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Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni
Getty Images (2)Blake Lively claims that It Ends With Us costar and director Justin Baldoni she allegedly ran a “social manipulation” campaign to damage her reputation.
The news broke on Saturday, December 21, that Lively, 37, had sued Baldoni, 40, for sexual harassment. Per The New York Timesthe lawsuit – filed on Friday, December 20 – contained “thousands of pages of text messages and emails” that Lively obtained via subpoena.
In one message allegedly sent on August 2, a publicist working with the studio and Baldoni wrote to a crisis management specialist, “He wants to feel like he can be buried.”
The text messages allegedly show that the crisis PR team worked to suppress stories about Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Lively. At the outlet, Jed Wallace, led a digital strategy that, in part, boosted social media posts that could help their cause.
Blake Lively has sued It Ends With Us costar and director Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment. According to the lawsuit obtained by TMZ and The New York Times, Baldoni’s alleged behavior caused “severe emotional distress” to Lively, 37. The lawsuit claims a meeting was held to address with Lively’s claims that there was “hostile (…)
Wallace sent emails referring to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” and text messages referred to efforts to “boost” and “amplify” online content that was positive or negative about Baldoni about Lively.
“We’re crushing it on Reddit,” Wallace texted.
In additional text messages, Baldoni allegedly encouraged the PR team and pointed out social media posts to use. On August 15, he offered to “flip the narrative” on a positive story about Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynoldsby “using their own words against them.”
The New York Times reported that Baldoni sometimes sought reassurance about the tactics. After noticing an article that was critical of Lively, she wrote, “How can we somehow say we’re not doing any of this – it looks like we’re trying to take her down.”
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s new film, It Ends With Us, has proven to be a huge box office hit, with a whopping $50 million in its opening weekend. While the cast should be riding high on the film’s success, they have instead found themselves the subject of controversy as reports swirl of behind-the-scenes drama involving different final cuts of (…)
At one point, Baldoni wondered if they were using “bot” accounts on social media, which his team denied doing.
Baldoni and others claimed in the texts that Lively used her own PR team to generate negative press about him, but did not cite evidence. (Lively denied that she or her representatives planted or spread negative information for Baldoni.)
Baldoni lawyer, Bryan Freedmanaddressed Lively’s “completely false, outrageous and deliberately salacious” accusations in a statement to Usclaiming that Lively filed the lawsuit to “fix her negative reputation” and “remake a narrative” about the film’s production.
Freedman further alleged that Lively made “multiple demands and threats” while filming It Ends With Usincluding “threatening not to show up to set, threatening not to promote the film, ultimately leading to its demise during release, if her demands were not met.”
Us reached out to Lively’s rep for comment but did not immediately hear back. In a statement to the New York Times of her lawsuit, Lively said, “I hope my legal action will help pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about wrongdoing and help protect others who may have target them.”
