Blake Lively- Jason Baldoni and NYT - False Light claims

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I actually know Liz Dye irl. She isn’t a lawyer, I don’t think, but is a yoga instructor. Draw your own conclusions about how reliable her commentary is, but I would guess less reliable than some of the lawyer mom here.

While not a lawyer (though Torrez is, right? Harvard law grad and former Covington atty?), isn't Dye a journalist who covers legal issues at pubs like Above the Law and Wonkette, and so aren't you rather minimizing this woman's resume to yoga? https://substack.com/@lizdye

Are you touting Above the Law and Wonkette as something besides online gossip sites? Honestly, no shade intended, she’s a nice person, and solidly in the dcum demographic, perhaps she posts in this thread anonymously. Her kids are the same age as mine in the same city and they don’t call that city Smalltimore for nothing. But I am a litigator and wouldn’t seek her out for legal advice, can think of many lawyer moms I’d go to first. How you spend your free time, however, is your call.

"perhaps she posts in this thread anonymously" oh noes here we go again, conspiracy theory #589.

Honestly, I am just really hoping that the world view of Baldoni supporters continues to fall slowly apart bit by bit, culminating in the judicial determination at some point that not only did the smear happen, but Freedman himself was involved in it. I know that is asking for a lot and I don't expect to get it, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if that is where all of this is going.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I actually know Liz Dye irl. She isn’t a lawyer, I don’t think, but is a yoga instructor. Draw your own conclusions about how reliable her commentary is, but I would guess less reliable than some of the lawyer mom here.

While not a lawyer (though Torrez is, right? Harvard law grad and former Covington atty?), isn't Dye a journalist who covers legal issues at pubs like Above the Law and Wonkette, and so aren't you rather minimizing this woman's resume to yoga? https://substack.com/@lizdye

Are you touting Above the Law and Wonkette as something besides online gossip sites? Honestly, no shade intended, she’s a nice person, and solidly in the dcum demographic, perhaps she posts in this thread anonymously. Her kids are the same age as mine in the same city and they don’t call that city Smalltimore for nothing. But I am a litigator and wouldn’t seek her out for legal advice, can think of many lawyer moms I’d go to first. How you spend your free time, however, is your call.

"perhaps she posts in this thread anonymously" oh noes here we go again, conspiracy theory #589.

Honestly, I am just really hoping that the world view of Baldoni supporters continues to fall slowly apart bit by bit, culminating in the judicial determination at some point that not only did the smear happen, but Freedman himself was involved in it. I know that is asking for a lot and I don't expect to get it, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if that is where all of this is going.

Yea, we all know that you have personalized this case in an unhealthy way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

I mean, I think it’s normal if the star of your movie has hijacked it, threatened to feed “stories” about you to her friend at the Times, and is actively trying to turn Hollywood and the public against you. Sort of like it’s not normal to be relegated to the basement and a separate theater for the premiere of your own film.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

I see the purposelessly misleading pro Lively folks are back to working weekends, and scouring the world for anti Wayfarer Baldoni talking points to throw around.

I had to look into crisis PR (no ‘smear’) for my fairly small company and it was about 70k a month. Obviously it’s rare to need crisis PR for an entire year so your 900k reference seems purposefully irrelevant.

And this was some years back, and a small company. baldoni’s was PR related to a film that had cost some people a bunch of money. That number is not weird at all, and doesn’t indicate there was a smear campaign.

Stop being so shameless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

I see the purposelessly misleading pro Lively folks are back to working weekends, and scouring the world for anti Wayfarer Baldoni talking points to throw around.

I had to look into crisis PR (no ‘smear’) for my fairly small company and it was about 70k a month. Obviously it’s rare to need crisis PR for an entire year so your 900k reference seems purposefully irrelevant.

And this was some years back, and a small company. baldoni’s was PR related to a film that had cost some people a bunch of money. That number is not weird at all, and doesn’t indicate there was a smear campaign.

Stop being so shameless.

