Blake Lively's lawsuit against Justin Baldoni sparks controversy over leaked text messages

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. Pic/Getty Images

Days after American actor Blake Lively sued her It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni in a case that is now being termed as among the most defining ones on sexual harassment coming out of the Hollywood industry, questions were raised about the methods that Lively took to secure the texts messages of Baldoni and his team that she used in her complaint. The bombshell texts that point to an alleged ‘smear campaign' against her, it is now being revealed, were sourced from a phone belonging to Baldoni's former publicist Jennifer Abel, who subsequently quit her past job.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Jones, the founder of Jonesworks, which was previously representing Baldoni and his production company, outed herself as the source of the damaging communications in a lawsuit she filed on December 24. She disavows involvement in the campaign.

In the interim, Baldoni's team has vowed to bring out "the truth", and has threatened to lodge a countersuit against Lively in 2025. The countersuit will reportedly claim that the text messages in question have been presented out of context and that Lively's team planted stories to smear his reputation. Despite not outright confirming the countersuit, Baldoni's lawyer, Bryan Freedman warned that the contents of it would ‘shock everyone'. "I am not going to speak to when or how many lawsuits we are filing but when we file our first lawsuit, it is going to shock everyone who has been manipulated into believing a demonstrably false narrative," he reportedly told Deadline.

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