Celebrity PR Is Not Looking Great In The Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni Case

For most fans, the behind-the-scenes crisis PR machine that mitigates the public narratives of Hollywood talent is of very little interest. Folks hear about a celebrity controversy, scandal or misjudged statement and are rarely curious about why at some point it often just goes away — and where it ever came from to begin with.  

For whatever it’s worth, that’s probably how it should be. The inner workings of public relations should not really be the concern of the public. The indifference is likely a sign that it’s working well. A hint and a half that it’s not successful is when it becomes a critical focus of a high-profile case — catalyzed by a legal complaint from Blake Lively and made public in a New York Times article in December that includes screenshots of allegedly incriminating text messages between PR professionals. 

Enter Jennifer Abel, Melissa Nathan, Leslie Sloane and Stephanie Jones, the four publicists who are named in legal complaints and lawsuits that have been filed in the last few weeks between Lively’s and Justin Baldoni’s teams. 

In the complaint, Lively alleges that her “It Ends With Us” co-star Baldoni, who also directed and co-produced the movie (with his company Wayfarer), hired Abel and Nathan to orchestrate a smear campaign against her ahead of the movie’s Aug. 9 release last year. It also claims that that was in retaliation for Lively’s raising of concerns of sexual harassment and misconduct by Baldoni and co-producer Jamey Heath in a meeting while the film’s production was paused during the 2023 writers strike. The complaint alleges that Baldoni hired Nathan and Abel out of fear that those concerns would be made public following a flurry of suspicion from social media users when the two stars were never seen together at the film’s premiere. 

The text messages shown in the New York Times article have particularly shocked audiences and readers. They portray Abel and Nathan allegedly conspiring and celebrating in real time that a bevy of online social media users were turning against Lively weeks before the release of “It Ends With Us,” amplifying a hate narrative that in turn caught the attention of myriad news sites, including HuffPost. 

For his part, Baldoni has denied all allegations. On Dec. 31, he was among 10 others, including Abel and Nathan, who filed a $250 million lawsuit against the Times, accusing the publication of libel and false light invasion of privacy (portraying someone in a misleading and damaging way) and “altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.” The Times denied the claims. 

And just this week, Baldoni’s team filed a $400 million lawsuit against Lively, her publicist Sloane and husband Ryan Reynolds alleging civil extortion, defamation and false light invasion of privacy. It also claims that Lively used her power to take over Baldoni’s film throughout production, enlisted Reynolds to make “unauthorized changes to the script in secret” and that Sloane propagated “malicious stories portraying Baldoni as a sexual predator.”

“This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim,” Lively’s legal team said in response to Baldoni’s latest lawsuit. “This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim Offender.” 

As more statements from both Lively’s and Baldoni’s legal teams continue to make headlines, another conversation that has been simmering on the sidelines concerns the alleged practices of celebrity crisis PR, particularly in the social media age.

Even in an era when media literacy is in the toilet and checks and balances are undervalued on platforms like Facebook, some have sounded the alarm about the claim that a PR team could be behind a character assassination. (Others have called it “disturbing.”) Abel’s text shown in the Times article that she was “having reckless thoughts of wanting to plant pieces this week of how horrible Blake is to work with” is just one example that compounds that.

Kaitlyn McClung, a PR and communications professional with extensive crisis PR experience, recognizes the heightened distrust in public relations. 

“Because of instances like this ... I do believe that — maybe not in this case, but in the past — PR firms have made the wrong decision ethically and planted something or have gone against a code of ethics in some way to get their client ahead,” she told me in a video call earlier this month.

“And that’s what breaks my heart, the fact that this may be true and this may happen,” she added. “Now we don’t have the public’s trust. Our entire job is to relate to the public and help get our client relatable to the public and help them in any way and be that relationship between.”

The question over whether planting articles is ethical seems to depend on who else in the PR industry you ask. Adrienne Uthe, the founder/adviser of Kronus Communications, appreciates that with the Lively and Baldoni case, the public now has a more honest understanding of what PR is.  

“I think people think that it’s a cleaner industry than it actually is,” Uthe told me on another call. “There’s a dark side to PR, just like every other industry. With PR, it’s sexy, it’s razzle-dazzle, it’s glitz and glam. But in reality, it’s getting dirt on people but using it in a legal way.”

What does that look like?

“It’s having a really good legal team that you trust to tell you what you can/cannot do, and what you should do,” she said. 

It’s unclear whether Abel and Nathan had that guidance at the onset of signing on with Baldoni and Wayfarer or at any other point during their collaboration. Or whether Sloane did while she was allegedly working behind the scenes with a journalist to counteract rumors about Lively.   

