Justin Baldoni asked a judge on Friday to prevent Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds from accessing years of his phone and text records, which he said could reveal location data and his web browser history.
In a letter to the court, Baldoni’s lawyer Mitchell Schuster argued that Lively’s subpoenas are “flagrantly overbroad.”
“It is hard to overstate how broad, invasive, and atypical these Subpoenas truly are,” Schuster wrote. “This is civil litigation, not a criminal prosecution, and (Lively and Reynolds) are not the FBI.”
Lively’s lawyers submitted subpoenas earlier this week to AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. They are seeking further evidence to bolster their claim that Baldoni, her director and co-star in “It Ends With Us,” engaged in an unlawful smear campaign against her in retaliation for her sexual harassment complaint.
Responding to Baldoni’s objections, a Lively spokesperson said Friday: “If they have so many receipts why are they so afraid to produce them?”
Baldoni and Lively are each suing each other in federal court in New York, in cases that have also drawn in Reynolds, numerous publicists and communications operatives, and the New York Times. Baldoni alleges that Lively destroyed his reputation with provably false allegations.
Lively’s lawyers also issued subpoenas to Jed Wallace, a crisis consultant based in Texas, and to internet providers Cloudflare and AOL. In a statement on Wednesday, Lively’s team said they aim to “expose the full web of individuals” involved in the efforts to tarnish her reputation.
In response, Baldoni’s team accused Lively’s side of engaging in a “massive fishing expedition.”
The phone company subpoenas include requests for records pertaining to Baldoni, producer Jamey Heath, billionaire Wayfarer Studios co-founder Steve Sarowitz, and publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, all of whom are defendants in Lively’s suit. Lively’s team also sought records pertaining to several other employees of Wayfarer and of Nathan’s PR company.
The subpoenas seek “call logs, text logs, data logs, and cell site location information” dating back to Dec. 1, 2022.
In the letter to the judge, Schuster argued that the request is “wildly disproportionate to the needs of the case and unnecessarily invades the privacy of untold numbers of third parties, including family, friends, business partners, and — quite literally — any other person with whom any of the targets have communicated with over a period of years.”
Schuster also said that the subpoenas are a “media ploy,” given that they were leaked to the press along with a combative statement on Wednesday. The attorney suggested that was “hypocritical,” referring to the Lively team’s objections to the Baldoni team’s media campaign. He added that Baldoni is not objecting to her media statement, nor to her use of third-party subpoenas.
“The Wayfarer Parties are using such tools themselves, albeit in a far narrower and legally permissible fashion,” he wrote.
Baldoni’s lawyer asked for the judge to address the dispute “at the soonest possible opportunity.”
Lively’s spokesperson argued that the requested records will “expose” the remaining pieces of the story: “Mr. Baldoni and the Wayfarer parties have already admitted that Ms. Lively raised concerns multiple times. They have admitted that they created a plan in case she ‘made her grievances public,’ in which they planned to plant stories suggesting Ms. Lively was a ‘bully’ and ‘weaponizing feminism.’ They have admitted that they were able to ‘bury’ anyone. They have admitted that they bragged and laughed at how negatively the narrative had shifted against Ms. Lively, and how successful they were at ‘confusing’ people. They have admitted that they said they ‘started to see a shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative,’ yet they deny that they implemented their plan. Now they want to block the very discovery that would expose them. If they didn’t do it, they would have nothing to hide.”
From Variety US