Reply to Blake Lively- Jason Baldoni and NYT

Forum Index » Entertainment and Pop Culture

Reply to "Blake Lively- Jason Baldoni and NYT - False Light claims "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading through Liman's Opinion dismissing Wayfarer etc's claims, here were a few excerpts from the Extortion claim section that I enjoyed:

Demanding harassment free working conditions /= extortion:  "Even if they turn out to be unneeded, an employee can insist on protections at workplace for sexual harassment without being accused of extortion. If an employer accedes, it cannot later claim to be a victim of the employee’s wrongful threats."

Hoist by his own petard:  "Although the Wayfarer Parties allege that they did not believe Lively deserved a producer credit or p.g.a. mark, Dkt. No. 50 ¶¶ 153–155, they also allege that Lively took over significant production responsibilities, see id. ¶ 296 (stating that Lively used baseless sexual harassment allegations “to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production”); id. ¶ 344 (alleging that Lively seized creative control over the production and the Wayfarer Parties “were deprived of the opportunity to produce, edit, and market a film”); cf. United States v. Jackson, 180 F.3d 55, 70–72 (2d Cir.), on reh’g, 196 F.3d 383 (2d Cir. 1999) (suggesting that a threat is not wrongful if it has a “nexus to a plausible claim of right”)."

Hard bargaining /= extortion:  "The fact that a plaintiff decides it is more financially beneficial to acquiesce to a demand than to sue does not mean the plaintiff lacks an adequate remedy in damages. Having made their decision, the Wayfarer Parties cannot now seek to recover in damages for what they would have obtained had they not agreed and had Lively promoted some different version of the film more consistent with the Wayfarer Parties’ artistic vision."

I also thought it was interesting in the TMZ clip that Freedman said he was given leave by the judge to file an amended complaint for the 4 following claims, because Judge Liman specifically forbids Freedman from amending for two of these lol:

1. Intentional interference of a contractual agreement (a/g Lively and Reynolds); 
2. Intentional interference with prospective economic advantage (a/g Lively and Reynolds);
3. Negligent interference with prospective economic advantage (a/g Lively and Reynolds?  not sure);
4. Breach of implied duty of covenant and good faith and fair dealing (only a/g Lively).

When you look at the opinion itself, Liman explicitly says in two places that he grants Wayfarer etc leave to amend only for the following two claims:  tortious interference with contract and breach of implied contract.

And footnote 66 p.130 specifically lays out that the court will not permit amendment for the following claims (some of which appear on Freedman's list):
* False light
* Breach of implied covenant;
* [b]Intentional or negligent interference with prospective economic relations[/b];
* Promissory fraud.

If you specifically go back to Wayfarer's Amended Complaint and look at the counts, you can track that Judge Liman means to allow Wayfarer to amend ONLY for the following:

1.  Liman says "Tortious interference with contract" which tracks to Count 5 in the amended complaint:  Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations (involving the WME interference);
2.  Liman says "Breach of implied contract" which tracks to Count 4 in the amended complaint:  Breach of Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing (involving the contract, if it exists, between Lively and Wayfarer).

Freedman says that he is going to include negligent and intentional interference with prospective economic advantage in the amended complaint, which tracks to counts 7 and 6 of the amended complaint involving the WME contract.  [b]However, Liman explicitly forbids Freedman for amending these interference with prospective economic advantage claims due to futility[/b]!  He explains that the failure of the defamation claim against Reynolds is fatal to these economic advantage claims, since interference needs to be through a wrongful act and Liman found Reynolds statement could not be considered as such.

So, a day later and Freedman is already spouting wild nonsense and either does not understand Judge Liman's opinion better than me, who looked at this for 20 minutes, or alternatively Freedman has decided to explicitly ignore it.  A++ as usual Mssr. Freedman. [/quote]

This is excellent, thank you for putting it together.