It’s obviously not a great sign that each of those PR reps is being sued right now. 

But it’s the allegation that Abel and Nathan were working with Baldoni to retaliate against Lively’s legally protective complaint of sexual harassment against her employer (Baldoni and Wayfarer) that has particularly put them in hot water.

“If a third party who is not your employer acts in concert with your employer to knowingly break employment laws, then that third party is just as liable as your employer,” Nisha Verma, a labor and employment partner at the Dorsey & Whitney law firm, explained to me on a video call.  

Abel and Nathan’s correspondence, shown in screenshots in the Times article, is damning, she said. “Some of the evidence indicates that that’s what they were aware of. And these are their own text messages.”

Baldoni’s newest lawsuit, though, claims that Nathan and Abel were not behind the alleged smear campaign against Lively but that they were “ready in case Reynolds and Lively decided to unleash their wrath on them.” That plan, which was allegedly not enacted, came after Baldoni’s camp claimed Reynolds approached Baldoni’s agency, WME, suggesting that he was a “sexual predator” and that they drop him. 

(Following Lively’s initial legal complaint in December, it was reported that Baldoni was dropped by WME, but the agency denied that it was pressured to do so by Reynolds or Lively.)    

From Uthe’s perspective, the alleged tactics of Nathan and Abel are all par for the course in crisis PR. She suggested that representatives are “hired to do a job” and sometimes “need to be collecting intel on the other side, doing some oppositional research to, if you have to get dirty, have it ready to go.” Still, she said that Nathan and Abel “fumbled the bag” in their execution.

“At the very least, better strategies, risk management tools and secure communication devices should have been employed to prevent leaks and protect their conversations,” she said.

Just how those texts were made public is another messy layer to the story that’s continued to raise eyebrows about the Hollywood PR industry. 

Abel used to work for Stephanie Jones, founder and CEO of the PR firm Jonesworks. According to Jones’ lawsuit, also filed in December claiming a breach of contract, Abel was allegedly fired for stealing documents and clients while preparing to launch her own business. 

According to that lawsuit, after Abel returned her phone to the company, Jones discovered the text messages that she claims prove both a plot to smear Lively and that Abel and Nathan were stealing her clients, including Baldoni and Wayfarer. 

Meanwhile, Baldoni’s new lawsuit, which includes Abel as a plaintiff, alleges that Abel actually quit Jonesworks due to Jones’ “bizarre” behavior and that Jones then seized her personal cell number, which Abel used for a company phone, and gained access to all Abel’s contacts and correspondence for over a month before Abel regained control of the number.

Lively’s legal team was able to obtain those texts through “a prelitigation subpoena,” Verma explained, “in which someone who expects to be a party to a lawsuit (here, Lively) can submit a request to the court to be able to subpoena a third party (here, Jones).”

Baldoni’s new lawsuit also claims that Jones approached Lively’s lawyers with the text messages “to destroy Baldoni, Wayfarer and Abel in one fell swoop.” That was following Jones’ allegation in her own lawsuit that Abel and Nathan colluded to blame her for the alleged campaign against Lively and “to publicly and privately attack Jones and Jonesworks.” 

Further, Jones claims in her lawsuit that Nathan and Abel “began to formulate a no-holds-barred strategy to discredit and suppress any potential revelations about Baldoni’s on set behavior.” It also alleges that they “used their industry connections” to plant negative articles about Lively in outlets including the Daily Mail and New York’s Page Six, as well as on social media platforms like Reddit and TikTok. 

The allegations portray something far from an ethical PR-journalist working relationship.    

For instance, the Page Six pieces are written by Sara Nathan, the publication’s editor-at-large and sister of Melissa Nathan, Baldoni’s publicist. Lively’s complaint portrays something more concerning: “After Sara Nathan circulated draft language related to Ms. Lively’s involvement in the different cuts of the film, Ms. Abel sent Sara Nathan revisions to the draft, which Sara Nathan offered to ‘amend.’”

Meanwhile, two critical questions have gotten lost in the discourse. Many have suggested — and the newest lawsuit from Baldoni’s camp even claims — that some of the Lively hate has been organic and in response to the actor’s own behavior, seen in resurfaced interviews. But why was there such a rise of it around the release of her movie if it didn’t come from either PR team — and why didn’t Sloane, Lively’s publicist, make any public statements in an attempt to squash it?

Uthe wondered the same thing. 

“I was seeing all these videos about negative press interviews,” she said. “So, I don’t know if Justin’s team did that or not, but I think that people need to give a little bit more credit to social media and how quickly it can shape perceptions.”  