What small company needs 70k/mo in crisis pr? That's absurd. Unless your "small company" is a hedge fund that is accused of stealing client money, I don't buy it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have always thought that all of the sanctions motions were filed primarily to stress how unsupported many of Baldoni’s claims were and how dismissal with prejudice would therefore be appropriate.

Andrew Torrez (who is himself a bit sketchy tbh, see below) and Liz Dye, who both also correctly predicted the emaciation of Baldoni’s complaint at the motion to dismiss stage, think the sanctions motions have a good chance of succeeding. They also stress that Freedman’s responses to the motions were circular nonsense legal arguments that don’t offer any real defense.

https://www.lawandchaospod.com/p/sanctions-for-justin

Not really familiar with this podcast. My understanding is that Torrez himself was accused of sexual harassment of some of his prior podcast listeners, and inappropriate touching of his prior podcast host, and that he has sought and received treatment for same. (But if this is the Lively side equivalent of posting Candace Owens content, let me know and I won’t do it again!!)

I also listen to Torrez’s prior podcast partner at Gavel Gavel: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gavel-gavel/id1797928897

So the doc I linked above was a Torrez/ Dye write up of the sanctions issue. They also discuss the Baldoni case at times on their podcast, Law and Chaos. I’ve linked one episode below — they definitely think Baldoni’s legal claims are iffy and that Freedman and co. seem to be acting in court in a way to perpetuate the smear (e.g., as discussed in the link below, by sending their court filings to friendly pubs in advance so Lively’s dropping of the ED claims was reported within minutes of its filing on the docket).

Minutes 22-36 discuss the drama around Lively dropping her emotional distress claims and the judge’s decision not to compel her medical records: https://www.lawandchaospod.com/p/ep-139-you-get-a-civ-pro-and-you-f5f?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

I see the purposelessly misleading pro Lively folks are back to working weekends, and scouring the world for anti Wayfarer Baldoni talking points to throw around.

I had to look into crisis PR (no ‘smear’) for my fairly small company and it was about 70k a month. Obviously it’s rare to need crisis PR for an entire year so your 900k reference seems purposefully irrelevant.

And this was some years back, and a small company. baldoni’s was PR related to a film that had cost some people a bunch of money. That number is not weird at all, and doesn’t indicate there was a smear campaign.

Stop being so shameless.

What small company needs 70k/mo in crisis pr? That's absurd. Unless your "small company" is a hedge fund that is accused of stealing client money, I don't buy it.

The company was well under 750 people so yes, small in the corporate world. And companies often hire crisis PR for brand reputations issues, and it’s expensive. It’s also short term so when I looked into it, we were looking at 6 months or less. Really not that much overall. You’re acting like some random person off the street hired PR for 70k a month. No, it was a decent sized film with a healthy budget and they wanted to safeguard their investment. This is not ‘totes’ abnormal behavior as you put it in such a juvenile way.

[Anonymous]

Google told me social media monitoring shouldn’t be costing anyone besides an international company more than $10K per month, and that even that would include services like SEO and “deindexing:”

https://cleartailmarketing.com/average-cost-reputation-management/#:~:text=Typical%20Price%20Ranges,level%20strategies%20and%20detailed%20reporting.

I think deindexing is sort of like downvoting on Reddit, so that it pushes certain posts or comments to the back of the queue or google index so that posts you don’t like won’t be viewed by many people and won’t come up in search results. I actually saw someone talking about Jed Wallace performing this kind of work, though obvs I don’t know if that’s true. But that sort of thing (and I guess it’s opposite, of up-indexing) could explain why some bad posts about Lively caught fire while some about Baldoni never took off.

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Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

I see the purposelessly misleading pro Lively folks are back to working weekends, and scouring the world for anti Wayfarer Baldoni talking points to throw around.

I had to look into crisis PR (no ‘smear’) for my fairly small company and it was about 70k a month. Obviously it’s rare to need crisis PR for an entire year so your 900k reference seems purposefully irrelevant.