Freedman looks very out of the loop on this -- no reply until Tuesday and then his response seems to have factual errors that will come back to bite him. Either he'll finally read the decision closely enough to understand they cannot replead everything he says he's going to, OR he'll replead it all and get bench slapped for violating the judge's order.[/quote]

Dp and I don’t post much on here but isn’t freedman Baldonis lawyer? How is he ‘out of the loop’ for not responding to a court decision from Monday on… Tuesday… ? Or do you mean something else? Because that seems pretty timely to me!![/quote]

DP but in this high profile cases it's typical for the lawyers to comment immediately in the articles that come out in the hours after the decision drops, even if it's just to say they plan to appeal. So yes I think it's unusual that Freedman waited a day, and then in addition, isn't reading the decision correctly according to PP, even with that extra time.[/quote]

Dp. I’m a litigator and have worked with crisis PR for some high profile litigations, and I don’t agree. We would never want to completely rush a statement without taking a beat to pause and gather our thoughts. As long as a statement came out around the same news cycle, it would be fine and perfectly industry typical (not that there’s a hard and fast rule as this Pp seems to want to think - lol).

As far as not reading the decision ‘correctly’, that only matters when they file! It seems that the point they wants to make is that they plan to continue, and that’s really the only message that matters. Totally standard stuff ime. [/quote]

This is not a "totally standard" case. Have you worked on cases that produced 800+ threads on DCUM? That spawned a half dozen subreddits dedicated just to following the minutia of the case? Where legal and celebrity podcasts issued "special reports" when the judged handed down a decision on MTDs? This is an unusual case and cannot be handled the "standard" way. Previously this has actually benefitted Freedman, who has a style tailor made for this kind of case, and hurt Lively, whose lawyers are clearly not used to this kind of coverage and scrutiny. But this week was a role reversal as Freedman got caught flat footed and Lively's team made hay with this decision.

And actually Freedman's statement about what claims they plan to refile does matter from a PR perspective. As soon as he stated there were four claims they planned to refile, Reddit and the Tik tokkers who follow the case immediately jumped all over it, figuring out which ones he meant since, of course, it was widely reported on Monday (correctly) that Judge Liman's decision only left two claims that could be refiled in an amended complaint. Now a lot of JB fans believe he actually has four, that the mainstream media got it wrong on Monday (they didn't), and that Justin will shortly be refiling his complain with four claims. If he files with only two, this will create a news story about how Freedman lied or got it wrong. If he refiles with four, the judge will respond very negatively (the judge's order is very clear on which claims he may refile) and that will create a news cycle about that.

So actually Freedman has guaranteed a negative news cycle surrounding the amended complaint when it gets filed. That's not smart. You'd think given that he had overnight to review the judge's decision, he wouldn't have made such a glaring error in their one official statement to the press.[/quote]

I’m the PP and I’m not sure where I said that it’s a ‘standard’ case. In fact I mentioned that in the cases I was referring to, crisis PR was hired. So not standard. And yes, I’ve worked on cases that were the subject of VERY active news cycles, one of them went on for several years. A close colleague handles litigations involving a person we all know who is in the news daily.

I’m not quite sure I understand the obsession with freedman here and the details of his statement. When I first started working around PR, I assumed detailed statements made sense. But then I learned, no one cares or remembers much other than the overall gist. And most people do not care about the lawyers. I wish! :) [/quote]

Just re-upping the above post from two weeks ago after Freedman went on TMZ and said he had 4 claims to replead for the amended complaint, and a DP (if you "click to show earlier quotes") said that Freedman had just guaranteed himself a negative news cycle when the amended complaint was due.  Granted, that PP did not actually even imagine Freedman would have the effrontery not to file an amended complaint at all, but the jist of the issue still stands:  Liman and various tiktokers said there were 2 claims to replead; Freedman said he will replead 4, so everyone was on high alert for what got plead.  A different PP suggests that folks don't notice or remember what the lawyers say to the press.

So what got plead was nothing.  [i]I think people noticed.[/i]  Freedman has Baldoni supporters so hyped up they notice everything (except the ones who are giving up or tuning out because of all the recent losses).  Most of the Baldoni supporters have left this thread, I think sort of unable to deal with the losing.  Yesterday on the Reddit subs it was almost like after the MTD was issued.  [/quote]

People have left the thread because of your endless posts, no one wants to engage with the crazy.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics