Justin Baldoni's ‘takedown’ plan against Blake Lively involves Taylor Swift, Hailey Bieber

Blake Lively has filed a lawsuit against her "It Ends with Us" co-star Justin Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and causing "severe emotional distress." A new report on Sunday revealed that Taylor Swift and Hailey Bieber's names were allegedly included in a crisis management plan crafted by Baldoni’s team to damage Lively's reputation.

A US Weekly report cited exhibits attached to Lively's complaint, which claimed that a crisis management expert working for Baldoni wrote in an August 6 email “we have seen the most innocuous issues turn giant due to socials or the hugest crises have no effect on social whatsoever. You just cannot tell at this stage. But BL does have some of the same TS fanbase, so we will be taking it extremely seriously.”

The report mentioned a separate “scenario planning” document from Baldoni’s side. It claimed that the document notes, “...our team can also explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.”

Lively and Swift, 35, have long been close and have documented their friendship over the years, the report added.

Baldoni also appeared to use a social media post of Hailey Bieber as an example in an "astroturfing plan" against Lively. Text exchanges reviewed in a legal complaint obtained by US Weekly on Saturday, December 21, showed Baldoni had sent a screenshot of an X thread that unpacked “Hailey Bieber’s history of bullying women,” according to the text, writing, “This is what we would need.”

Lively filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Baldoni on Friday. The lawsuit outlined multiple claims about Baldoni's alleged behaviour during production.

In the complaint, Lively accuses 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.