u/Flashy_Question4631

Excellent TT video breakdown by Barrett Adair of the bombshell NYT expose shining a light on the slimy “PR” work by the same PR team and lead lawyer, Bryan Freedman, and digital fixer Jed Wallace that Wayfarer and Baldoni hired to retaliate and cause intense reputational harm to Blake Lively. Blake opened the door to expose those who will willingly destroy women’s lives with false disparaging online narratives - for hire.

With the recent headlines of the Cornell 7 college rape case, it is relevant to revisit Justin Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman’s own gang rape allegations which he settled. The back story:

**The Accusations:** A civil lawsuit was filed in 1986 by a 17-year-old high school student. The plaintiff alleged that she was drugged when Bryan Freedman and his fraternity brothers from the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity repeatedly sexually assaulted and battered her.

Now Baldoni’s smear team (Freedman, Jed Wallace and Melissa Nathan) are being implicated in multiple online smear campaign against women.

YOU ARE THE COMPANY YOU KEEP.

With Andy Signore/popcorned planet now promoting he’s going to sell tickets to watch his incomplete documentary about this case, let’s revisit the fact that his Anti Blake content was deemed defamatory by Judge Griffin.

TAG also admitted working directly with Andy Signore presumably on defamatory Blake Lively content on his social media platforms.

And people are going to pay to watch this crap?

Glad to see this for Blake Lively! The Baldoni supporters don’t make a dent in those who still enjoy watching entertainment featuring Blake and Ryan!

Record Pre-Sales: Avengers Doomsday achieved the biggest 4-month-advance pre-sales of all time for any movie generating 16.4 million in ticket sales in the first 24 hours. 🔥🔥🔥

Post courtesy u/Sockdolagerldea

There is a text thread on the docket that was recently made public, where a CC posted a negative story about Baldoni. The unknown person described how her friend had been exploited by Baldoni, how he pretended to be man enough to tell her friend’s story but then used the dying girl for his own gain by making it all about him and what he wanted to portray, instead of the truth of her friend’s life.

It turns out this is a common theme amongst people who have worked with Baldoni, or are friends/family members of the dead people that Baldoni used for his own gain.

One person complaining about Baldoni could be just a grudge. Two people, maybe it’s a coincidence. But MULTIPLE people have stated essentially the same thing. And even a reviewer was astute enough to call it out, calling Baldoni’s rebranding of the lessons of dying kids as “verging on offensive”.

Seems to me that the answer to the question, “does Justin Baldoni exploit others for his own gain” is a resounding Yes. Yes he does.

Justin Baldoni’s PR team was working DIRECTLY with Perez Hilton to write Blake and Ryan hit pieces and spread false narratives…with Justin’s slimey PR manager, Melissa Nathan, instructing Perez to say “inside sources”. Baldonians will tell you there was zero proof of a smear campaign. Even the judge said “Wayfarer did what they planned to do”.

Revisiting Andrew Billen's interview with Justin Baldoni: Key takeaway:

"Justin Baldoni is probably the most conflicted person I have ever interviewed." Billen says Baldoni presented himself simultaneously as a devoted husband, feminist and attentive father while also describing himself as materialistic, addicted to pornography, obsessed with his appearance, and desperate for male approval.

Here is the article in its entirety:

My encounter with Justin Baldoni

Devoted husband, feminist, former porn addict … the actor accused by Blake Lively of ungallant conduct struck Andrew Billen as protesting too much - Andrew Billen

When an avatar of virtue falls from grace, our polite reaction should not be that we are angry, just terribly disappointed. When paragons stumble the first thing we feel in our heart is schadenfreude. And so it was this weekend when I read that the movie star and director Justin Baldoni, whom I had interviewed about his woker-than-woke memoir Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity in 2021, had been fired by his agent after feminism’s ally faced allegations from one of his leading ladies about his distinctly unwoke and ungallant conduct.

