Celebrity PR Is Not Looking Great In The Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni Case

From allegations of planting articles to concocting smear campaigns through text messages, Hollywood public relations has faced a messy few weeks.

For most fans, the behind-the-scenes crisis PR machine that mitigates the public narratives of Hollywood talent is of very little interest. Folks hear about a celebrity controversy, scandal or misjudged statement and are rarely curious about why at some point it often just goes away — and where it ever came from to begin with.

For whatever it’s worth, that’s probably how it should be. The inner workings of public relations should not really be the concern of the public. The indifference is likely a sign that it’s working well. A hint and a half that it’s not successful is when it becomes a critical focus of a high-profile case — catalyzed by a legal complaint from Blake Lively and made public in a New York Times article in December that includes screenshots of allegedly incriminating text messages between PR professionals.

Enter Jennifer Abel, Melissa Nathan, Leslie Sloane and Stephanie Jones, the four publicists who are named in legal complaints and lawsuits that have been filed in the last few weeks between Lively’s and Justin Baldoni’s teams.

In the complaint, Lively alleges that her “It Ends With Us” co-star Baldoni, who also directed and co-produced the movie (with his company Wayfarer), hired Abel and Nathan to orchestrate a smear campaign against her ahead of the movie’s Aug. 9 release last year. It also claims that that was in retaliation for Lively’s raising of concerns of sexual harassment and misconduct by Baldoni and co-producer Jamey Heath in a meeting while the film’s production was paused during the 2023 writers strike. The complaint alleges that Baldoni hired Nathan and Abel out of fear that those concerns would be made public following a flurry of suspicion from social media users when the two stars were never seen together at the film’s premiere.

The text messages shown in the New York Times article have particularly shocked audiences and readers. They portray Abel and Nathan allegedly conspiring and celebrating in real time that a bevy of online social media users were turning against Lively weeks before the release of “It Ends With Us,” amplifying a hate narrative that in turn caught the attention of myriad news sites, including HuffPost.