Justin Baldoni and Jennifer Abel have filed a lawsuit against publicist Stephanie Jones in the latest development of the legal battle between him and Blake Lively.
Jones represented Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios last summer when press reports first emerged of a rift between the director and Lively.
Abel was Jones’ partner at Joneswork PR and running point on the Baldoni account as speculation mounted about why Lively and some cast members had stopped following the director on Instagram.
What happened next has become a matter of intrigue and resulted in a sprawling legal morass that has consumed Hollywood and sparked intense public interest.
“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. “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, [Lively’s personal publicist] Leslie Sloane, immediately after Jones was terminated for cause by Wayfarer due to her own wrongful behavior.”
The latest lawsuit portrays Jones as growing increasingly paranoid and rattled by negative press about her in outlets like Puck and Business Insider as well as on an anonymous website that detailed her alleged treatment of employees and clients.
One Puck column called Jones an “erratic screamer” and reported on a client exodus that included Dwayne Johnson and Lauren Sanchez.
The complaint claims that Jones, who was relying on a psychic, then plotted a revenge campaign against client Baldoni and partner Abel as they both announced their plans to exit Jonesworks.
The latest complaint, filed in New York federal court on Friday, marks the sixth lawsuit involving the “It Ends With Us” parties.
At the heart of the drama, Baldoni is suing and being sued by Lively over what happened on the set of and in the run-up to the release of the 2024 domestic violence drama.
The movie became a surprise hit for Sony, earning $351 million at the box office worldwide off of a $25 million budget.
In December, Lively filed a letter with the California Civil Rights Department in which she alleged that Baldoni sexually harassed her during the film’s production in 2023 and carried out a 2024 smear campaign.
The CRD letter, which is confidential, leaked to the New York Times and served as the basis for the newspaper’s explosive report.
In its story, the Times wrote that it had reviewed “thousands of pages of text messages and emails that she obtained through a subpoena.”
The text messages all appeared to have come from Abel’s phone, which was seized in August 2024, a few weeks after she informed Jones that she was leaving the agency to start her own outfit.
On August 21, 2024, two days before her last day, Abel arrived at the Jonesworks office in Beverly Hills, where “she was confronted by a physically imposing security guard, a forensic data extraction technical expert, and an attorney sitting at a conference table awash in documents,” the complaint states.
Also present was Jones’ chief of staff, Gordon Duren, who had flown in unannounced from New York, where Jones is based.
“After being ushered into the conference room, Abel noticed that the security guard was posted just outside its doors, positioned between the conference room and the office entrance, blocking the exit. There, the attorney gestured at the documents and instructed Abel to review and sign them. The attorney stated that Jonesworks suspected Abel had retained proprietary information on her personal laptop. Abel was told that Jonesworks would have grounds to sue if she did not allow them access.”
The complaint adds that Abel, who was confident that her computer contained no such data, turned over the device. She was pressured to relinquish her phone.
She agreed: “so long as they would confirm that Jonesworks would immediately release her personal cell phone number, which would enable Jonesworks to take possession of the physical device without gaining unrestrained access to its contents.”
The complaint continues: “After express confirmation from the Jonesworks chief of staff and attorney that they would release the phone number if she went straight to the Verizon store, Abel handed them the phone and was ushered out of the building as her colleagues watched in disbelief.”
Abel waited at a nearby Verizon store for Jonesworks to release her personal cell phone number. After four hours “of desperate (unanswered) calls, Abel left Verizon in panic and despair.”
The lawsuit claims that she “realized Jones had double-crossed her — in a very serious way. By refusing to release Abel’s phone number, Jonesworks had usurped her contact information and cut off Abel’s access to critical accounts protected by two-factor authentication linked to that phone number.
As a result, Abel lost access to her iCloud (including all her text messages, photos, and contacts), bank accounts, utilities, insurance, and virtually every other sensitive account. By contrast, Jones now had unrestricted access to everything stored on Abel’s phone — her text messages, emails, personal photos.”
All of that violated California labor laws covering Abel’s employment, according to the lawsuit.
On New Year’s Eve, Baldoni and nine other plaintiffs, including crisis publicist Melissa Nathan and Abel sued the New York Times for $250 million for libel.
Lively then sued Baldoni and the group for violating federal and California state law “by retaliating against her for reporting sexual harassment and workplace safety concerns.”
The director subsequently sued Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds for $400 million for civil extortion, defamation and other actions. Sloane’s stay for discovery in that case was denied today.
But Jones filed the first suit in the sprawling case in December for breach of contract among other claims. That kicked off a legal back and forth that now involves three celebrities (Reynolds, the biggest of the three, Lively and Baldoni) four publicists (Jones, Nathan, Abel and Sloane) as well as two “It Ends With Us” producers (Jamey Heath and Steve Sarowitz) and a social media guru in Texas (Jed Harris). Lively’s lawyers said that they received the text messages via a subpoena to Jones in a move that raised eyebrows.
