Slamming Justin Baldoni’s “Smoke & Mirrors Exercise,” Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds’ PR Chief Wants Out Of ‘It Ends With Us’ Legal Battle

deadline.com:

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds‘ publicist Leslie Sloane is standing strongly with her clients against Justin Baldoni‘s alleged “bizarre and abusive practices,” but the Vision PR boss wants herself and her company dropped from the legal battle between the It Ends With Us stars. “The Wayfarer Parties dragged Leslie Sloane and Vision PR, Inc.

into the instant litigation as a smoke and mirrors exercise to distract from their own sexual harassment and systematic retaliation,” asserts an accompanying memo to a motion to dismiss Sloane and Vision PR from the latest version of Baldoni’s $400 million defamation and extortion lawsuit filed today in federal court. “The Amended Complaint does not—and cannot—identify anything Ms.

Sloane did that comes anywhere close to the damning communications between Baldoni and his own publicists concerning an explicit campaign to ‘destroy’ and ‘bury’ the woman employee who accused him of sexual harassment,” the document from Sloane’s Bois Schiller Flexner lawyers goes on to say with a flip of sorts on to Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, CEO Jamey Heath, their backer and their own PR team lead by Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel and the astroturfing that Lively says she suffered.

After the New Year’s Eve and January 16 complaints from Lively and Baldoni following the former’s December 20 sexual harassment and retaliation filing with California’s Civil Rights department, both sides have now filed amended complaints in their increasingly acidic face-off.