 Legal papers revealed he had been accused by his co-star Blake Lively of sexualised behaviour on the set of their film, It Ends with Us. Her complaints had been addressed by the film’s producers but once filming was over, according to documents acquired by her lawyers, Baldoni and the lead producer, Jamey Heath, commissioned a public relations firm to orchestrate a smear campaign against her. If even a fraction of Lively’s claims are true — and both men deny them — the gap between what Baldoni preaches in public and his conduct as a director, producer and leading man is dizzying. Yes, we should be angry.

 But disappointed? I can’t say I am. Baldoni was probably the most conflicted person I have ever interviewed. On the one hand he was a devoted husband, present father, an ever-listening and learning male feminist. On the other he was a materialistic, fast-car driving porn addict who objectified no body as much as his own.

“I might be 37 years old, but I’m still that 12-year-old boy who seeks acceptance and validation from men, from boys in my class,” Baldoni told me ruefully. He was “on a journey” and “still not on the other side of it”, he wrote in his book. A month today he turns 41. If 40 is an overgrown boy’s last chance to graduate to manhood, perhaps he blew it. If the complaints are true, beneath the glare of studio lights, New Man Baldoni makes Old Geezer Gregg Wallace look like Gary Lineker.

Before all this blew up in his face, Baldoni was best known for two things. The first was as the suitor of the eponymous heroine in the American TV comedy-drama Jane the Virgin. It was a role in which between 2014 and 2019 he led with a pair of well-defined pectorals calculated to inflame the show’s teenage girl audience. The other was his 2017 Ted talk, Why I’m Done Trying to Be Man Enough, an 18-minute mea culpa on behalf of men everywhere.

 “And will you,” he asked us men, “be man enough to stand up to other men when you hear ‘locker-room talk’, when you hear stories of sexual harassment? When you hear your boys talking about grabbing ass or getting her drunk, will you actually stand up and do something so that one day we don’t have to live in a world where a woman has to risk everything and come forward to say the words ‘me too’? This is serious stuff.”

 To Lively, her allegation that on the set of It Ends with Us Baldoni improvised unwanted kissing in his scenes with her and discussed his sex life is also serious stuff. In her complaint to the studio while still filming, she asked that Baldoni and Heath no longer make “mentions of cast and crew’s genitalia” and no longer add “sex scenes, oral sex or on-camera climaxing [by her]”. In the end, Lively was granted her own cut of the movie and this was the one released, earning her a producer credit. As a result, the finished movie is rather less explicit than Jilly Cooper’s Rivals on Disney+.

As the film neared its release, Lively said she would not do publicity appearances alongside Baldoni. Presumably fearful that Lively’s attitude would undermine its prospects, in August the production company and Baldoni, as one of its producers, hired the crisis management expert Melissa Nathan. Together they allegedly decided the best form of defense was attack, albeit a covert one in which damaging stories about the actress would be leaked. A publicist reported to Nathan that Baldoni “wants to feel like she can be buried”. Nathan responded reassuringly: “You know we can bury anyone.” Stories duly appeared: Lively was difficult to work with, rude to journalists, and “tone deaf” to the issues It Ends with Us addressed.

I would say the charge of tone deafness should more urgently be levelled against the movie itself. In it, Baldoni plays Ryle, a handsome neurosurgeon who romances Lily, a Boston florist played by Lively. Ryle seems too good to be true, and so it turns out when he twice, perhaps three times (the first occasion is ambiguous), assaults Lily. What starts out as a standard rom-com swerves into a would-be intense drama about domestic violence. Yet still, the film’s glossy, soapy style is maintained. Its conclusion, which is weirdly forgiving of Lily’s attempted rapist husband, doesn’t work either.

