Blake Lively now facing defamation lawsuit from Justin Baldoni's PR guys

The Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni situation gets ickier by the day, but this new wrinkle is kind of funny. A PR crisis management firm just sued Blake Lively for defamation—yes, the very thing other wealthy clients would normally hire it to handle. Maybe the company should have considered calling a crisis management firm of its own until this whole thing blew over.

The complaint was filed yesterday in Texas federal court by Jed Wallace of Street Relations. In a previous suit, Lively accused Wallace of creating artificial content on social media to instigate a smear campaign against her. Her petition alleged that the PR team would then feed this manufactured content to reporters in order to trigger a viral moment and "influence public opinion and thereby cause an organic pile-on," per The Hollywood Reporter. Wallace is now seeking a court order stating that he didn't engage in harassment or retaliation against the actress, and a cool $7 million in damages to boot. "Neither Wallace nor Street (Relations) had anything to do with the alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, failure to investigate or aiding and abetting the alleged harassment or alleged retaliation," the complaint states. "Neither could they have breached a contract with Lively because no such contract exists."

Meanwhile, Lively's team doesn't seem too concerned about this new development. "Another day, another state, another nine-figure lawsuit seeking to sue Ms. Lively ‘into oblivion’ for speaking out against sexual harassment and retaliation," her lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, wrote in a statement. "This is not just a publicity stunt—it is transparent retaliation in response to allegations contained within a sexual harassment and retaliation complaint that Ms. Lively filed with the California Civil Rights Department. While this lawsuit will be dismissed, we are pleased that Mr. Wallace has finally emerged from the shadows, and that he too will be held accountable in federal court."

This likely won't help either party respect Judge Lewis Liman's warning from earlier this week to stop trashing each other to the media. He's threatened to move up the start date of the trial if he finds that this war of public opinion "would prejudice the opportunity for parties [to have] a fair trial" in any way. That date is currently set for March 9, 2026. We'll see if either Lively's or Baldoni's teams can hold out until then.