Justin Baldoni is being sued by his own former PR now
The invisible hand of Hollywood—the public relations machine—is suddenly quite visible amid the Justin Baldoni vs. Blake Lively narrative war. Lively may have shocked the pop culture world with a legal complaint, but it's an actual publicist filing the first lawsuit against Baldoni. Not only that, it's Baldoni's own former publicist. Stephanie Jones, one of the biz's biggest behind-the-scenes names and the founder of the company that used to rep Baldoni, is suing him, his company Wayfarer Studios, crisis PR manager Melissa Nathan, and Baldoni's current publicist Jennifer Abel, per Deadline.
Abel—the one who allegedly helped coordinate that smear campaign and who admitted earlier this week to "sophomorically [reveling]" in Lively's digital lashings—actually used to work for Jones. In fact, Abel was still at Jones' company for part of the It Ends With Us set drama before leaving to start her own company (and taking Baldoni and his studio with her). It was evidently a bad breakup, as Jones is suing for defamation and breach of contract, among other things. Abel is specifically accused of downloading and stealing company documents and clients, per the outlet.
"Defendants Abel and Nathan secretly conspired for months to publicly and privately attack Jones and Jonesworks, to breach multiple contracts and induce contractual breaches, and to steal clients and business prospects," the suit reads in part (via Deadline). "Behind Jones’s back, they secretly coordinated with Baldoni and Wayfarer to implement an aggressive media smear campaign against Baldoni’s film co-star, and then used the crisis as an opportunity to drive a wedge between Jones and Baldoni, and to publicly pin blame for this smear campaign on Jones—when Jones had no knowledge or involvement in it."
The lawsuit comes as some industry insiders and observers (including a recent Puck News report and a veiled suggestion from Abel herself in a since-deleted Facebook post) have theorized that Jones voluntarily fed incriminating text messages to Lively's team in an act of revenge against Abel. Much of those messages came from Abel's Joneswork company phone, and a question still remains as to how Lively knew that those texts even existed to form the basis of her complaint. Abel apparently tried to claim that Jones doctored the messages from that phone to make her look bad (some of which are included in Jones' own filing, like Abel calling Baldoni "pompous" and Nathan "a piece of shit"). Jones, of course, denies this: "Jones has never doctored any text messages and has no reason to do so," her suit reads. "Abel’s text messages were forensically extracted directly from the company phone that Abel used during her employment at Jonesworks … And as has become glaringly apparent, the text messages are themselves enough to condemn Abel and Nathan without any need for doctoring."
Suffice to say this PR battle over a PR battle has the industry in a bit of a tizzy. Sources quoted in a Variety piece on the subject have been clutching their pearls about it. As "one top studio executive" put it to the outlet, "There are two smear campaigns going on here. One against Lively, and one against the PR people. It doesn’t mean that Jen Abel and Melissa Nathan didn’t do anything wrong, but who sold them out? There’s a code you don’t breach." Seems like a few norms have been breached, and with Lively's lawsuit still to come, who knows what more is in store.