Justin Baldoni is taking legal action against his former publicist Stephanie Jones, blaming her for sparking the legal battle between him and Blake Lively.
Baldoni filed the lawsuit in New York federal court on March 21 against the founder of PR firm Jonesworks.
In his filing, the It Ends With Us director has accused Jones of violating client confidentiality by sharing private conversation which was then used as central evidence in a separate lawsuit Lively filed against him.
“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 to People Magazine regarding the recent complaint.
The recent lawsuit is the sixth linked to the It Ends With Us production which began with Lively suing Baldoni, producer Jamey Heath, and Wayfarer co-founder Steve Sarowitz, alleging sexual harassment and a smear campaign launched to damage her reputation.
The New York Times later claimed it had reviewed “thousands of pages of text messages and emails that she obtained through a subpoena.”
Baldoni has claimed that Jones got her hands on the text messages after seizing Abel’s phone when she informed Jones she was leaving to start her own firm. Abel was told that Jonesworks would have grounds to sue if she did not allow Jones access to her personal laptop.
“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 construct a false narrative about the source of Lively’s bad publicity,” read Baldoni’s complaint.
“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,” the complaint continued.
It is pertinent to mention that Jones was the first to file a lawsuit against Baldoni and Abel in December.
Baldoni then hit back at Lively and the New York Times by suing them for defamation and libel respectively in separate lawsuits before countersuing Jones in March.