Before the Justin Baldoni legal battle began, Blake Lively secretly made a “super shady” move against her “It Ends With Us” co-star. She reportedly filed a covert lawsuit against Baldoni in an attempt to get her hands on alleged incriminating text messages they shared months before going public with her sexual harassment accusations. Through the action, Lively’s attorneys issued a subpoena for said text messages and then dropped the lawsuit without the opposition getting the slightest hint.
The Daily Mail carried out an investigation to uncover details surrounding the “sham” lawsuit that Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, claimed he was unaware of until recently. Lively’s company, Vanzan, filed the shadow suit as the plaintiff in September and withdrew days before she publicly accused her adversary.
Blake Lively allegedly filed a lawsuit before accusing Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment
A Daily Mail investigation unearthed the specifics of a “shady” lawsuit Blake Lively filed against Justin Baldoni before publicly accusing him of sexual harassment. Court papers revealed that Lively’s company, Vanzan, filed the shadow suit in the Manhattan Supreme Court on September 27 and accused up to 10 individuals of harming the plaintiff’s “business and reputation.” The filing did not name any person from either party.
A few days after the filing, New York attorney Samantha Katze subpoenaed all communications and documents from Baldoni’s former publicist, Stephanie Jones, and her PR agency, Jonesworks. Jones turned over private messages between one of her former employees, Jennifer Abel, and her crisis management guru, Melissa Nathan. These communications supposedly showed the latter two and Baldoni discussing a negative campaign against Lively and alleged efforts to “destroy” her. One such text from Nathan read, “We can bury anyone.”
Blake Lively’s legal team has since used these messages as the basis of her claims that accused Justin Baldoni, Abel, and Nathan of orchestrating a smear campaign against her. The Daily Mail further reported that they withdrew the lawsuit on December 19, and the following day, Lively filed an official sexual harassment complaint against her co-star.
Legal expert Ron Zambrano, who has no relation to the case, called it “super shady,” adding that the intent was “surreptitious and clandestine.” Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, later condemned the action, referring to it as a “sham” in a statement to Page Six. Freedman noted that there was “nothing normal about this” and that it was “done in bad faith.” Lively’s team, however, maintained innocence, claiming it was “entirely lawful and appropriate.”
