Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni and the sinister world of crisis PR

Plus, Nosferatu, introversion, and a powerful longread

Shady PR tactics are nothing new – I’ve spent hours on the phone to wily publicists trying every trick in the book to get their client’s headline or quote changed, from promising access to white whale clients, serious emotional manipulation or even threatening me with legal action.

But nothing prepared me for the level of shadiness revealed in Blake Lively’s lawsuits against her It Ends with Us director and co-lead Justin Baldoni, which alleges that he and his team coordinated a “smear campaign” of negative press to damage her reputation following intrigue around an on-set fallout with Baldoni, which resulted in them doing totally separate press for the film, and Lively being given the final cut by Sony.

Baldoni’s team were also anticipating the potential leak of crisis talks between Lively and Baldoni’s production studio Wayfarer that occurred half-way through making the film, during which Lively raised a 30-strong list of things Baldoni must stop doing for her to continue working with him. Lively’s suit accused Baldoni of keeping an open set when she was filming nude scenes, improvising unscripted intimate scenes, coming into her trailer while she was breastfeeding, asking intrusive questions about her sex life, among many other disturbing things.

The reported ‘smear campaign’ against Lively was part of Baldoni’s crisis PR strategy, a kind of damage control publicity that has become increasingly common with brands and celebrities since the rise of cancel culture. It’s a secretive business, and as such the best crisis PR is invisible: a gradual shift in public perception around a divisive famous figure through meticulously planned and well-placed interviews, the brains behind the most heartfelt and authentic notes app apology, and pruning a dodgy digital footprint.

But according to Lively’s allegations, Baldoni’s crisis PR Melissa Nathan (who also repped Johnny Depp during his trial against Amber Heard), allegedly resorted to some very dirty methods, from using her extensive network of journalist contacts to plant false and negative stories about Lively being a ‘bully’ by “weaponising feminism” and, according to one of Nathan’s text exchanges, deliberately goading the internet’s desire to “tear down women”.

Baldoni’s team was also accused of using bots, drawing parallels with the defamation case against Heard. (According to computer programme Ron Schnell, on the excellent Who Trolled Amber podcast, over 50 per cent of the Tweets about Heard in the lead up to the trial were either bots of paid-for accounts, and he traced many of them to Saudi Arabia, which has a vested interest in stirring up culture wars in the West.) Baldoni and his team deny these allegations, and Baldoni has sued the New York Times, who reported Lively’s suit, for libel.

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Over the past few years I’ve noticed more and more ‘regular’ PR firms offer crisis comms as an integrated part of the business. In fact, it’s such an essential facet of maintaining a public persona that I was surprised the PR firm repping Baldoni, Jonesworks, had to hire one outside of their business: Nathan, a British publicist who started her career in London, working for culture publicity film Outside Organisation before moving to New York to work as vice president for Hiltzik Strategies, hired by Depp during his various trials, and headed up by veteran crisis PR Matthew Hiltzik, who has worked with Miramax and Weinstein.

Last January Nathan launched her own PR film, The Agency Group, with clients including Depp, Logan Paul and Drake. TAG was also hired on temporary contracts, such as with Baldoni – Jennifer Abel from Jonesworks contracted her following a flurry of negative press around Baldoni this August following allegations of creepy behaviour towards Lively on the It Ends with Us set.

Jonesworks boss Stephanie Jones, who claims the smear campaign was operated behind her back, is also suing Nathan. In her lawsuit Jones alleges that Nathan, with whom she worked on a mutual client a few years back, had an ethically grimy way of working that rang alarm bells. Jones claims she advised the mutual client to end their contract with Nathan, for which Nathan has since held a grudge, allegedly explaining why Nathan – according to Jones’s lawsuit – tried to discredit Jonesworks through negative media stories about her allegedly toxic workplace and dwindling client list. Jones claims it is also the reason that Nathan, along with Jonesworks employee and Baldoni’s personal PR Jennifer Abel, attempted to steal Baldoni as a client, among others, along with confidential Joneswork information.

Looking through Jones’s lawsuit, which through subpoena got hold of plenty of texts between Abel and Nathan, Jones seems to have a strong claim: there is back and forth about the pair placing this all-guns-blazing Business Insider piece, and, though publicists taking clients with them to new ventures is relatively common, Jones accuses Abel and Nathan of stealing company documents – it was in fact her IT staff who allegedly reported the suspicious activity on Abel’s account.

It is fascinating to watch publicists, and specifically a crisis publicist, become the story, and not just any story, but one that will define this year’s entire pop cultural narrative. Melissa Nathan, who, until this sorry saga, could barely be found online, has now become a villainous fixture of the very pop culture subReddits she had perhaps once hoped to influence through her campaigns. Who offers crisis PR to the crisis PR?

