Justin Baldoni and Jennifer Abel have taken legal action against his former publicist Stephanie Jones.
In December 2024, Blake Lively initiated a lawsuit against her It Ends with Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and attempting to damage her reputation—claims he firmly denies.
Since that time, several other legal actions have emerged, including a $400 million defamation lawsuit from Baldoni’s team. Recently, on Friday, March 21, Baldoni and Abel submitted a new complaint in a New York federal court, accusing former publicist Stephanie Jones of ‘maliciously’ leaking text messages.
Last summer, when rumors of a conflict between Baldoni and Lively began circulating, Jones was representing Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios. Abel was a partner of Jones at Joneswork PR.
Coinciding with Lively’s lawsuit, Jones also initiated a lawsuit against Baldoni for breach of contract, alleging she had dismissed Abel the previous summer upon discovering evidence on Abel’s company phone linking her to the alleged smear campaign against Lively.
The newly filed complaint accuses Jones of leaking text messages that were later referenced in a New York Times article revealing ‘private messages [detailing] an alleged campaign to tarnish Blake Lively’.
Documents obtained by Variety indicate that Jones’ phone was confiscated in August 2024, and the text messages featured in the explosive article seemed to originate from her device, shortly after Abel informed Jones about her intention to leave Joneswork PR and start independently.
Furthermore, the complaint claims Abel was confronted at the Jonesworks office, just two days before her planned departure, by a security guard, a forensic data extraction expert, and an attorney, who demanded she surrender her electronic devices.
The lawsuit alleges Abel was compelled to hand over her devices under the belief that her computer contained no ‘proprietary information’ and on the condition that Jonesworks would ‘immediately release her personal cell phone number’ to prevent the company from having unrestricted access to its contents.
Jonesworks reportedly agreed to release Abel’s phone number if she promptly visited a store, but the complaint claims this did not happen within four hours, accusing Jones of ‘double-crossing’ Abel.
“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,” the complaint states. “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.”
The lawsuit claims Jones then shared the contents of Abel’s phone with Lively and her team without obtaining a subpoena.
The lawsuit contends this action led to the manipulation of Jones’ ‘communications to construct a false narrative about the source of Lively’s bad publicity’, accusing Jones of being fully aware that the repercussions would negatively impact Abel as well as her clients, Wayfarer and Baldoni.
The lawsuit accuses Jones of violating California labor laws concerning Abel’s employment and orchestrating a ‘malicious scheme’ that resulted in ‘Abel’s life ha[ving] been turned upside down, her career and reputation destroyed, her private information leaked, and her email inbox and social media pages filled with a daily stream of death threats and abuse’.
The complaint further states: “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.”
Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, told Variety it is ‘undeniable’ that Jones ‘initiated this catastrophic sequence of events by violating the most basic of privacy rights, as well as any remaining trust her clients held’.
Freedman accused Jones of ‘maliciously turning over communications’ from Abel’s phone and providing information to Lively’s personal publicist, Leslie Sloane, and claims she 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.
Freedman concluded: “We will not stop until our clients are cleared of all wrongdoing and compensated for the vast damages that they have incurred.”
Kristin Tahler, a partner at Quinn Emanuel and representative of Stephanie Jones, stated to UNILAD: “Ms. Jones’ lawsuit is based entirely on facts and concrete evidence. That 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 a 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.”