And this was some years back, and a small company. baldoni’s was PR related to a film that had cost some people a bunch of money. That number is not weird at all, and doesn’t indicate there was a smear campaign.

Stop being so shameless.

What small company needs 70k/mo in crisis pr? That's absurd. Unless your "small company" is a hedge fund that is accused of stealing client money, I don't buy it.

The company was well under 750 people so yes, small in the corporate world. And companies often hire crisis PR for brand reputations issues, and it’s expensive. It’s also short term so when I looked into it, we were looking at 6 months or less. Really not that much overall. You’re acting like some random person off the street hired PR for 70k a month. No, it was a decent sized film with a healthy budget and they wanted to safeguard their investment. This is not ‘totes’ abnormal behavior as you put it in such a juvenile way.

I was the “totes normal” poster and Pp you’re responding to above is someone else, fwiw.

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Anonymous wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm getting worried for JB over the retaliation claim, and like people here have been saying forever, I get that's why BL's lawyers want to focus on it. I genuinely think most of the negative press toward Blake was organic, and I'm not pro-BL, but I think it's worrisome if they can find even a handful of posts disparaging her that they can trace back to JB.

I don't think he hired Nathan because she spoke up against sexual harassment, I think he hired Nathan because Blake was running to the press first (see that Daily Mail article in early August about him being a chaunivist) and he needed to protect himself and the company. But I just don't see a jury making a distinction between "retaliating" against SH and "retaliating" to protect himself. Her lawyers are going to get them to ask: Did JB launch any counterattack on her for whatever reason? I don't think the jury is going to believe her on the SH claims, but I think BL's lawyers are going to try their hardest to make the argument that retaliation is their focus, SH is subjective and so don't focus on that, etc.

I think Baldoni is going to have a hard time explaining why he was paying Wallace $90K to just keep track of socials and not affirmatively add commentary to the conversations when keeping track of socials is specifically work that his other 2 PR firms were getting paid $30K/month and $15K/month to do as per their written contracts.

Unless Wallace was promoting positive commentary about Justin. There is actually a fair amount he could be doing that wouldn’t involve Lively at all. Same for all the pr folks, positive stories about their clients is their business.

Agree that if Wayfarer/TAG/Wallace can show that they were just promoting positive stories about Justin and Wayfarer and staying neutral on Blake, they will beat the retaliation claims.

There are a few messages from the Jen Abel phone that indicate they did go after Blake though, including with Wallace's team, and that some of what they did was seeding negative stories online. There could be some explanations for those messages that are exculpating -- maybe they wanted to go after Blake but didn't because cooler head prevailed, or because they discovered they didn't need to. It's also possible that TAG or Wallace essentially lied to Wayfarer about what they were doing, that they said said they would see negative stories about Blake and then those popped up on their own without any effort, so TAG and Wallace claimed to have caused it (in order to justify their large fees).

One legal question I have is what if the facts show that Baldoni and Wayfarer absolutely wanted to go after Blake and hired TAG and Wallace specifically to spread negative content about her online, but then they didn't? Would Baldoni/Wayfarer still potentially be liable for trying to retaliate? Would just hiring these people and giving them the directive to trash Blake in the press be enough for a jury to find them guilty of retaliation? I truly have no idea.

The cause of action requires actual acts of retaliation. I thought about it, but didn’t actually do it isn’t enough.

I think the question would be if hiring someone itself counts as a retaliatory act. Hiring is easily distinguished from "thinking about" retaliation, so your straw man fails. That said, I don't know if you framed it as paying for a bad act that didn't occur if that would be sufficient or not (on the other hand, you might be able to frame it more favorably as paying to ensure negative stories came out; it might depend on the contract wording).

She is going to need to show the hiring was retaliation to her claims of sexual harassment and not due to her threats and efforts to freeze him out of the movie. He has a right to seek help when being defamed. And yes, he can still use her behavior as a defense even if he can’t collect damages on it as a cause of action.