The other day I stumbled upon a kind of blind-item gossip site about Stephanie Jones, called Stephanie Jones Leaks, which was last updated in October and reads as a kind of gleefully bitchy, anonymous Gossip Girl-style takedown of Jones and her company, alongside an honesty box via which people can submit their own stories of her allegedly toxic workplace. It seems astonishing that Jones’s own personal branding crisis might be the worst she has ever dealt with.

Also fascinating is just how disproportionate Baldoni’s giant PR crisis has been to his minimal fame. This is an actor I would bet most people, and perhaps even most culture journalists (myself included), had never even heard of until It Ends With Us. Despite his biggest credit being the TV show Jane the Virgin, he somehow sweet-talked the rights out of It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover, who had reportedly turned everyone else down. (I would love to read the reported email pitch from Baldoni, who, suspiciously, seems to have built his entire brand and personality on being a male ally to women – see his podcast, books, TED talk, and the It Ends with Us press tour).

Considering Baldoni’s modest notoriety, he has a curiously loud and aggressive fanbase, which suggests that, like with Depp vs Heard, authentic support is being hugely magnified by paid profiles and bots. And while a loud and protective fanbase may help your reputation, it doesn’t pay the bills. It was telling that Depp’s big comeback film, Jeanne du Barry, flopped at the box office, and was reportedly pulled from cinemas in Los Angeles due to low ticket sales (it was an indie film, but still).

Nathan may have had more success with her crisis PR around Depp, but Depp was a Hollywood giant whose personal brand was, if anything, wrapped up in a very traditional and toxic masculinity from the start. It’s likely the reason Dior shockingly kept him as the face of their fragrance Sauvage, and why he is slinking back into the mainstream with upcoming films that suit his dark reputation: Day Drinker, about a grieving bartender, starring alongside Penelope Cruz, and The Carnival at the End of Days, about Satan and the end of the world, alongside Adam Driver.

The only comeback for Baldoni, perhaps, would be to quit his performative allyship and join the manosphere, starting afresh with a new podcast about what it’s like to be a ‘victim of weaponised feminism’. First guest? Armie Hammer.

This week in links

Finding Jordan Neely, New York Magazine
Jordan Neely was once a beloved fixture of New York City life as a Michael Jackson impersonator. But, as a result of severe mental health issues exacerbated by personal tragedy, he became homeless, and, aged 30, was choked to death in May 2023 by ex-marine Daniel Penny on a New York subway because he was reportedly scaring fellow passengers. Shockingly, Penny was cleared of his murder. This longread thoughtfully pays tribute to a life filled with injustice – including Neely’s own mother being murdered when he was a child – and how his death became a smoking gun in US politics.

Nosferatu, in cinemas now
Lily Rose-Depp’s ‘horny horror’ by director Robert Eggers – adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula – has been described as a masterpiece by some critics, and ‘extravagantly sexual’. Depp is brilliant, giving a career-best performance (atoning for the abomination that was the Idol) as Ellen, who is sexually possessed by a vampire (though those orgasm scenes are a little too reminiscent of the Idol, come to think of it). But I found that the film prioritises atmosphere over plot, and, while beautifully shot (and despite loving Eggers’s The Lighthouse and The Witch) it’s a bit of a slog.

‘People feel they don’t owe anyone anything’: the rise in ‘flaking’ out of social plans, Guardian
I was struck by this quote from a 23-year-old telecoms sales person, who perspectively notes how, online, introverts are often portrayed as morally superior to extroverts: “Increasingly with gen Z and millennials there is a fetishisation of introversion. Web comics and memes make a moral comparison to extroverts, who are supposedly loud, obnoxious people. Introverts are [depicted as] moral people who own cats and crochet.” It applies to influencing on TikTok too, with creators like Madeleine Argy making ‘bed rotting’ a key part of her personal brand. And yet, as the piece notes, Gen Z is facing a loneliness epidemic.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki
I devoured this thriller about a female journalist in Japan who becomes obsessed with a female serial killer accused of seducing men through her beautiful cooking. It paints a fascinating portrait of cultural misogyny in Japan and is full of some of the most mouth-watering descriptions of food you'll ever read.

Londoncentric, Substack
Journalist Jim Waterson quit his job at the Guardian to launch a Substack promising to report on the city in ‘an old fashioned way’. I’ve enjoyed his posts so far, including on the Drumsheds scandal (and, mysteriously, the charity that owns the space), as well as on the ‘fake reviews’ of London’s most expensive hotels and restaurants, including the Ritz, “in an extraordinary tale that stretches from the capital’s lucrative luxury dining market to forced labour camps on Cambodia-Myanmar border.”

And for more on Lively vs Baldoni, including a detailed but very digestible breakdown of the various lawsuits and allegations, listen to my most recent podcast episode of Straight Up.

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