Blake Lively‘s legal team is seeking to obtain Justin Baldoni‘s phone records amid the pairs ongoing lawsuit.
Why does Blake Lively want Justin Baldoni’s phone records?
Lively’s team of attorneys recently sent subpoenas to three phone carriers — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — to gain phone records from the filmmaker. The subpoena (via Variety) also seeks to gain the phone records of Baldoni’s publicist Jennifer Abel, as well as publicist Melissa Nathan.
The reason behind the subpoena is to help Lively’s team continue to build their case of Baldoni trying to smear Lively through social media. While the team already has access to Baldoni’s text messages, phone records may help show that Baldoni and his team orchestrated even more covert campaigns against Lively.
“Phone records belonging to all of the individual defendants will expose the full web of individuals who were involved in the smear campaign against Ms. Lively,” said a Lively spokesperson in a statement. “Such records will provide critical and irrefutable evidence not only about who, but also about when, where, and how their retaliation plan came together and operated.”
In response to the subpoena, Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman said that Lively’s team is looking for calls, texts, and location data that stretch back two years and is doing nothing but fishing for information they won’t find.
“This massive fishing expedition demonstrates that they are desperately seeking any factual basis for their provably false claims,” Freedman said. “They will find none.”
Lively’s initial complaint alleges that Baldoni created a hostile work environment
All of this stems from a formal complaint that Lively made against Baldoni in December. In it, she states that things got so bad during the filming of It Ends With Us that an all-hands-on-deck meeting was called in response to her claims of a hostile work environment. During the meeting, Lively asked that Baldoni stop showing her nude videos or images of women, that he stop mentioning his pornography addiction to her, that Baldoni stop discussing sexual experiences in front of her, and that he also stop mentioning Lively’s weight.
The complaint also claims that an agreement was made between production company Wayfarer Studios and the cast in which the promotion of the movie would focus “more on [Lively’s character’s] strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” However, Lively claims that Baldoni would renege on that and instead spoke in interviews about the film’s serious story.
Lively also claimed that Baldoni and his PR manager, Melissa Nathan, discussed ways to start a social media campaign to harm her reputation. The filing by Lively includes 22 pages of texts between Baldoni’s publicist and Nathan, in which they discuss wanting to have Lively “buried.”