 The film received mixed reviews, but despite Baldoni’s fears that Lively would torpedo its launch, it did well commercially, earning £280 million at the box office worldwide against a budget of £20 million. I can understand its success. The film goes a long way to being redeemed by Baldoni and Lively, who prove astonishingly adept at switching on a dime from shock to schlock. The pair — and here’s an irony — have great onscreen chemistry. Should relations ever be repaired, the two would be shoo-ins for a movie called We Can Bury Anyone.  But back to Baldoni’s opus. Man Enough can be read as a manifesto for the reform of men, but it is really too confessional and self-flagellating for that. There has been nothing like it since the 4th-century theologian St Augustine prayed unto God to be granted “chastity and continence but not yet”. When he talked to me from his home in the ecologically sound Californian town of Ojai, Baldoni appeared to me to be sincerely messed up and, like many Americans when they discuss themselves, thoroughly in earnest. What he was effectively telling me was that the better angels of his nature were at war with the default devils born of his randy but thwarted adolescence.

 His background was mainly atypical because of his parents’ religion, a 19th-century Persian invention called Baha’i, which forbade alcohol, demanded fasting, and was very insistent on no sexual intercourse before marriage. Baldoni wrote that when at 19 his girlfriend tricked his penis into her, his emerging sexuality had been scarred, alongside his faith and sense of worth.

 Luckily — or perhaps not — his faith did not proscribe pornography, of which he was not so much a devoted fan as an addict. Neuro-pathways, he explained, had been forged by the porn of his youth, and down them he still travelled. It was not violent stuff, he explained. “And because of the deep work that I’ve been doing for years and years and years, and luckily because of my spirituality and my faith, it never progressed. So when I have a pull to look at porn, it’s the same porn that I looked at when I was 10 or 11.”

Nevertheless, even though he was now the father of two young children, still he was “pulled” towards it. “I could be out in the world, championing female voices, fighting for gender equality, go home, have this amazing conversation and dinner with my wife, especially early on in our marriage, and still feel this strange pull towards porn. It’s not rational.”

His other addiction was to what he referred to as “muscle dysphoria”, and I would term narcissism. He had entered the acting profession aged 16, by which time almost all young male actors were expected to turn up with their lines learnt and bodies ripped. His early credits tell the story: Shirtless Medical Student, Steroids-Using Con Man, and, I am afraid, Shirtless Date Rapist. On chubbier days on Jane the Virgin he would conceal his tummy behind a plant.

But his gym visits were not just for his career’s sake. His body was also his sexual calling card, and he took it very personally that on first acquaintance his eventual wife, the Swedish actress Emily Foxler, managed to resist his pulchritude. Had he not “a pretty nice ass”?

 But, he assured me, he was growing out of all this. He now admired fathers who relaxed into their “dad bods”. His “brand” was now predicated on his heart and mind, not his chest. When we talked he had not worked out for two years. The trouble was he had wanted to, and, indeed, had just hired a trainer. But, “I said to him something I’ve never said before: ‘My body will change and I will eventually get back in shape, but I want you to work out the muscles that nobody can see, so I can feel good. I want to be able to run with my kids and not hurt my back, not pull a muscle. I want to throw my son up in the air and not have my rotator cuff hurt.’”

 So when on Sunday night I watched It Ends with Us I was disappointed (ie secretly gleeful) to find that he was very quickly shirtless and that his torso had been sculpted into new heights of topographical variety and his biceps lattice-worked with protruding veins. Why did no one spot this transition from meek, mild man-feminist, that his inner Hulk had burst loose once more? Why did his wife, who has a small part in It Ends with Us, not perceive this red flag?

 Perhaps she was just pleased to be back in a movie. When I talked to her husband, she had given up her acting career and was running a company selling shawls for breast-feeding mothers. Yet Baldoni managed to square his feminism with Emily’s reversion into a traditional woman’s role. “If I’m preaching anything in this book, it’s awareness,” he told me. “That’s it. It’s awareness. It’s being f***ing aware, right? If you are a man and your wife has a child — or your wife gave birth to a child — and her career dies while your career flourishes, be aware of it. Right? If you’re aware of it, that’s the first step.”

 The real problem with Baldoni, I now think, is not that he has been unable to rid himself of his inner-man thoughts. These are incorrigible but pretty harmless if kept to yourself. It is that he is an actor and cannot stop acting out the first thing that occurs to his ego. I wrote in my piece: “Man Enough is a deep dive into his self-confessed tendency towards performative superficiality, superficiality so profound that when he directed his first film he wore a pair of non-prescription glasses to enhance his credibility.”

