No Johnny Depp, No Rebel Wilson: Justin Baldoni & Crisis PR Team Want Past Clients & “Smear Websites” Kept From Blake Lively Jury

In this life, you can rest assured there will be taxes, death and there will be more over-adrenalized filings in the long legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni over the making of It Ends With Us and the digital blast radius that allegedly followed.

Now, less than six weeks before the trial in Lively’s recently trimmed multi-million dollar case against her IEWU co-star/director and his Wayfarer Studios brass kicks off on May 18 in federal court in New York City, the docket is filling up fast. In one particular instance, with retaliation, breach of contract, and aiding and abetting claims staring them in the face, Baldoni and the Melissa Nathan-led so-called Crisis PR team at the heart of the alleged 2024 online smear campaign against the actress want any mention of some very high-profile past clients kept quiet.

This latest move comes amidst a weekend squall of 11th hour motions (some sealed, some not), memorandums of law, potential witness lists (no testimony from Taylor Swift, but she will be mentioned; Ryan Reynolds is showing up for sure), verdict forms and more. To that, clumsily citing a “grab bag of awkward comments, minor confrontations, and perceived slights,” Team Baldoni are also seeking to make sure that over the two weeks or so for the trial the jury never hears telling and testimony of “alleged bad experiences of other women” when it comes to the Jane the Virgin alum.

By other women, if you hadn’t already guessed from past filings, the defendants mean the likes of IEWU actresses Jenny Slate and Isabela Ferrer. With all the bridges burned, the women spotlighted by Baldoni and the Wayfarer team to keep out of the Lively trial also include Colleen Hoover, the author of the bestselling book the box office hit Sony distributed movie was based on.

However, perhaps most directly to the remaining retaliation claims in play, it is Nathan’s past and not-so-past clients that the collective Wayfarer gang desire rendered judicial non-entities that is the linchpin of this latest effort to hamper Lively’s case. Put starkly, Nathan and the others assert “the sole reason why Lively improperly seeks to introduce evidence of work that Nathan purportedly performed for her other clients (other than Wayfarer Studios) is to convince the jury that Nathan is immoral and a wrongdoer, etc.”

To counter that narrative, Nathan and her The Agency Group specifically want to make sure any jury doesn’t hear anything about the PR dark arts work they supposedly did for the likes of Johnny Depp, Rebel Wilson and recently convicted sex traffickers the Alexander brothers, among others.

“Any services that Nathan rendered for actor Johnny Depp in connection with his high-profile defamation litigation against ex-wife Amber Heard, for other celebrities such as rappers Drake and Travis Scott, professional wrestler Logan Paul, and actress Rebel Wilson, for politicians, or for other clients are irrelevant to whether she aided and abetted the purported smear campaign at issue herein, as alleged by Lively,” says an April 10 pretrial supplication from PR vet Nathan and other defendants to Judge Lewis Liman. “Indeed, any references to Nathan’s involvement with so-called ‘smear websites’ are irrelevant and prejudicial because Lively does not allege that such mechanism was utilized (by any of the defendants) against her.”

Well, with around $300 million in damages on the table, what Lively does allege is that Nathan, fellow publicist Jennifer Abel and TAG, helped by one-time self-described “hired gun” Jed Wallace, preemptively unleashed an online onslaught against the Gossip Girl star to prevent her from going public against Baldoni. That onslaught saw Lively pillared online from an army of posts and tweets that ranged from critical to caustic to cruel and onward.

Clearly, with an apparently common M.O. in play, Lively and her lawyers want the references to Nathan’s past clients out in open court to convince jurors that such retaliation is the PR firm’s stock in trade in many forms. Admittedly, the smear sites and the involvement of Wilson, in and around her multi-national legal dust-ups with the producers of her directorial debut The Deb, have been revealed in other courts themselves over the past several months to varying degrees of attention.

Yet, Perhaps, just perhaps — with Range Media repped Depp moving back into the movie mainstream after several years cast out in the indie cold, and the now Range Media-repped Wilson already having scored another directing gig with the Jennifer Coolidge and Nicole Scherzinger-starring Girl Group — Team Blake want to bring some outside pressure to bare on Nathan, TAG and the rest of Baldoni’s circle.

In the case of the largely out of sight Amber Heard: Just days after Lively filed her initial sexual harassment and retaliation complaint in late 2024 against Baldoni and his inner circle with the California Civil Rights Department, The Rum Diary actress herself offered her support in her own way.

Granted, it was a guarded manner you would expect of a woman who was vilified and financially buried in the 2022 defamation suit from her ex-husband. “Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying ‘A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on,’” Heard said in a December 2024 statement. “I saw this firsthand and up close. It’s as horrifying as it is destructive.”

At the time, Heard’s stance, like that of Lively, was waved off by Baldoni’s lawyers and flacks.

Despite texts and other communications that seem to indicate a plan to tear Lively to digital shreds plus some telling depositions from TAG employees, Nathan and Abel have always denied there was a smear campaign that ever went beyond the figurative drawing board.

“What the cherry-picked messages don’t include, although not shockingly, as it doesn’t fit the narrative, is that it was no ‘smear’ implied, no negative press was ever facilitated, no social combat plan, although we were prepared for it, as it’s our job to be ready for any scenario, but we didn’t have to implement anything, because the internet was doing the work for us,” Abel proclaimed in a now shuttered December 2024 Facebook post even before Lively actually sued Baldoni, the Wayfarer team, and the publicists.

With all parties asking Judge Liman to grant orders in their favor “at a time and date to be determined by this Court,” Lively and her multi-firm representatives are looking to see some evidence also denied to the as-yet-unselected jury.

As an April 10 filed notice states, they don’t want the jurors to see or hear about:

1. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 1 to Preclude Improper Character Evidence and Lay Opinion Concerning Ms. Lively’s Reputation;

2. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 2 to Preclude Evidence and Argument Relating to the “Vanzan Subpoena”;

3. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 3 to Preclude Evidence Concerning the Character “Nicepool” in the Film Deadpool & Wolverine;

4. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 4 to Preclude Testimony and Evidence Regarding Ms. Lively’s and Non-Party Ryan Reynold’s Net Worth and Financial Status;

5. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 5 to Preclude Internal Sony Communications;

6. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 6 to Preclude Evidence Concerning Defendants’ Alleged Post-Litigation Harm;

7. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 7 to Preclude Evidence Concerning Statements by Plaintiff and Her Agents regarding the Court’s Summary Judgment Order or Proceedings; and

8. Ms. Lively’s Motion in Limine No. 8 to Exclude Testimony of Non-Party Witness Kjersti Flaa.

Fact is, the real grab bag here is all these motions and inches and yards of legal ground the attorneys try to cover for their clients heading into trial.

With settlement talks proving a dead end even after the sexual harassment aspect of Lively’s case was cut out on jurisdictional and contract grounds, the race now is almost as much one of information distribution as it will be actual courtroom argument. To that, both Team Baldoni and Team Blake will be playing a very hard version of hard ball in the weeks and days leading up to jury selection.

Still, looking at the jury verdict form that Lively’s attorneys submitted in the past few days, it’s no secret where they think the weak link is. Among all the questions about damages, there is a center of gravity to their probable legal strategy. A center than just might be out there in one particular question: “Do you find that The Agency Group PR LLC is liable for aiding and abetting retaliation against Ms. Lively?”

As William Shakespeare’s Henry V and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes would say: “the game’s afoot.”