He wasn't defamed.

You keep framing everything in the best possible way for Baldoni, and I understand it because I do the same with Lively. That's what lawyers do. But recognize that not everyone has drunk the Baldoni Kool Aid, and regular people may not be so eager to share your take on who is the good guy here. I will grant that Baldoni's got a shot though because of the old adage, someone famous said this I think, I can't quite remember who: "It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women."

I understand that you don’t think that, but much of the social media universe does. If a jury feels the same, she loses. It’s perfectly legal to hire a pr firm when some one has launched an all out war on you.

Baldoni paid Jed Wallace $30K per month -- minimum of three months "as it needs to seed" for the purpose of "creation of social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [the] narrative and stay on track."

That makes Jed Wallace look like a liar for the info he included in his declaration saying he didn't interact with anyone, and I sure don't think a jury will like that at all. This contract makes it clear that someone was certainly interacting with people on social media to change the story, so between this and the other conversations between Abel and Nathan it sure sounds like a smear. Who knows what else will come out?

NAG with a video about Jed Wallace, putting his affidavit up against those parts of the email that seem to contradict his email, noting the possibility that he hired subcontractors, and questioning whether he would really get paid $90K over 3 months to just monitor socials: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518047871824858382

NAG followed up on this video that she posted about how Jed Wallace may seemingly have lied in his declaration here: https://www.tiktok.com/@notactuallygolden/video/7518458313420311822

Commentary on Jed Wallace starts at about the 2 minute mark.

Noting that the comments she has received to this video on youtube by Baldoni supporters are off the charts wild and she posted back some "nastygrams" to those people.

I don’t find her compelling on this point. $30,000/mth is just not much money for pr.

$30K per month to Wallace to be (as his declaration suggests) the single Street Relations person just "monitoring socials" which was work that both of Baldoni's PR companies was already being paid $45/month to do ($15K to Abel and $30K to Jones) will seem rather excessive to most normal people fwiw.

Let me rephrase, to Livwly supporters who either aren’t familiar with the industry or just looking for their next talking point.

Got it, it's totes normal for a B list celebrity to be paying $75K/month for PR assistance that doesn't include any active interference and engagement (or smearing!!! definitely no smearing!!!) but just "monitoring" of media like socials and press. Yup.

(FYI for normal people, across 12 months that would translate into nearly a million dollars per year at $900K.)

I see the purposelessly misleading pro Lively folks are back to working weekends, and scouring the world for anti Wayfarer Baldoni talking points to throw around.

I had to look into crisis PR (no ‘smear’) for my fairly small company and it was about 70k a month. Obviously it’s rare to need crisis PR for an entire year so your 900k reference seems purposefully irrelevant.

And this was some years back, and a small company. baldoni’s was PR related to a film that had cost some people a bunch of money. That number is not weird at all, and doesn’t indicate there was a smear campaign.

Stop being so shameless.

What small company needs 70k/mo in crisis pr? That's absurd. Unless your "small company" is a hedge fund that is accused of stealing client money, I don't buy it.

The company was well under 750 people so yes, small in the corporate world. And companies often hire crisis PR for brand reputations issues, and it’s expensive. It’s also short term so when I looked into it, we were looking at 6 months or less. Really not that much overall. You’re acting like some random person off the street hired PR for 70k a month. No, it was a decent sized film with a healthy budget and they wanted to safeguard their investment. This is not ‘totes’ abnormal behavior as you put it in such a juvenile way.

I think you are confusing me with someone else. I'm the immediate PP but I don't use phrases like "totes".

I work in the corporate world (in consulting) and 70k/mo in crisis PR is a lot and indicates a major issue. If that's just for crisis PR, we're talking on top of normal PR budget for branding, press relations, etc., which can also be expensive but is a typical overhead cost. 70k/mo for 6 months would be the equivalent of 3 or more full time assistants, for instance -- not a minor expense. And for something unexpected and not previously budgeted for.