 When we talked Britain had just been shocked by the murder of the young Londoner Sarah Everard and by the exposure of the rape culture in our schools. Baldoni was aware of all this and had seen men respond using the hashtag #NotAllMen. “So I made a video about it on my TikTok, basically telling people to shut up,” he said. “I don’t understand why, as men, we cannot sit in the discomfort and just listen.”

Telling others to shut up seemed to me a very Baldoni contribution to world enlightenment. If the courts finally get the chance to decide the rights and wrongs of his embarrassing feud with Lively, I hope they somehow find that the better angels won the war of Baldoni’s soul. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if they had instead defected to the cause of a young mother of four who would not be silenced.

 

A federal judge said “it is fair to presume the Wayfarer parties did what they said they planned to do,” his entire $400 million lawsuit was thrown out, Team Baldoni's unscrupulous lawyer, BRYAN FREEDMAN was sanctioned, his crisis PR team TAG (Melissa Nathan, Jenn Abel and Jed Wallace) have been linked to multiple other smear campaigns, and Team Baldoni approved a statement saying her concerns “deserved to be heard" and advocated for a more respectful environment online. Bryan Freedman was off on a multi-stop smear tour within 24 hours of this statement release.

Also, Bryan Freedman was threatened with sanctions by the judge, earlier in this case, for misusing the court docket as "PR" and claims not backed by evidence. This whole case has been manipulated by rampant online misinformation and intentional falsehoods meant to cause intentional harm to Lively and Reynolds by Team Baldoni.

Justin Baldoni’s PR rep, Jenn Abel, actually commented on TikTok lawyer, Theresa’s video this week. Yes, the same Jenn Abel who sent texts that they could “bury anybody” and leave “no fingerprints.” regarding the online smearing of Blake Lively as ordered up by Team Justin Baldoni.

And the same PR team that allegedly asked Jed Wallace to boost Kjersti Flaa’s baby bump video and the same Jenn Abel that gleefully said “that’s all us” when reveling in the vicious bot driven comments that Blake was a liar, narcissist and mean girl - months before there was a lawsuit.

Theresa criticizes Jenn for what she describes as repeated poor judgment, including text messages with Melissa Nathan in which Justin Baldoni was described as “creepy” and that “no one likes him”

ustin Baldoni’s shady past wrought with allegations of misconduct and legal action. No, it wasn’t just Lively.

Proof that the Baldoni led smear campaign, with partner Steve Sarowitz, pledging he would spend 100 million to ruin Blake lively - BEFORE there was a lawsuit - influenced millions by using digital warfare to seed lies and false narratives that lively was a racist, bully, mean girl, didn’t care about DV. WE all saw it online, out of nowhere, in August 2024 after TAG, and digital hitman, Jed Wallace were hired. The same team now implicated in multiple other smear campaigns.

Get every penny, Blake!

Justin Baldoni’s shady past wrought with allegations of misconduct and legal action. No, it wasn’t just Lively.

Proof that the Baldoni led smear campaign, with partner Steve Sarowitz, pledging he would spend 100 million to ruin Blake lively - BEFORE there was a lawsuit - influenced millions by using digital warfare to seed lies and false narratives that lively was a racist, bully, mean girl, didn’t care about DV. WE all saw it online, out of nowhere, in August 2024 after TAG, and digital hitman, Jed Wallace were hired. The same team now implicated in multiple other smear campaigns.

Get every penny, Blake!

NO PROOF THAT ANY DAILIES WERE DELETED. Bryan Freedman went on frenzied press tour spinning another false narrative AFTER the settlement because he knew there would be zero consequences. Team Baldoni had the “DAILES” info for over a year and would not have used it at trial because it can easily be explained away.

Based on the publicly available testimony, there does not appear to be evidence that Blake Lively herself personally contacted Sony and said "delete the dailies" Even Ange Giamatti said, “nothing urgent”. It is highly unlikely that Blake would have directly contacted Ange at Sony, who likely did not know the name of the legal representative making the request, so categorized it as “Blake asked”.

