Posted on 02/28/2025 4:15:31 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Blake Lively has hired a PR crisis manager with deep government ties as her legal battle with Justin Baldoni escalates. The actress, who is suing and being sued by her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, is quietly working with Nick Shapiro, the CIA’s former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to former director John Brennan.
Shapiro is not without controversy. He was one of a group of 51 former senior intelligence officials who signed the widely cited and subsequently criticized 2020 open letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Shapiro, who launched crisis PR firm 10th Avenue Consulting in 2015 after his lengthy tenure in the federal government, would seem an unconventional choice for Lively given that the spiraling legal morass has no obvious political ties. According to his bio, Shapiro “helped lead the Obama Administration’s response to the H1N1 Pandemic, the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, the Gulf Oil Spill, the Boston Marathon Bombing, the Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, as well as numerous cyber attacks, data breaches, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes.”
“The litigation team for Ms. Lively retained Mr. Shapiro to advise on the legal communications strategy for the ongoing sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit occurring in the Southern District of New York,” says a member of the actress’ legal team at Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
(Excerpt) Read more at variety.com ...
Baldoni/Lively saga ping!
She is going to get sued to oblivion
Doesn’t Deadpool have superpowers or something?
WGAF?
Blake, the Amber Heard copy cat, needs all the help she can get.
So her plan is to have them create a fake Russian dossier claiming he is a Russian agent?
Where is the money/credit coming from to fund this nonsense.
She does have a political connection.
Lively and Penn Badgley appeared in a pro-Obama commercial, as part of MoveOn.org’s Youth Vote program.
We obviously don’t have more than the most superficial information, but reading the tea leaves:
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have been getting absolutely hammered from the moment Justin Baldoni found his take no prisoners lawyer, started to return fire, and began to release full email and text chains, and unedited footage of the scenes in question.
If BL and RR had anything to turn it around, surely they would have by now. At this point, it looks to me like they need to find a way to cut their losses and find a settlement.
But I expect Baldoni will not settle for anything less than a full retraction of all accusations and an abject public apology, plus monetary damages. The money can probably be negotiated. The direct attack on Baldoni’s character and behavior onset are not negotiable. BL and RR made it personal. It is now a death match.
Who the hell are BlakeLively and JustinBaldoni ?
WHY are these aholes in our face?
If she hired Brennan, they must be planning to get even rougher in attacking Baldoni.
Blake Lively is some dippy movie star second generation who thinks she’s really gorgeous but she’s not, and she accused Justin Baldoni of some kind of hostile work environment on a movie set he was kind enough to hire her fatness to work on. He was the lead actor and producer of the movie, but wanted her to lose weight which got her all bent out of shape claiming fat shaming.
Thanks, but my question remains:
Why are these aholes in our face ?
Why are these aholes in our face?
Well, since you asked .... People have different points of entry, but what has gotten the conservative tribe engaged is the fact that — as things stand at the moment — we are seeing a #MeToo lynch mob get stopped in its tracks.
There was a lot happening behind the scenes that hasn’t been sorted out, but the premier and the publicity tour raised a lot of questions. Blake Lively then escalated last December by filing an explosive complaint with the California Civil Rights Commission. A clearly coordinated NYT hit piece on Justin Baldoni dropped immediately thereafter. We know now that the NYT had been working on the story for months without ever reaching out to Baldoni for his perspective; Baldoni got a “courtesy call” on a Friday night saying the piece was dropping Saturday and did he have anything to say?
Baldoni circled the wagons, consulted the people he obviously needed to consult, and filed a $250 million lawsuit against the NYT. Blake Lively then sued Baldoni and Wayfarer, the production company in which he is a partner, for $180 million. Baldoni countersued Lively for $400 million; I’m not sure if Ryan Reynolds, to whom Lively is married, is also named in that suit, but he is clearly in the crosshairs as well.
There are too many threads to get into here, but as it stands at the moment, Lively took the first shots. When Baldoni responded, his initial filings attached copious evidence that simply blew Lively’s accusations out of the water. And this isn’t just BL and RR vs. JB. Sony was the distributor and is deeply involved. The agency that had represented BL, RR and JB is involved. The rest of the cast is involved. The author of the novel on which the movie is based is involved.
