{"id":93453,"date":"2025-08-26T07:47:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T07:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/93453\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T07:47:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T07:47:03","slug":"blake-lively-and-justin-baldonis-smear-campaign-texts-unsealed-directors-crisis-management-unnecessary-over-organic-criticism-of-actress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/93453\/","title":{"rendered":"Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s ‘smear campaign’ texts UNSEALED; director’s crisis management ‘unnecessary’ over “organic criticism” of actress |"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blake Explosive new evidence has emerged in Blake Lively<\/a>\u2019s ongoing legal battle with her ‘It Ends With Us’ co-star and director Justin Baldoni<\/a>. A New York federal judge has unsealed a series of text messages and emails that appear to show Baldoni\u2019s team discussing their social media activity with a hired crisis management team leading up to the film’s release. However, text messages reveal that all the strategy was ultimately deemed ‘unnecessary’ due to a wave of \u201corganic\u201d online criticism over Lively’s remarks.<\/p>\n

Crisis PR emails <\/p>\n

Court filings, which include more than 60 exhibits submitted by Lively\u2019s attorneys last week, reveal that Baldoni\u2019s publicist Melissa Nathan connected his business partner, Jamey Heath with social media consultant Jed Wallace in August 2024. While the consultant’s LinkedIn profile has since been deleted, it described him as a \u201chired gun\u201d, according to Daily Mail.In the report, Nathan allegedly outlined a $25,000-per-month package for \u201cmostly untraceable\u201d services designed to seed content, engage with negative accounts, and push pro-Baldoni narratives using anonymous profiles. In one email, Nathan\u2019s colleague Katie Case described the strategy as \u201csocial and digital mitigation and remediation\u201d, stressing the need to execute operations \u201cwithout fingerprints.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secret digital plans<\/p>\n

Plans included monitoring Reddit and other forums, taking down hostile accounts, and starting discussion threads that redirected criticism away from Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios.<\/p>\n

Organic social media backlash<\/p>\n

Despite these preparations, sources told the publication that much of the work turned out to be ‘unnecessary’ over the ‘organic’ widespread criticism of Lively\u2019s promotional strategy. The actress’ highly controversial line, “wear your florals” to a film about domestic violence, also spread rapidly online.According to the report, Case shared the infamous Instagram video of Lively and said, \u201cLike come on. We had NOTHING to do with that.\u201dInternal texts show PR staffers distancing themselves from the backlash, insisting that negative TikToks and commentary were \u201corganic stuff from real people.\u201d \u201cWe didn\u2019t tell Jed to go after the idea that her promo was inappropriate,\u201d read the message that went on to add, \u201cThat happened organically. People saw the actual movie and were like\u2026 wait.\u201dAn unnamed member of the group chat agreed, replying, \u201cThis is crazy. She doesn\u2019t have a good reputation. All of this is organic stuff from real people making TikToks \u2014 not bots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taylor Swift connection concerns<\/p>\n

One internal email also revealed concerns about Lively\u2019s close friendship with Taylor Swift. Case warned that if Lively \u201cactivated the Taylor Swift fan base,\u201d it could trigger a major PR crisis, prompting the crisis team to raise its proposed fee to $30,000 per month.<\/p>\n

Baldoni knew Lively would go against him<\/p>\n

In a separate January 2024 text exchange with fellow executives, Baldoni expressed frustration over his working relationship with Lively. The 41-year-old filmmaker wrote that he felt like he was \u201cacting and working with this person who can and will use anything she can against,\u201d him. “It\u2019s all scary \u2014 yet I know I have protection,” he saidHe also expressed his outrage over having to direct the movie, while the actress was seemingly taking control of the project. He said, \u201ctrying to find [his] balance of captaining a ship and leading it while it\u2019s being held hostage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ongoing legal battle<\/p>\n

The revelations are the latest twist in the highly publicised legal feud between Lively and Baldoni which sparked off over the New Year, with the actress filing a lawsuit against the director and him counter-suing her for $400 million. While Baldoni’s lawsuit was later dropped, Lively\u2019s legal team is going ahead to allege that Baldoni\u2019s camp engaged in an intentional ‘smear campaign’ against her. Baldoni and his legal team has maintained since the start of the court battle that the negative press against Lively emerged ‘organically’ from genuine audience reaction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Explosive new evidence has emerged in Blake Lively\u2019s ongoing legal battle with her ‘It Ends With Us’ co-star…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[17860,6491,46455,96,25485,17859,46454,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-93453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-blake-lively","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-crisis-management","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-it-ends-with-us","13":"tag-justin-baldoni","14":"tag-smear-campaign","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}