Alleged Smear Campaign Messages That Auto-Deleted, Hidden From Courts Crank Up The Heat Anew In Blake Lively Vs. Justin Baldoni Battle

Just when you thought Blake Lively‘s sexual harassment and retaliation claims against her It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni truly couldn’t get anymore incendiary, lawyers for the Another Simple Favor actress may have dug up a bonafide digital smoking gun.

“Defendants have hid the ball at every turn in the discovery process, either failing to produce documents, or improperly cloaking them in the attorney-client privilege, forcing no less than twelve discovery-related motions to date against Defendants and their aligned third parties,” alleges a much-redacted sanctions seeking filing today from Lively’s Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and Willkie Farr & Gallagher attorneys.

Backed up by a very similar filing Wednesday from Baldoni ex-PR firm and third-party defendant Jonesworks LLC, Lively’s team is essentially calling out Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios inner circle and the likes of publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel over deliberate use of the Signal app, voice memos and other software for their smear campaign scheme against the actress. Risking refuting a court order on evidence from months ago, the aim of the Baldoni execs and hired hands to use Signal back in 2024 is said to be “either destroying or failing to preserve relevant communication in real time.”

A.K.A.: They knew they may be taken to court and they wanted to cover their sub-contracted tracks, surmise the hindsight-benefited Lively’s lawyers of the Wayfarer defendants.

It should be noted, Baldoni and his crew have always denied Lively’s claims of what went down on the set of the Sony-distributed domestic abuse film.

Even with some less than affirming texts and emails that have come out looking to counter their argument, the Baldoni team has rejected from the drop the idea that they orchestrated a multi-pronged smear campaign against Lively in mid-2024. Instead, they claim the harsh online blowback against the Gossip Girl star was “organic” from regular Joes and Josephines who were spotlighting what an insufferable elitist Lively could allegedly be.

Early this year, Baldoni actually sued Lively, hubby Ryan Reynolds and others for defamation in a $400 million countersuit. As a legal move that action got a lot of attention and aided a conflicting narrative, but it also got tossed out this past summer.

Long suspecting something was up to explain the lack of significant chatter over a supposed effort to taint and stain Lively online in the lead-up to IEWU‘s August 2024 premiere and worries the actress would turn on Baldoni, the Signal info and more came out of depositions with ex-Nathan staffers like Katherine Case and Breanna Butler.

In fact, Stephanie Jones’ lawyers say the hits, so to speak, kept coming even after Lively first filed her claims against Wayfarer Studios co-founder Baldoni with the California Civil Rights department last December, and as she prepared to formally sue the Jane the Virgin alum. “Evidence only recently produced reveals that, soon after Lively initiated this action, Abel, along with Freedman and others, were actively directing social-media messaging intended to promote Baldoni and disparage Lively,” Jones’ legal team writes in their own memo, with reference to lead Baldoni attorney Bryan Freedman.

Jones’ chief attorney Kristin Tahler added today to Deadline: “Jen Abel conspired with Melissa Nathan, Justin Baldoni and Wayfarer to orchestrate a smear campaign and she did it in secret, outside of Joneworks and behind Stephanie Jones’ back. Conversations were moved to an auto-deleting platform and evidence was destroyed. There can be only one reason for this. They had something to hide and wanted to make sure it would never be discovered.”

Add to that, looking for financial and judicial compensation, the 30-page memorandum from Team Blake declares : “Now that the dust has settled, and fact discovery and depositions have closed, two things are clear: (1) despite Defendants’ clumsy efforts to cover their tracks, there is substantial evidence that the retaliatory campaign was, in fact, implemented as planned, and (2) Defendants flouted this Court’s orders, and destroyed and/or failed to preserve or produce additional material and highly relevant evidence, the absence of which they intend to try to unjustly exploit in their favor.”

And, as the much trolled case heads towards a March 2026 trial in New York City, Lively and Abel’s crew also want Judge Lewis Liman to take away one of the Wayfarer boys and their flacks’ key defenses.

Employing no small degree of restraint compared to past filings in this matter being fought in and outside the courts, Lively’s Esra Hudson-led team says:

“Accordingly, to remedy the prejudice caused by the spoliated evidence, Ms. Lively respectfully seeks the following adverse inference: Defendants intentionally deleted and failed to preserve relevant evidence for this litigation. Defendants anticipated litigation with Ms. Lively by at least August 2024, but nonetheless elected to use methods of communication that automatically delete, such as Signal and (as to the Wallace Defendants) voice memos, to discuss the execution of the Digital Campaign against Ms. Lively, and Defendants failed to take affirmative steps to preserve such communications prior to December 20, 2024. You may presume from Defendants’ failure to preserve these Signal communications and voice memos that Defendants did, in fact, execute the plan that TAG recommended and for which the Wayfarer Parties retained the Wallace Defendants and that Defendants intentionally failed to preserve their communications in order to hide this fact.”

A.K.A.: Lively’s team is saying to Baldoni – you walked right into this, didn’t you?

Baldoni rep Melissa Nathan, who is also a defendant here, did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment from Wayfarer and the other defendants on the Lively and Jonesworks filings and their accusations.