Slamming Justin Baldoni’s “Smoke & Mirrors Exercise,” Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds’ PR Chief Wants Out Of ‘It Ends With Us’ Legal Battle
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ publicist Leslie Sloane is standing strongly with her clients against Justin Baldoni’s alleged “bizarre and abusive practices,” but the Vision PR boss wants herself and her company dropped from the legal battle between the It Ends With Us stars.
“The Wayfarer Parties dragged Leslie Sloane and Vision PR, Inc. into the instant litigation as a smoke and mirrors exercise to distract from their own sexual harassment and systematic retaliation,” asserts an accompanying memo to a motion to dismiss Sloane and Vision PR from the latest version of Baldoni’s $400 million defamation and extortion lawsuit filed today in federal court.
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“The Amended Complaint does not — and cannot — identify anything Ms. Sloane did that comes anywhere close to the damning communications between Baldoni and his own publicists concerning an explicit campaign to ‘destroy’ and ‘bury’ the woman employee who accused him of sexual harassment,” the document from Sloane’s Bois Schiller Flexner lawyers goes on to say of Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, CEO Jamey Heath, their backer and their own PR team lead by Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel and the astroturfing that Lively says she suffered.
After the New Year’s Eve and January 16 complaints from Lively and Baldoni following the former’s December 20 sexual harassment and retaliation filing with California’s Civil Rights department, both sides have now filed amended complaints in their increasingly acidic face-off. With both sides also rejecting mediation from the court and telling Judge Lewis J. Liman that any hope of a settlement is essentially a non-starter, the media smorgasbord that this has become is set to go to trial in NYC on March 29, 2026.
Neither representatives for Lively and Reynolds nor Baldoni and gang responded to request for comment Thursday on Sloane’s motion. If they do, this post will be updated. On a few levels it makes sense that no one is talking right now as Sloane herself and her attorneys kind of set the PR table on this latest turn in the whole shebang.
“The Wayfarer Parties accuse Ms. Sloane and Vision PR, Inc. of extortion but do not (and cannot) identify where or how the alleged extortion occurred, or how Ms. Sloane or Vision PR, Inc. received anything of value because of that extortion,” the filing from the Katie Holmes and George Stephanopoulos PR exec states of Sloane and Vision PR’s role or not in the Lively vs Baldoni case.”
They also assert claims for defamation without complying with the basic requirement of identifying or describing the statements they allege are defamatory. Because the Amended Complaint’s scattershot allegations fail to adequately plead claims for civil extortion, defamation, and false light, Ms. Sloane and Vision PR, Inc. respectfully request that the Court dismiss the Amended Complaint with prejudice and award attorneys’ fees and costs under New York’s anti-SLAPP law.”
Of course, as Sloane and her Vision PR are knee-deep in all this so far, former Hiltzik Strategies staffer Nathan and now RWA Communications founder Abel are also in the legal quicksand too. Various text messages littered throughout the Lively filings allege their use of the PR Dark Arts to execute an online smear campaign against the actress in the lead-up to IEWU release last summer and blunt anything Lively may have said about possible misconduct by Baldoni. With their so-called “hired gun” Jed Wallace now a defendant in the case after Lively filed her amended complaint earlier this week, Abel and Nathan have long admitted to putting together plans to protect their client Baldoni and Wayfarer. However, vital to note, they say they never had to use the schemes because the Internet rose up all on its own against the Gossip Girl alum.
No hearing date has been set for Sloane’s motion to exit the matter.
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