Justin Baldoni is suing one of his former publicists, Stephanie Jones, alleging she is the person who leaked the texts that led to Blake Lively’s accusation of a smear campaign against her.
Baldoni, 41, and publicist Jennifer Abel, who used to work for Jones’ company, Jonesworks PR, have accused Jones of taking Abel’s work phone and handing it over to Lively and her team, who allegedly mined the phone for text messages to take out of context in an effort to make it appear that Baldoni’s side was building a smear campaign against her.
That so-called smear campaign became a major part of Lively’s original suit against Baldoni in December 2024, in which she also accused her It Ends With Us costar and director of harassment.
Baldoni and Lively, 37, have gone back and forth since, with Baldoni also suing Lively and The New York Times for defamation, seeking $400 million.
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“It is undeniable that Stephanie Jones initiated this catastrophic sequence of events by violating the most basic of privacy rights, as well as any remaining trust her clients held,” Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman said in a statement to Us Weekly. “No stranger to stirring up crisis scenarios for departing clients, Ms. Jones maliciously turned over communications from the phone she wrongfully took from her own partner to her cohort Leslie Sloane, immediately after Jones was terminated for cause by Wayfarer due to her own wrongful behavior.”
Freedman claimed Lively and her team “walked right into Ms. Jones’ ploy of bitter revenge against her most-trusted employee at the expense of her own long-term client,” the statement continued. “We will not stop until our clients are cleared of all wrongdoing and compensated for the vast damages that they have incurred.”
Baldoni’s latest suit comes after Jones filed a lawsuit against Abel, Baldoni and others, accusing them of being the ones who orchestrated the alleged smear campaign. She also accused them of breach of contract and trying to steal her clients for themselves.
“Ms. Jones’ lawsuit is based entirely on facts and concrete evidence,” Kristin Tahler, a partner at Quinn Emmanuel and representative for Jones, said in a statement to Us. “That suit clearly shows that Jen Abel conspired with Melissa Nathan and others to steal reams of confidential documents, clients and staff and eventually attempt to destroy the business that Ms. Jones spent decades building.”
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“Abel, Nathan, Baldoni and their co-defendants attempted to achieve these outcomes through bullying distortion and outright disparagement,” the statement continued. “These facts are backed up by dozens of messages provided in the suit we filed a month ago and cannot be credibly disputed. Having no facts or evidence, we see a familiar playbook — smear our client, culminating in the work of fiction masquerading as the counterclaims that were filed yesterday.”
Similarly, The New York Times also denied all claims brought against them from Baldoni and Wayfarer. “The Baldoni/Wayfarer legal filings are rife with inaccuracies about The New York Times, including, for example, the bogus claim that The Times had early access to Ms. Lively’s state civil rights complaint,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told Us in a February statement. “Mr. Baldoni’s lawyers base their erroneous claim on postings by amateur internet sleuths, who, not surprisingly, are wrong.”
