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.
“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.
In December, Lively filed a letter with the California Civil Rights Department in which she claimed that Baldoni sexually harassed her during the film’s production in 2023. The CRD letter, which also included allegations of Baldoni waging a 2024 smear campaign against Lively, became the basis of a New York Times report, kicking off a legal back and forth involving a group of more than a dozen people and companies.
On New Year’s Eve, Baldoni and nine other plaintiffs, including his crisis publicist Melissa Nathan, sued the New York Times for $250 million for libel. Lively then sued Baldoni and the group for violating federal and California state law “by retaliating against her for reporting sexual harassment and workplace safety concerns.” The director then sued Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds for $400 million for civil extortion, defamation and other actions.
In a related suit, Baldoni’s former publicist Stephanie Jones is suing Baldoni and Nathan for breach of contract among other claims. Jones provided the text messages to Lively’s legal team sometime after parting ways with Abel in August 2024 in a move that raised eyebrows. Lively’s lawyers say they received the text messages via a subpoena to Jones’ PR firm Jonesworks. It remains unclear on what grounds Jones would have been required to turn over correspondence involving former client Baldoni or former employee Abel given that no lawsuit had been filed at the time.
In yet another lawsuit, Texas-based digital entrepreneur Jed Wallace filed a multi-million dollar suit against Lively in federal court for defamation. He claims that he has suffered millions of dollars in reputational harm after the actress alleged he unleashed a “digital army” to malign her back in August.
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.”
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.”
Though it is standard for celebrities like Lively and Baldoni to work with crisis PR when they are enmeshed in a conflict, the actress’ team was highly critical of the director’s use of the behind-the-scenes professionals last summer ahead of the film’s opening. At the time, news outlets and social media influencers covered a mysterious feud between Lively and Baldoni that prevented the two from appearing together at joint press events or the film’s premiere on Aug. 6.
The Sony film, which was produced and financed by Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios, became a runaway hit, earning $351 million at the box office globally off of a $25 million budget.
