OMG. The legal drama never ends!
Justin Baldoni and his current publicist Jennifer Abel have filed a countersuit against his ex-publicist Stephanie Jones! In a complaint filed in New York federal court on Friday, the actor accused Stephanie of breach of contract and breach of implied covenant and good faith and fair dealing after she allegedly “maliciously” leaked private information and text messages to Blake Lively‘s publicist Leslie Sloane. These leaked texts then became a primary factor in Blake’s lawsuit.
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If you don’t know, Jennifer worked at Stephanie’s company Joneswork PR, where she was the point person for Justin and his Wayfarer Studios. But when she chose to leave the company last summer, Stephanie reportedly grew “concerned” that she’d steal her clients and lashed out! Justin and Jennifer now allege that Stephanie sought revenge by leaking Jennifer’s phone contents to the enemy! In a statement to Variety, Justin’s lawyer Bryan Freedman explained the case:
“It is undeniable that Stephanie Jones initiated this catastrophic sequence of events by violating the most basic of privacy rights, as well as any remaining trust her clients held. No stranger to stirring up crisis scenarios for departing clients, Ms. Jones maliciously turned over communications from the phone she wrongfully took from her own partner to her cohort, [Lively’s personal publicist] Leslie Sloane, immediately after Jones was terminated for cause by Wayfarer due to her own wrongful behavior.”
He added that the publicist “has a well-documented history of highly questionable conduct in the workplace, which the Lively parties would have seen with even the smallest amount of online research, yet they walked right into Ms. Jones’ ploy of bitter revenge against her most-trusted employee at the expense of her own long-term client.”
According to the lawsuit via Variety and Page Six, Jennifer had gotten “close” and developed a “trusting relationship” with the Jane the Virgin alum and other members of his Wayfarer team. She was even the one who recommended he hire crisis management expert Melissa Nathan, even though she knew her boss wouldn’t like the idea (and that proved to be true when Stephanie was “furious” and pressured her to “disparage Nathan as a demonstration of loyalty”).
However, Stephanie “largely did not hide” the fact that Justin wasn’t a very important client to her amid more prestigious celebs and allegedly caused “more problems than she was solving.” That’s why he chose to end his contract with her firm in August — around when Jennifer announced she would be leaving to start her own firm, as well. All this apparently really upset the founder!
As the Blake drama was heating up, Stephanie was also supposedly growing more paranoid and rattled by negative press circulating about her online (something she alleges was Jen and Melissa’s doing), including an anonymous website that called her out for alleged treatment of employees and clients. Yeesh!! That’s when, while relying on a psychic, Justin and co. claim she went after ’em!
The docs claim Stephanie contacted a DailyMail.com reporter on August 8, 2024 “in direct violation” of Jennifer’s instructions on behalf of Wayfarer (because they had a “truce with Lively’s team”). Word got back to Blake’s publicist, and they allegedly started planting stories of their own. But when confronted, Stephanie blamed her team on all this.
Just weeks after Abel announced her exit and two days before she was set to leave anyway, Stephanie “suddenly” fired her on August 21, 2024, “threatening her, seizing her phone, and marching her out of the Jonesworks Los Angeles office.” Jennifer recalled showing up to the office where “she was confronted by a physically imposing security guard, a forensic data extraction technical expert, and an attorney sitting at a conference table awash in documents.” As a security guard blocked her exit, she was taken into a conference room:
“There, the attorney gestured at the documents and instructed Abel to review and sign them. The attorney stated that Jonesworks suspected Abel had retained proprietary information on her personal laptop. Abel was told that Jonesworks would have grounds to sue if she did not allow them access.”
She turned over her device, though she insisted she didn’t have any of such data. She was also pressured to hand over her phone — which she did under the agreement that they would release her phone number so she wouldn’t lose access to the device’s contents. She was told if she went straight to a Verizon store after handing over her device, they’d ensure she got to keep her number. But after waiting four hours at the cell store, she left “in panic and despair” when she never heard back from Jonesworks! Jeez!
“[She] realized Jones had double-crossed her — in a very serious way. By refusing to release Abel’s phone number, Jonesworks had usurped her contact information and cut off Abel’s access to critical accounts protected by two-factor authentication linked to that phone number. As a result, Abel lost access to her iCloud (including all her text messages, photos, and contacts), bank accounts, utilities, insurance, and virtually every other sensitive account. By contrast, Jones now had unrestricted access to everything stored on Abel’s phone — her text messages, emails, personal photos.”
Just hours after handing over her phone, Leslie Sloane allegedly called Justin’s Melissa explaining that she’d seen her text messages — “which could only have come from Abel’s phone” — and that she should expect to be sued. Damn, that was fast! The docs stated:
“Jones [had] turned over the contents of Abel’s phone to Lively and her team — without a subpoena — so they could slice and dice her communications to to construct a false narrative about the source of Lively’s bad publicity. In turning over these materials to Lively, Jones knew full well that the blowback would engulf not only Abel but also her clients, Wayfarer and Baldoni. As a result of Jones’ malicious scheme, Abel’s life has been turned upside down. Her career and reputation have been destroyed, her private information leaked, and her email inbox and social media pages filled with a daily stream of death threats and abuse.”
Oof. The legal docs argued this violated California labor laws covered by her employment. As mentioned, this comes after Stephanie filed a lawsuit in December against Justin, Jennifer, Wayfarer, and Melissa for defamation, breach of contract, and more, arguing she had nothing to do with the alleged plot against the Gossip Girl star. Kristin Tahler, an attorney for Stephanie, said in a statement to Variety:
“Ms. Jones’ [December] lawsuit is based entirely on facts and concrete evidence. [Our] suit clearly shows that Jen Abel conspired with Melissa Nathan and others to steal reams of confidential documents, clients and staff and eventually attempt to destroy the business that Ms. Jones spent decades building. Abel, Nathan, Baldoni and their co-defendants attempted to achieve these outcomes through bullying distortion and outright disparagement. These facts are backed up by dozens of messages provided in the suit we filed month ago and cannot be credibly disputed. Having no facts or evidence, we see a familiar playbook — smear our client, culminating in the work of fiction masquerading as the counterclaims that were filed yesterday.”
WOW. This is messy!
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[Image via Phil Lewis/WENN/MEGA]
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