We all know the story. In December, months after the release of their movie It Ends With Us, star Blake Lively filed her sexual harassment lawsuit against co-star/director Justin Baldoni. It was New Year’s Eve, how could we forget?
Except… is that really the timeline? Or was there a secret earlier lawsuit none of us knew about??
That’s what DailyMail.com dug up this week. In a move legal experts have described as “super shady” Blake seems to have filed a “sham” lawsuit months earlier in order to get ammo for her real lawsuit.
Why? In order to have the evidence she needed to show Justin was behind a smear campaign (evidence that proved dubious later on, but that’s another story), she had to subpoena it. But anyone can’t just subpoena information in the hopes of learning something worth filing a suit over.
Related: Blake Lively So Proud To Be Named To Time‘s 100
So according to DM, a company called Vanzan filed a suit in the Manhattan Supreme Court on September 27 — nearly three full months before the public suit. The suit doesn’t name Blake so no one would know about it. It doesn’t even name Baldoni or his team, just 10 unnamed defendants. DOEs #1-10 are accused of some vague damaging of privacy:
“(They) have participated, and may continue to participate, in efforts to harm plaintiff including by: failing to act in plaintiff’s best interests, taking actions to their personal benefit at plaintiff’s expense, failing to freely communicate with plaintiff regarding matters that impact plaintiff’s business and reputation, and disclosing to third parties and failing to keep strictly confidential plaintiff’s confidential and/or private information.”
But again, no one is named, so no one ever had to be notified they were being sued. Weird, right?
The trick is, as far as we understand DM‘s legal experts’ assessment, this lawsuit had no merit and never had a chance at winning. But that didn’t matter. It was never intended to make it to trial. But filing it allowed Blake’s lawyers to subpoena all those texts and emails from Justin’s former publicist Stephanie Jones. So that’s how she got all that info!
OK, so they got all that info — and then on December 19 the lawsuit was dropped. The next day Blake filed her very public Civil Rights Department complaint against Justin, and week and a half later her official lawsuit. And for all that she was armed with the information she got from the subpoena in the fake lawsuit.
So why didn’t we know this was Blake the whole time? According to DM, Vanzan was able hide the names of everyone involved because they were founded in Delaware, which allows for a measure of corporate secrecy. It was only when they did business in California that they had to disclose that the company’s CEO, CFO, and secretary are all Blake. So near as we can tell, Vanzan = Blake? Just a legal entity for her to hide behind?
OK, so was what she did legal? For sure. Was it ethical? Not according to the lawyers who spoke to DailyMail. Ron Zambrano, employment litigation chair at West Coast Trial Lawyers, dished:
“This is a sham lawsuit generated for an ulterior motive, which can be sanctionable for a waste of judicial resources. They intentionally did this to really work in a very surreptitious and clandestine way. It’s super shady.”
Celeb attorney Peter Gleason said:
“This looks like a ruse to try and interject legitimacy into obtaining discovery that is intended to be used in another cause of action. If that is the case, it’s totally inappropriate.”
Keith Davidson, co-host of legal podcast Ask 2 Lawyers, explained:
“It’s very rare to sue only Doe defendants. It doesn’t make any sense to me. And the fact that it’s on a vague complaint, the whole thing appears to be a fig leaf.”
Justin’s attorney Bryan Freedman blasted the legal loophole as well, fuming:
“This appears to be an end-around, skirting the process, to be able to secretly get these documents without having to give anyone notice. That would be an abuse of process and we intend to take all action allowable under the law.”
Blake’s lawyer Esra Hudson, unsurprisingly, had a dissenting opinion, arguing:
“Doe lawsuits are common and entirely appropriate legal tools for pursuing claims and uncovering the identity of unknown perpetrators of unlawful activities. This lawsuit unearthed the Wayfarer parties’ documented plan — in their own words, in their own text messages — to ‘destroy’ Blake Lively. Their faux outrage has nothing to do with legal ethics or the law, which are not an issue here, and is entirely about the fact that they got caught doing something that they insisted would be ‘untraceable’.”
What do YOU think, Perezcious paralegals? Was this move shrewd and smart? Or shady and dark?
[Image via Sony/YouTube/MEGA/WENN.]
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