Bad blood had been brewing for a long time before this became public. Baldoni and Wayfarer seem to have saved every email, every text message, every phone message, and all raw footage. Baldoni has a scorched earth lawyer who seems the type to shoot the wounded for fun, and this has become a cage match to the death. What all these people will say under oath remains to be seen.
And ... drumroll please ... hold onto your hat ... Taylor Swift is involved (and is apparently not very happy about it). Legally that doesn’t seem to be important, but BL has been part of Taylor Swift’s posse for years, and one of her messages to Baldoni warned him that she, BL, was Khaleesi, and her dragons (RR and TS) would destroy her enemies. Yes, she said that. We are beyond the point of parody. So the Swifties are engaged, and a greater pack of loons you will never see. It’s pass the popcorn time.
Baldoni is not a big name, but he’s been around for a long time, mostly as a producer although he was one of the stars of a long-running series and had directed one previous feature film, a commercially successful mid-budget indie movie. He had a reputation as one of the good guys in Hollywood. He is married with two young kids. His mother is Jewish, his father is Catholic of Italian descent, and he is Baha’i; I don’t know how that happened, but he is apparently serious about it. He is also a touchy-feely, “men need to learn to be sensitive” type of guy. It will be interesting to see if he gets red pilled by this. But as it stands now, this started as David vs. Goliath, and David is winning. Touchy-feely Justin Baldoni, man bun and all, is pulling off a complete demolition of a #MeToo freight train.
Khaleesi and her dragons are going down in flames.
I apologize for the length, but you asked.
Thank you for the succinct summary of the saga. I kewp seeing the news about them but never understood what it was about.
I think Freepers need to know about popular culture in general, especially things that are being discussed widely.
We don’t yet know how this got started. There is a lot of plausible speculation but unless someone has a come to Jesus moment and decides to come clean, we may never know for sure.
Right now, it’s fair to say that this is an epic Hollywood train wreck that will become a textbook case study of the nasty underside of the industry. We should be glad for a few things: no one is dead (yet); neither of the principals’ marriages have broken up (yet, and there are six young kids who will have to live with this); there is no rape or physical assault; there are no drugs or alcohol fueled incidents involved. It all seems to revolve around egos, power and money.
Sony has been silent, and what Sony will say when this goes to trial will be crucial. Wayfarer and Baldoni had the rights to the film and a possible sequel. Wayfarer was the production studio. Baldoni directed and costarred in the film. Sony was the distributor.
As the Lively-Baldoni split escalated — whatever triggered it in the first place — Sony clearly sided with Lively. The rumor is that Lively and Ryan Reynolds leaned hard on Sony; RR has major clout in Hollywood right now. Supposedly Lively was threatening not to promote the film if she didn’t get her way, and a sequel and perhaps other movie deals were on the table (probably having more to do with Reynolds than Lively, as Reynolds is a hot commodity right now).
One potentially solid fact point is the story of the dueling cuts. Baldoni of course had the official director’s cut. Lively insisted on access to all the footage and the right to do her own cut, which is unheard of. Sony forced Baldoni’s and Wayfarer’s hands on that. Both cuts were tested. It has been reported that Baldoni’s cut tested better with audiences, yet Sony, the distributor, chose Lively’s cut.
Why would a distributor pick the lower performing version of a movie? The widespread supposition is that BL and RR were playing hardball behind the scenes. Given that Baldoni and Wayfarer seem to have saved every communication, and given that Baldoni has a lawyer who eats puppies and kittens for breakfast, it is possible that at least some Sony execs may be trapped into having to tell the truth.
This could get a lot bloodier than it already is. The nuke Hollywood from orbit folks should be passing the popcorn.
The loon Blake Lively’s Candian husband Ryan Reynolds is the leader of the whole entire mess to—he wanted the stallion v. stallion fight and wanted to take over the sequel from Justin Baldoni. I hope Ryan Reynolds and his loony tune wife Blake Lively get so much mud on their ugly faces they never recover.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.