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By Shannon Power
Pop Culture & Entertainment Reporter
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What's New
Amber Heard is the latest person to speak out about the legal dispute between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
Why It Matters
Lively has sued Baldoni after they co-starred in a summer box office smash movie, It Ends With Us. Baldoni directed the movie about domestic violence, which Lively co-produced.
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Rumors of tension between the pair surfaced during the movie's press tour in August, including that Lively demanded the final edit of the film and the pair did not pose together for photos or do interviews during the publicity circuit.
In the lawsuit, Lively accused Baldoni of sexual harassment, introducing unplanned sex scenes into the movie, fostering a toxic work environment and also hiring a PR company to initiate a "smear campaign" against her, per the legal documents.
Baldoni has denied the claims.
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What to Know
Baldoni hired TAG PR and crisis relations experts Melissa Nathan and Jed Wallace before the film's release. Nathan was the same person hired by Heard's ex-husband, Johnny Depp, during his defamation trial against her in 2022.
Depp sued his actress ex-wife over an op-ed she wrote in The Washington Post, where she described herself as a public figure advocating against domestic abuse. The Pirates of the Caribbean actor claimed the article, while not naming him, falsely implicated him and he sued her for defamation. The jury ruled in his favor during a highly publicized trial.
"Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying 'A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on.' I saw this firsthand and up close. It's as horrifying as it is destructive," she said in a statement to NBC News, regarding Lively's lawsuit.
The actress claimed in the suit that one tactic undertaken by Baldoni and Heath was to change the focus of promotion for It Ends With Us. Lively alleged she had been told the publicity of the movie would focus on the main character's resilience in a violent relationship. She claimed Baldoni shifted the focus to make it about raising awareness of family violence. As a result, Lively faced a lot of backlash for seeming to not address the serious issues in the movie while doing interviews to promote it.
"To that end, he and his team used domestic violence 'survivor content' to protect his public image," the suit said. "What the public also did not know was that this was the beginning of a multi-tiered plan that Mr. Baldoni and his team described as 'social manipulation' designed to 'destroy' Ms. Lively's reputation."
What People Are Saying
Baldoni's lawyer, Bryan Freedman, reacted to Lively's claims about a "smear campaign" on Monday.
"TAG PR operated as any other crisis management firm would when hired by a client experiencing threats by two extremely powerful people with unlimited resources," Freedman said in a statement to Us Weekly. "The standard scenario planning TAG PR drafted proved unnecessary as audiences found Lively's own actions, interviews and marketing during the promotional tour distasteful, and responded organically to that which the media themselves picked up on."
The attorney also referenced alleged text messages between Baldoni and the PR team, which were published in a New York Times article about the lawsuit. The article reported Lively's legal team got their hands on the messages through a subpoena, but Freedman claimed they were leaked.
One of the alleged text messages reportedly shows a publicist speaking about Baldoni and writing: "He wants to feel like she [Lively] can be buried."
Heard was not the only famous person to speak out on behalf of Lively. Her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-stars also issued a statement about the whole affair. America Ferrera, Alexis Bledel and Amber Tamblyn issued a joint statement and posted it to their Instagram accounts.
"As Blake's friends and sisters for over twenty years, we stand with her in solidarity as she fights back against the reported campaign waged to destroy her reputation," the statement read.
"Throughout the filming of It Ends with Us, we saw her summon the courage to ask for a safe workplace for herself and colleagues on set, and we are appalled to read the evidence of a premeditated and vindictive effort that ensued to discredit her voice."
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