Lively explains, her depo, that her lawyers negotiated with the relevant parties regarding what would happen to sensitive footage as part of her nudity rider.  She stated "My lawyers negotiated with both the Wayfarer parties ... and Sony as well ... on what would happen to the footage that was most sensitive in nature." This part was LEFT OUT by most pro Justin Baldoni content creators and even Bryan Freedman.

Another point that often gets overlooked is timing.

The discussions about the sensitive footage occurred in September 2024 and November 2024, while the lawsuit was not filed until December 31, 2024. (Blake's deposition took place in July 2025). These discussions predated any litigation. Also, in September 2024 the online smear campaign was in full swing and I’m sure Blake Lively had no idea what was going on and wanted to ensure the birthing video was not leaked.

That timing matters because people frequently characterize the issue as "destroying evidence." But if the requests were made months before a lawsuit existed, the context appears different. The stated concern was reportedly sensitive footage, including material related to the film's birthing scene, and discussions about how that footage would be stored, protected, or handled. This is common in the film industry.

This was about protecting her IMAGE not destroying “evidence”. There was no litigation at the time the request was made – July 2024, September 2024, and November 2024... and was in accordance with her nudity rider.

NO PROOF THAT ANY DAILIES WERE DELETED. Bryan Freedman went on frenzied press tour spinning another false narrative AFTER the settlement because he knew there would be zero consequences. Team Baldoni had the “DAILES” info for over a year and would not have used it at trial because it can easily be explained away.

Based on the publicly available testimony, there does not appear to be evidence that Blake Lively herself personally contacted Sony and said "delete the dailies" Even Ange Giamatti said, “nothing urgent”. It is highly unlikely that Blake would have directly contacted Ange at Sony, who likely did not know the name of the legal representative making the request, so categorized it as “Blake asked”.

Lively explains, her depo, that her lawyers negotiated with the relevant parties regarding what would happen to sensitive footage as part of her nudity rider.  She stated "My lawyers negotiated with both the Wayfarer parties ... and Sony as well ... on what would happen to the footage that was most sensitive in nature." This part was LEFT OUT by most pro Justin Baldoni content creators and even Bryan Freedman.

Another point that often gets overlooked is timing.

The discussions about the sensitive footage occurred in September 2024 and November 2024, while the lawsuit was not filed until December 31, 2024. (Blake's deposition took place in July 2025). These discussions predated any litigation. Also, in September 2024 the online smear campaign was in full swing and I’m sure Blake Lively had no idea what was going on and wanted to ensure the birthing video was not leaked.

That timing matters because people frequently characterize the issue as "destroying evidence." But if the requests were made months before a lawsuit existed, the context appears different. The stated concern was reportedly sensitive footage, including material related to the film's birthing scene, and discussions about how that footage would be stored, protected, or handled. This is common in the film industry.

This was about protecting her IMAGE not destroying “evidence”. There was no litigation at the time the request was made – July 2024, September 2024, and November 2024... and was in accordance with her nudity rider.

 

Justin Baldoni has been a problem across multiple productions. Coworkers have called him verbally abusive, intimidating, disingenuous…with more than one saying that working with him was the worst experience of their careers. Blake has had a good reputation in her 20 year history until IEWU. Juston’s billionaire partner, Steve Sarowitz said he would spend 100 million to protect his studio (lied and said he didn’t bit actually did) which apparently meant endless $ to destroy Blake Lively - without leaving fingerprints - BEFORE there was a lawsuit…because they were worried that their shit show IEWU set “might” become public.

They won the PR war. The total social take down of Blake lively that they ordered up, paid millions for, and executed using digital warfare, as promised, more than delivered. The fact that his smear team of Melissa Nathan, Bryan, Freedman, and Jed Wallace are now being implicated or sued in other smear campaigns will be the silver lining in exposing these high stakes Hollywood smear campaigns. It doesn’t matter who you are, nobody’s going to survive this level of attack. It is shocking and unprecedented.