Nearly three months after the Times story dropped, it remains unclear on what grounds Jones would have been required to turn over correspondence involving a client or former employee given that no related lawsuit existed at the time.
“Ms. Jones’ [December] lawsuit is based entirely on facts and concrete evidence,” Quinn Emmanuel’s Kristin Tahler, an attorney for Jones, says in a statement. “[Our] 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. Abel, Nathan, Baldoni and their co-defendants attempted to achieve these outcomes through bullying distortion and outright disparagement. These facts are backed up by dozens of messages provided in the suit we filed 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.”
Today’s complaint states that just hours after Abel’s phone was seized, Sloane called Nathan. “During that call, Sloane told Nathan that Sloane had seen Nathan’s text messages (which could only have come from Abel’s phone) and that Nathan should expect to be sued,” the complaint says. “Jones [had] turned over the contents of Abel’s phone to Lively and her team — without a subpoena — so they could slice and dice her communications to to construct a false narrative about the source of Lively’s bad publicity. In turning over these materials to Lively, Jones knew full well that the blowback would engulf not only Abel but also her clients, Wayfarer and Baldoni. As a result of Jones’ malicious scheme, Abel’s life has been turned upside down. Her career and reputation have been destroyed, her private information leaked, and her email inbox and social media pages filled with a daily stream of death threats and abuse.”
Baldoni, Wayfarer and Nathan were also caught in the crossfire, the complaint says. “Jones reached out voluntarily to Lively’s team offering what she believed to be ammunition against [them]. Wielding reams of Abel’s private communications — which, with some unscrupulous massaging and creativity, could be sliced, diced, and stripped of context to support a false narrative about them. At the time, an embattled Lively was licking her wounds after a well-publicized series of promotional missteps and off-putting public appearances that resulted in a cascade of negative publicity. … In turning over these materials to Lively, Jones knew full well that the blowback would engulf not only Abel and Nathan but also current Jonesworks clients Wayfarer and Baldoni.”
The complaint details Jones’ alleged move to hold Baldoni and Wayfarer to its contract that would expire in 2025. “Jones vacillated between insisting that they only speak through lawyers and making erratic and deranged threats to sue, demanding exorbitant payment for work not done, and insisting against evidence that she was doing an amazing job,” it says. “Although they did not yet know just how far Jones had taken things, Wayfarer and Baldoni considered her behavior to be a material breach of the Agreement and advised Jones that they were terminating the Jonesworks Agreement as of the end of August. In December 2024, the Wayfarer team finally learned the full extent of Jones’ betrayal. As a result of Jones’ deliberate and unlawful disclosure of their private information, which Lively’s team exploited to concoct a false and disturbing narrative about them, Wayfarer and Baldoni have been irrevocably harmed. Following the coordinated ‘drop’ of Lively’s fantastical Civil Rights Department Complaint and an explosive New York Times article, Wayfarer and Baldoni became objects of public scorn and derision. Baldoni has been wrongfully labeled as a sex pest, his accolades have been rescinded, and his future projects thrown into doubt. The same is true of Wayfarer, which has been falsely cast as an enabler of sexual misconduct and the architect of a vicious retaliation campaign against a victim of such misconduct.”
Separately, Wallace has filed a multi-million dollar suit against Lively in federal court for defamation.
He claims that he has suffered millions of dollars in reputational harm after the actress claimed that he unleashed a “digital army” to malign her back in August.
“Stephanie Jones, founder of Jonesworks, has a well-documented history of highly questionable conduct in the workplace, which the Lively parties would have seen with even the smallest amount of online research, yet they walked right into Ms. Jones’ ploy of bitter revenge against her most-trusted employee at the expense of her own long-term client,” Freedman added. “We will not stop until our clients are cleared of all wrongdoing and compensated for the vast damages that they have incurred.”
The legal battle shows no signs of abating. Last month, Lively enlisted Nick Shapiro, the CIA’s former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to former director John Brennan, as a crisis PR specialist.
Lively is represented by DC-based attorney Michael Gottlieb, who employed a similar strategy with the actress as he did with client Drake in his PR battle with rapper Kendrick Lamar.
With that case, Gottlieb first filed a petition in New York Supreme Court rather than a lawsuit that claimed the success of Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” was due to deceptive practices carried out by Universal Music Group. Both Drake and Lively have taken a beating in the court of public opinion.
The new complaint refers to a “truce” that had been reached between Lively and Baldoni back in July, with both parties agreeing to stand down in engaging in negative press about the other, but Jones allegedly broke that detente when she defied Baldoni’s wishes and engaged with the Daily Mail to get the publication’s story about Lively “fixed.” Back in August, news outlets and social media influencers were covering a mysterious feud between Lively and Baldoni that prevented the two from appearing together at joint press events or the film’s premiere on Aug. 6.
Baldoni and Wayfarer control the rights to the film’s prequel, which is based on a Colleen Hoover best-selling novel as is the case with “It Ends With Us.”
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