Blake Lively‘s legal team has issued subpoenas to crisis PR firm consultant Jed Wallace, as well as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and other multiple entities, in search of more evidence of Justin Baldoni‘s alleged smear campaign against her.
“Ms. Lively has initiated discovery that will expose the people, tactics, and methods that have worked to ‘destroy’ and ‘bury’ her reputation and family over the past year,” Lively’s attorneys Mike Gottlieb and Esra Hudson said in a statement. “We will now receive all of the ‘receipts’ that, unsurprisingly, are nowhere to be found on Mr. [Bryan] Freedman’s website, and like Ms. Lively, those ‘receipts’ will have their day in court.”
The subpoenas also come a week after Lively’s legal team dropped a request in Texas to depose Wallace, who could be added to their New York lawsuit against Baldoni and others. In turn, Wallace filed an 11-page alleged defamation suit against Lively, which opens him up to discovery and to being deposed by Lively’s lawyers.
Regarding their reasoning for subpoenaing Wallace, a spokesperson said in a statement, “In their internal private messages that Baldoni’s team never expected anyone would see, they bragged that thanks to Jed’s work they saw a shift in the narrative to putting a spotlight on Blake and laughed at how sad it was that people so easily want to hate on a woman. We look forward to investigating more about Jed Wallace’s entire business model and what else he was doing to distract from the very real sexual harassment and retaliation claims made by Ms. Lively. We are delighted to be able to start discovery on it.”
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Cloudflare Inc. and AOL all received subpoenas amid the ongoing It Ends With Us legal battle. Regarding the telecom companies, the Lively spokesperson wrote, “Phone records belonging to all of the individual defendants will expose the full web of individuals who were involved in the smear campaign against Ms. Lively. Such records will provide critical and irrefutable evidence not only about who, but also about when, where, and how their retaliation plan came together and operated,” adding, “Internet records will show the involvement of different persons who might be playing key roles in digital retaliation.”
Lively intends to file her own amended lawsuit against Baldoni and his Wayfarer partner Jamey Heath, along with their publicist Jennifer Abel and crisis PR exec Melissa Nathan, next Tuesday. Her team had asked the court for a March 5 extension but were instead only given an additional four days (the original deadline was Feb. 14.)
In response to the subpoenas, Freedman wrote in a statement to THR, “Subpoenas are an ordinary part of the litigation process. What is extraordinary is what the Lively Parties are seeking. They are asking for every single call, text, data log, and even real-time location information for the past 2.5 years, regardless of the sender, recipient, or subject matter. This massive fishing expedition demonstrates that they are desperately seeking any factual basis for their provably false claims. They will find none.”
Lively initially filed a lawsuit on Dec. 31, 2024, in federal court in the Southern District of New York against Baldoni Heath, Abel and Nathan. In her complaint, Lively accuses Baldoni, her It Ends With Us costar and director, of sexual harassment, and him and his associates of orchestrating a campaign to smear her. A few weeks later, Baldoni filed his own suit against Lively and Reynolds for waging their own smear campaign. (Baldoni is also suing The New York Times for libel over their Lively story published in December.)
A trial date is currently set for March 2026.
