‘Can bury anyone’: Justin Baldoni allegedly launched smear campaign against Blake Lively? Report makes shocking claim

Blake Lively filed a legal complaint on Friday against her "It Ends With Us" director and co-star, Justin Baldoni. In the complaint, she accused Baldoni and lead producer Jamey Heath of harassment on set and alleged that they initiated a PR smear campaign in retaliation against her, according to the New York Times.

The complaint, which The New York Times reported was filed Friday, precedes a lawsuit. It names Baldoni, the studio, Wayfarer, behind the romantic drama “It Ends With Us” and Baldoni's publicists among the defendants.

In the complaint, Lively accused Baldoni and the studio of embarking on a “multi-tiered plan” to damage her reputation following a meeting in which she and her husband Ryan Reynolds addressed “repeated sexual harassment and other disturbing behavior” by Baldoni and a producer on the movie, the Associated Press reported.

As per the complaint, the plan included a proposal to plant theories on online message boards, engineer a social media campaign and place news stories critical of Lively.

Lively’s filing includes excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and emails that she obtained through a subpoena. These and other documents reviewed by The New York Times show a playbook for waging a "largely undetectable" smear campaign in the digital era.

As per the report, Justin Baldoni, the director and a star of the film, and Jamey Heath, the lead producer, had hired a crisis public relations expert last summer, as the release of “It Ends With Us” approached.

The crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan, whose clients have included Johnny Depp and the rappers Drake and Travis Scott, went hard at the press, pushing to prevent stories about Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Lively, the text messages show.

“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio and Baldoni wrote in an August 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. “You know we can bury anyone,” Nathan was quoted by the New York Times as saying.

Baldoni enlisted publicists and crisis managers in a “sophisticated, coordinated, and well-financed retaliation plan" meant to “bury” and “destroy” Lively if she went public with her on-set concerns, the complaint alleges.

“To safeguard against the risk of Ms. Lively ever revealing the truth about Mr. Baldoni, the Baldoni-Wayfarer team created, planted, amplified, and boosted content designed to eviscerate Ms. Lively’s credibility,” the complaint states.

“They engaged in the same techniques to bolster Mr. Baldoni’s credibility and suppress any negative content about him," it added, as quoted by the Associated Press.

'Completely false'

An attorney for Wayfarer said in a statement to The Times that the studio, its executives and public relations representatives “did nothing proactive nor retaliated” against Ms. Lively, and accused the actress of “another desperate attempt to ‘fix’ her negative reputation.”

Bryan Freedman, an attorney representing Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and its representatives, called the claims “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious.”

He reportedly pushed back against Lively's allegations of a coordinated campaign, saying the studio “proactively” hired a crisis manager “due to the multiple demands and threats made by Ms. Lively during production."

Freedman also said Lively threatened to not appear on set and not promote the film “if her demands were not met.” Those demands were not specified in the statement, but Lively's complaint lists 30 demands that she said Baldoni and others agreed to after their tense sit-down over her hostile work environment concerns.

Among them: “no more showing of nude videos or images of women” to Lively and others on set and no more discussions about pornography, sexual experiences or genitalia.