Wouldn’t that have been a good time for Sloane’s team to release a statement in support of her client? While she was allegedly trying to put out fires behind the scenes, her client’s reputation was on the line. Ultimately, it was only Lively who came to her own defense by way of an Instagram story at the time. 

McClung considers Lively’s post an ill-advised move: “I have very many personal and professional gripes about people doing that because it just seems unprofessional and inconsiderate of what the issue is, and I think that her team should have made the statement themselves on behalf of her and publicized that.”

Uthe agreed: “I had wished that her team would have protected her a little bit more. If I was her team, I would have wanted to address it.”

She thought about some of the criticism about Lively that sprung up early on. The actor was hyping up the fact that her character in “It Ends With Us” is a florist, so she had worn floral prints in promotional interviews and talked about flowers on her social media pages — and not about domestic violence, a central theme in the movie. 

From Lively’s own lawsuit, though, the actor claims that her team advised her to play up the character’s strengths, not her trauma.

“It’s like people are upset about the floral print of her dress while she’s promoting this,” Uthe said. “And she shouldn’t be doing that because it’s a movie about domestic violence. I’m like, ‘She looks good in florals. It’s that simple.’ I don’t know.”

Essentially, say something. 

“You can never fully stop the online hate,” McClung admitted. “But I think they should have tried to at least put up a wall of protection for Lively because she was getting — I mean, I think her reputation now is permanently damaged from this.” 

From McClung’s perspective, the public’s perception of Lively has been hit even more so than the perception of Baldoni, who she also acknowledges has been smeared. “I fully believe that this is because she is a woman in Hollywood that has been in the public eye, and, being in the public eye, you are going to be nitpicked. I’ve seen body language and lip reading experts have inputs on these things and nitpicking the women.”

Like McClung, many have likened the online vitriol spewed at Lively to how Amber Heard was treated throughout her and ex-husband Johnny Depp’s defamation case in 2022. 

“Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying ‘A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on,’” Heard said in response to Lively’s legal complaint in December.

But as Baldoni’s team has also claimed in its lawsuit, Uthe feels like Lively has “the upper hand” because of her greater popularity and influence and the fact that she’s married to Reynolds. “Probably more access to resources to prove a case, better legal team,” she said. 

Lively’s lawsuit could end up setting a legal precedent with regards to the PR industry, Verma said, specifically Lively’s complaint of false light invasion of privacy, which is usually brought against publishers (i.e., Baldoni and his team suing The New York Times). Lively’s case is going to prove more challenging because there is no allegation that Abel or Nathan actually printed a story that is “misleadingly harmful” to Lively. 

“There’s an allegation that they at least suppressed stories that would show Lively’s point of view that there’s discord on the set and amplified negative stories about Lively being difficult,” Verma said. “That’s thousands of stories, plus the comments, plus the clicks, plus the shares.”

And it doesn’t equate to Baldoni’s PR team being the ones who published a single story. In Verma’s experience, she’d never seen an amalgamation of many different stories that make up a basis for a false light or defamation case.    

“It’s not just one story; it’s all of them,” she said. “So does the amalgamation of thousands and thousands of instances of social media activity that somebody is aware is happening and potentially is putting into motion create one misleading false light representation?”

The defendants could be looking to dismiss that claim outright, Verma said, even before there is any litigation on the facts.  

Lively’s other claim against Nathan and Abel of intentional infliction of emotional distress is also a tough one to prove. For that, Verma refers to a standard used in law school.

“If you call someone and tell them their child died and their child didn’t die, and you know that, that’s exactly what that is,” the lawyer explained. “But you know that that’s going to wreck their world and they’ll never come back for it. You did it intentionally, and it shocks the conscience.”

Could that standard hold up in Lively’s case?

“The tactics used with respect to the PR, do they shock the conscience if they’re used by other PR professionals?” Verma asked. “That’s going to be a legal question, too. And it very well may mean that that claim is subject to a motion to dismiss.” 

Though McClung believes that the case will likely be settled out of court, she said that If it does move forward, the repercussions could shake up the PR world and set a bar for what the punishment should be. 

“I think if that does happen, this industry is going to be turned on its head, and we are going to have to do some reevaluations for how we care for our clients and how we care for the people we represent,” McClung said. “And the thought of that makes me very nervous for the industry.”

Because, as she repeated to me, the industry is already losing the public’s trust. 

Watching a public figure be dragged on social media is typically a sinister and common practice that the platform users eagerly participate in, as has also been the case for both Lively and Baldoni, before inevitably a whole other controversy comes along. But the potential here for legal recourse adds a far more serious tone. 

“Because at the end of the day, if there was no legal aspect, it is very much he said, she said,” McClung said. 

It is either way.