Justin Baldoni's Team Blasts Blake Lively amid $400 Million Lawsuit: 'We Have Received Death Threats'

The publicists joining Justin Baldoni in his new lawsuit against Blake Lively amid the ongoing It Ends with Us fallout say they're "private individuals" who have been plagued by threats since Lively first filed a complaint against Baldoni and his associates.

In the wake of Baldoni's lawsuit against Lively, Ryan Reynolds, their publicist Leslie Sloane and Sloane's PR firm Vision PR, Inc., filed on Jan. 16, in the Southern District of New York, his publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan tell PEOPLE in a statement that they've been " forced to answer this viciously selfish ongoing litigation littered with documented and provable lies in the midst of the tragedy impacting California where we reside." (Fires have been plaguing Los Angeles for over a week, killing at least 24 and displacing thousands.)

"Five months ago, Ms. Lively chose to promote a film about domestic violence in a way that caused instant negative and organic backlash due to her own highly publicized actions," the statement claims. "Instead of accepting responsibility, she decided to cruelly blame us. This malicious attack on private individuals by Ms. Lively and her team in which they chose to spoon feed The New York Times with doctored, out of context and edited text messages in an effort to paint herself as a victim set off a chain of events that has been harmful beyond measure. To be clear, Ms. Lively and her team initiated this smear campaign in the media for the sole intention of gaining undeserved public sympathy for her own missteps."

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In a Dec. 20 complaint, Lively, 37, claimed her It Ends with Us costar and director Baldoni, 40, exhibited “disturbing" and “unprofessional” behavior on the set of the film that led to a "hostile work environment." Lively's complaint includes accusations that Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath entered her trailer “uninvited” while she was undressed or “vulnerable,” alleges Baldoni “suddenly” pressured her to “simulate full nudity” in a birth scene and “improvised physical intimacy that had not been rehearsed, choreographed or discussed with Ms. Lively, with no intimacy coordinator involved."

Her complaint claims that in the aftermath of the experience and the alleged smear campaign against her, Lively “has suffered from grief, fear, trauma, and extreme anxiety.”

Nathan and Abel are extensively named in the complaint, and in an accompanying report released on Dec. 21 by The New York Times. Texts in the complaint include messages from Nathan, a crisis PR representative, floating proposals to hire contractors to dominate social media through “full social account take downs,” by starting “threads of theories” and generally working to “change narrative.”

Related: The Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni Lawsuits, Explained: A Complete Breakdown of the Allegations, Key Players and Who's Said What

Baldoni subsequently sued The New York Times on Dec. 31 alleging libel in response to its article. The suit alleges the newspaper used “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead" in its article about Lively's complaint. (The New York Times has defended its article as "meticulously and responsibly reported.")

Since then, Nathan and Abel claim in their statement that they've "received death threats, abhorrent abuse and vile anti-semitic slurs hurled at us due to her decision to use us as scapegoats for her own choices promoting her film in which she made millions of dollars."

"With this filing, we lift our own curtain of what happens when the entitled weaponize power, fear and money to destroy, intimidate and bully those who get in their way," concluded the statement.

Related: Justin Baldoni Alleges Blake Lively Never Read It Ends with Us Book Before Making Movie: It 'Worried' Her Colleagues

In this latest lawsuit, attorneys for Baldoni are requesting $400 million dollars on behalf of Baldoni, producer Jamey Heath, Abel and Nathan. They're suing on claims of civil extortion, defamation, false light invasion of privacy, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, intentional interference with contractual relations, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage.

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