Blake Lively Challenges Justin Baldoni’s “Receipts” By Bringing AT&T, T-Mobile & Verizon Into ‘It Ends With Us’ Battle
(Updated with Baldoni lawyer’s response) If Justin Baldoni thought his version of what went on during the making of It Ends With Us and the messy fallout from the film was going to go unchallenged, today Blake Lively gave her former co-star a lesson in hardcore lawyering.
Sending out a series of subpoenas to cell carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon as well as alleged social media manipulator Jed Wallace, the Gossip Girl vet and Ryan Reynolds want to get a look at the real “receipts,” to cite Baldoni and his main lawyer Bryan Freedman’s assertion of transparency.
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“Ms. Lively has initiated discovery that will expose the people, tactics, and methods that have worked to ‘destroy’ and ‘bury’ her reputation and family over the past year,” attorneys Esra Hudson and Michael Gottlieb said Wednesday as the search for Team Baldoni phone records flew out the door.
“Subpoenas went out to the entities below,” the duo added of the telecoms, Wallace, AOL, and Cloudflare, Inc. “We will now receive all of the “receipts” that, unsurprisingly, are nowhere to be found on Mr. Freedman’s website, and like Ms. Lively, those ‘receipts’ will have their day in court.”
Baldoni’s team are taking the subpoenas in stride.
“Subpoenas are an ordinary part of the litigation process,” said Freedman later Wednesday.
“What is extraordinary is what the Lively Parties are seeking,” the Hollywood litigator continued. “They are asking for every single call, text, data log, and even real-time location information for the past 2.5 years, regardless of the sender, recipient, or subject matter. This massive fishing expedition demonstrates that they are desperately seeking any factual basis for their provably false claims. They will find none.”
It should be noted that Freedman represents Wallace, as does Crisis PR chief Melissa Nathan, who is a fellow defendant in many of these suits.
At the heart of this portion of the allegations, both Lively’s strategic December 20 sexual harassment and retaliation complaint against Baldoni and her subsequent New Year’s Eve formal court filing, is that the high priced Nathan was retained by Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios to blunt any attack the actress may have made against him over conduct on IEWU. To that, Nathan’s TAG firm is alleged to have worked with Wallace (called Jed in some already public texts and other correspondence from Nathan and her team) to actually execute the online smear of Lively, that went after her reputation and derailed the summer 2024 launch of a new Lively product line.
Nathan and fellow publicist Jennifer Abel admit they planned a potential defense of their client, but they never had to push the button because an organic hate-on against Lively occurred anyway.
With the role and reach of Texas-based Wallace under the microscope even more of late, the attempt to dive deeper into his affairs, at the keyboard and otherwise could be significant. In the overlap of Lively’s likely to be amended NYE-filed sexual harassment and retaliation suit against Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, execs and PR team and Baldoni’s now amended January 16 $400 million defamation and extortion suit against Lively, Reynolds and their publicist Leslie Sloane, Wallace could be the inflection point.
With an amended complaint and so-called timeline posted on its own website on the last day of January by Team Baldoni, that’s at least what Team Blake are saying.
“In their internal private messages that Baldoni’s team never expected anyone would see, they bragged that thanks to Jed’s work they saw a shift in the narrative to putting a spotlight on Blake and laughed at how sad it was that people so easily want to hate on a woman,” a spokesperson for Lively and Reynolds said to Deadline this afternoon. “We look forward to investigating more about Jed Wallace’s entire business model and what else he was doing to distract from the very real sexual harassment and retaliation claims made by Ms. Lively. We are delighted to be able to start discovery on it.”
With multiple lawsuits, including a $7 million defamation action launched last week against Lively by alleged online smear campaign mastermind Wallace at play, Baldoni and Lively and Reynolds are currently set to go to trial on March 29, 2026 in New York.
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