The latest chapter of It Ends With Us is an alleged Blake Lively smear campaign

The dramatic summer feud among the cast of It Ends With Us took a darker turn last week when Blake Lively accused Justin Baldoni, the movie’s costar and director, of sexual harassment on set and a subsequent plot to tarnish her reputation.

On Friday, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, his studio Wayfarer, Wayfarer CEO Jamey Heath, and others alleging a smear campaign and detailing numerous instances of sexual harassment she allegedly endured while making the film. In addition to the legal complaint filed with the California Civil Rights Department — which precedes a lawsuit — the New York Times published a story that detailed allegations of behind-the-scenes texts and a strategy between Baldoni and his crisis PR firm that expressed a desire to “bury” Lively.

“I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted,” Lively said in a statement.

Lively’s legal filing alleges deplorable behavior from Baldoni and Heath and sheds light on what was previously categorized as a feud between the two stars. But it also shows the inner workings of crisis management — the nefarious tactics publicists deploy to shape the narrative around celebrity — and perhaps more strikingly, how incredibly easy their job is when social media users are primed to turn against a female celebrity.

Blake Lively’s legal filing alleges a hostile work environment

The biggest revelation about the filming experience from Lively’s legal complaint is a January 4 It Ends With Us “all hands” with high-level executives during the middle of production. At the meeting, Lively claimed that Baldoni and Heath, also a producer of the movie, had created a hostile work environment and subjected her to inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment; she and the rest of the cast and crew would not return to set until their behavior was addressed.

Among Lively’s allegations were that Baldoni improvised kissing scenes, that Heath had shown her a nude picture of his wife, that both talked about their past porn addictions, and that Baldoni and Heath had each walked into her trailer uninvited while she was changing, nude, or breastfeeding. According to Lively’s filing, the meeting included a 30-point conduct improvement plan for Baldoni and Heath. The points address the aforementioned alleged behavior and include other guidelines like: “No more pressing by Mr. Baldoni to sage any of BL’s (Blake Lively) employees” and “No more inquiries by Mr. Baldoni to BL trainer without her knowledge or consent to disclose her weight.”

After the meeting, Wayfarer brought an intimacy coordinator on set and conditions improved enough that Lively finished filming. Lively also asserts that in the final stages of production, she made her own cut of It Ends With Us — a version that Sony and Wayfarer ultimately went with. That decision gave her a producing credit, a bigger role in the making of the movie.

The key to understanding this complaint and, seemingly, the fight over this movie is that Lively claims that Baldoni and Heath were worried that Lively’s allegations would eventually surface and damage their reputations. Because they believed that Lively could pull the trigger at any moment, Lively alleges, Baldoni hired crisis PR to effectively smear her.

Justin Baldoni allegedly hired a crisis management firm to employ gross tactics against his costar

While Lively and Bandoni are the faces of the It Ends With Us debacle, the most incendiary figure of the complaint is Melissa Nathan, the crisis management expert Baldoni hired. Publicists like Nathan are very important in Hollywood because celebrities’ images are so valuable. Actors’ and actresses’ careers depend on how marketable they are, and bad stories about said actors and actresses threaten their livelihoods. Nathan, who has also helped rehab clients like Johnny Depp and Travis Scott, makes those stories go away.

Nathan’s connections in the media seemed to help facilitate her work — her sister, Sara Nathan, for instance, is a journalist at the New York Post and the two allegedly coordinated on Page Six’s coverage of the feud, according to the filing. Lively’s filing also alleges — via text messages and emails reportedly obtained through a subpoena— an interaction in which Nathan sent around a Daily Mail article with the headline: “Is Blake Lively set to be CANCELLED? String of ‘hard to watch’ videos that have surfaced following ‘tone deaf’ Q&A to promote It Ends With Us could tarnish 36-year-old star’s golden Hollywood image for good.” To be clear, it is not your imagination nor a hallucination; Daily Mail headlines are almost always that long and almost always find a way to mention an actress’s age in a menacing way.

“You really outdid yourself with this piece,” a text from Jennifer Abel appears to read, a PR executive working with Wayfarer and Baldoni, to Nathan.

“That’s why you hired me right? I’m the best,” Nathan seemingly wrote back. “You know we can bury anyone,” Nathan appeared to write in another message that surfaced in Lively’s filing.

In addition, Nathan also allegedly presented Baldoni with an entire takedown plan that included teams that would monitor and post stories on Reddit and social media, as well as the hiring of Jed Wallace, “a Texas-based contractor” who was in charge of creating “content that appeared to be authentic” but was actually Baldoni PR that was designed to go viral.

While Nathan and her team’s communications appear to be incendiary, sometimes stopping just short of a cartoon villain going “Muahahahaha,” the odd wrinkle to this story is that it seems as though Baldoni needs her services more than ever — the allegations of his film’s toxic work environment are out in the open while Nathan, Wallace, and Abel’s alleged machinations on his behalf have also been made public.

How much of Blake Lively’s reputational hit was a smear campaign and how much of it is misogyny

Lively’s filing argues that the work of Nathan and her associates is directly responsible for the tarnishing of her reputation. The filing alleges that Nathan delivered a proposal to Baldoni detailing how her team would shift the narrative against Lively — “engage with audiences in the right way, start threads of theories … this is the way to be fully 100% protected.”

But it’s a little difficult to parse who was doing what and how much of a hand Nathan, Abel, and Wallace had in public opinion. Aside from a few instances of stories showing up in trade and tabloid publications, the legal filing doesn’t specifically get into what Nathan and Wallace did and didn’t seed. And while Lively’s assertion that Nathan is a master social media manipulator, it is giving a lot of credit to someone who allegedly gave the Daily Mail a tip.

Further, Lively’s It Ends With Us promotion was a disaster, partly due to the fact that a film about domestic violence and Lively’s desire to simultaneously promote her other ventures — a hair care company, an alcohol company, her husband Ryan Reynolds’s projects — were always going to be at odds. (The filing alleges that the marketing directive was to focus on the more hopeful and empowering aspects of the movie rather than the film’s serious, domestic violence subject matter.) While Nathan seemingly was, to whatever degree, trying to manipulate the press, she wasn’t responsible for Lively’s conduct or the fact that her reputation already seemed to be on the downturn.

Plus, Nathan’s alleged campaign was no doubt helped along by social media’s ingrained misogyny and its habit of cyclically turning on female celebrities.

At one point during the initial release of the film, Nathan appeared to express her glee and surprise at how the narrative had shifted. Baldoni “doesn’t realise how lucky he is right now. We need to press on him just how fucking lucky,” Nathan allegedly wrote to Abel in October 2024. “The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don’t even agree with half of them lol,” Nathan added that same month.

The socials Nathan is referring to seem to be, in some part, stan accounts — social media fan accounts run by people online who relentlessly attack others who don’t share their point of view about a given celebrity or cultural property.

More details are sure to come out, but for now it appears as though Baldoni paid people to do a smear job — but a lot of people online did a better job for free.