day after It Ends With Us came out, Nathan’s team reported that they had “started to see [a] shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative.” That sure sounds like implementation. But even the Times acknowledges it’s “impossible” to determine whether any of the alleged sliming was actually responsible for that shift in sentiment, or the ultimate damage to Lively’s brands. Sales of those brands tanked after the Baldoni onslaught is said to have begun, but how much is provably his team’s fault?
What’s most interesting—and, frankly, a little bit gross, if also understandable—is how Lively’s team has chosen to fight back. Her lawyers at Manatt and Willkie Farr & Gallagher filed this matter as a 10-count complaint with California’s Civil Rights Department. It’s not an actual lawsuit, but a first step toward a suit. And it encourages the state to investigate on its own, but it also allows for some rare pre-complaint discovery—a similar strategy to the one Willkie is deploying on behalf of Drake in his ongoing war with Universal Music Group.
That led to the early “subpoena” of these private and highly inflammatory text messages… not from Abel or Baldoni or anyone at Wayfarer, but from none other than Stephanie Jones, who terminated Abel in late August and, by all accounts, hates her guts. Jones and Abel split shortly after the release of It Ends With Us and the publication of that Business Insider story, though Jones continued to rep Wayfarer. Multiple sources told me that Jones confiscated Abel’s work phone as part of that split, which was particularly heated because Abel was leaving to start her own firm. Since then, Jones has been on a crusade against her former colleague—and those who know Jones well have told me she will stop at nothing to harm a perceived enemy. (When Jones didn’t like a story I wrote about her clients Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos, this Page Six story calling me “sexist” appeared days later, written by Sarah Nathan, Melissa’s sister. When Dwayne Johnson split with Jones last year, negative media coverage began appearing about him. At the time, Jones denied she was responsible.)
So, all of a sudden, Jones was “subpoenaed” for Abel’s private communications, which were then leaked to the Times for an article that absolutely buried Abel? At the very least, it appears that Jones maybe volunteered those texts to harm her nemesis, even if they also hurt Wayfarer, and Lively’s lawyers maybe laundered the source via the “subpoena.” (Compliance with the subpoena could also free Jones from confidentiality obligations she had to Abel.)
It also maybe seems notable that neither Jones nor her company, Jonesworks, is mentioned a single time in either the Lively complaint or the Times story, despite being a Wayfarer publicist and Abel’s employer when much of the allegedly nefarious activities went down. The Times noted that Nathan’s P.R. firm was backed by Scooter Braun, but that tidbit would have been even more interesting had the story mentioned that Braun has also been repped by… you guessed it, Steph Jones. Braun’s passive involvement in a slime campaign against Lively, a B.F.F. of his nemesis Taylor Swift, herself a master of her own media narrative, adds another incestuous element to this sordid affair. As does the fact that Jones’s husband is Jason Hodes, an agent at WME, which reps both Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and which just dropped Baldoni, no doubt under pressure from the Reynolds-Livelys. Keeping up? (Disclosure: WME represents Puck, but not me personally.)
Speaking of WME: Let’s not pretend that the agency, whose parent company continues to employ caught-on-video wife beater Dana White, cut Baldoni due to anything other than financial considerations. I’ve had several conversations with WME agents this year about how they don’t just quickly cancel people. They consider accusations carefully and convene a “client action committee” of stakeholders before they drop anyone, as they did with Morgan Wallen in 2021 after his racist comments surfaced.
And yet, no such committee was convened before Baldoni was booted. Why? Optics, yes, and both Sony and SAG-AFTRA have since put out statements supporting Lively. But Lively and Reynolds, a massive WME client, are almost certainly calling the shots. Remember when J.J. Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, basically demanded that CAA fire agent Adam Berkowitz after he was accused of inappropriate conduct? Similar vibes here.
Anyway, knowing that this Steph Jones angle would all come out during the litigation, Lively’s lawyers admitted to me today that her company was the source of the texts. “The subpoena disclosed and referenced in the complaint was served on Jonesworks LLC,” they said in a statement. “The internal documents referred to in the complaint were produced subject to that subpoena.” They say more information is forthcoming but declined to comment further.
For its part, the Times story—whose byline includes Megan Twohey, of Harvey Weinstein Pulitzer fame, further elevating the allegations—revealed only that the private communications were “subpoenaed,” neglecting to mention that they were subpoenaed from Jones, who has a clear axe to grind in this situation. That’s maybe interesting, too.
Adding yet more fuel to the fire, Bryan Freedman, the litigator for Wayfarer, Baldoni, Nathan, and Abel, is now claiming that the complete set of texts from Abel’s phone will show that Lively’s team cherry-picked communications that are “deliberately misleading, altered and are taken completely out of context.” The irony, he said, “will be that the ‘smear campaign’ is Lively’s team purposely withholding texts that prove that no smear campaign ever took place.” Hmmm. The texts out there already are pretty bad. Regardless, Freedman is now planning to sue Jones, personally. Steph did not respond to my request for comment.
The New P.R. Wars
Despite all this, you may still be asking, What’s the big deal?—at least legally. After all, social manipulation and astroturfing are just part of the crisis playbook these days. It’s all noise online, right? Baldoni’s team may have supercharged negative sentiment or boosted unflattering interviews of Lively, but they didn’t create those interviews out of thin air. That’s why Lively’s complaint includes breach of contract and retaliation claims. Essentially, the aggressive P.R. tactics might not be actionable… except for the fact that she had accused Baldoni of sexual harassment and his company agreed in writing that it wouldn’t attack her in response.
That broad side-letter contract stemmed from Lively’s claims of harassment on-set, after which she got Baldoni and Wayfarer to agree to refrain from 30 separate categories of bad behavior, everything from unwanted touching and dirty talk to “no more adding of sex scenes, oral sex, or on-camera climaxing by Lively outside the scope of the script she approved when signing on to the project.”
That agreement laid the groundwork for her current harassment claim, and it also allowed her to argue a breach of the provision that called for “no retaliation of any kind” against Lively, “including during publicity and promotional work.” Even if Lively spread dirt on Baldoni (which she maintains she didn’t), she was under no such constraint.
A pretty smart strategy, though this case is certainly in the early stages. With Freedman promising to sue Jones, a fiery response from Baldoni’s team expected as soon as this week, and a full civil lawsuit likely from Lively, this situation could unmask the rat-fucking underworld of Hollywood crisis P.R. like nothing since the Weinstein exposés. “The allegations in the complaint are head-turning, but I think it’s nothing compared to the litigation that’s coming,” Puck’s legal expert, Eriq Gardner, slacked me today. (He’ll have more on Thursday.) Indeed, 2024 may end up as a turning point when the cold war over public perception of celebrities turned hot.
Previous Villains of the Year…
2023: Nelson Peltz, Ike Perlmutter, and Jay Rasulo (click here)
2022: Gunnar Wiedenfels (click here)
2021: Adam Aron (click here)
