Blake Lively quietly filed a clandestine lawsuit months before her legal war with It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni became public, in an apparent plot to seize damning text messages from his publicist.

The filing allowed her attorneys to issue a subpoena for the embarrassing texts and then drop the lawsuit, all without Baldoni’s team knowing it even existed.

Now, a DailyMail.com investigation has uncovered the full story behind the obscure suit, which was filed without names of the defendants, by a company owned by Lively, in an apparent bid to avoid detection.

Legal experts say the case appeared to be a ‘sham’ lawsuit, with one describing it as ‘super shady.’

Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman told DailyMail.com: ‘This appears to be an end-around, skirting the process, to be able to secretly get these documents without having to give anyone notice.

‘That would be an abuse of process and we intend to take all action allowable under the law.’

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Blake Lively quietly filed a clandestine lawsuit months before her legal war with Justin Baldoni became public in order to obtain the bombshell texts that became central to her case, DailyMail.com has learned

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Publicist Stephanie Jones (right) has claimed she was merely complying with a legal subpoena when she turned over a work cellphone to Blake Lively that ultimately served as the backbone of the actress’s defamation lawsuit

Freedman said he had no knowledge about the lawsuit until DailyMail.com contacted him to ask for comment.

Lively’s lawyers said the newly-uncovered lawsuit was ‘common and entirely appropriate’, and accused Freedman of ‘faux outrage’.

Court papers show the shadow lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on September 27 last year, by a company called Vanzan.

The lawsuit accused up to 10 unidentified individuals – listed only as ‘Does 1-10’- of harming Vanzan’s business and reputation, but did not specify what they did wrong.

‘(They) have participated, and may continue to participate, in efforts to harm plaintiff including by: failing to act in plaintiff’s best interests, taking actions to their personal benefit at plaintiff’s expense, failing to freely communicate with plaintiff regarding matters that impact plaintiff’s business and reputation, and disclosing to third parties and failing to keep strictly confidential plaintiff’s confidential and/or private information,’ reads one of the typically vague sentences.

Nowhere in the suit, submitted by New York attorney Samantha Katze, does it name any person on either side, allowing the case to slip unnoticed into the legal system.

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Filings exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com show the covert case was filed without names of the defendants in an apparent bid to avoid detection

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The copy of the case summons shows it was dated September 27, 2024, seven weeks after the It Ends With Us premiere

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The lawsuit accused up to 10 unnamed individuals – listed only as ‘Does 1-10’ – of harming Vanzan’s business and reputation, only vaguely describing the alleged misconduct

Just four days after the filing, on October 1, Katze issued a subpoena to Baldoni’s ex-publicist Stephanie Jones and her company Jonesworks – who had recently parted ways with the actor – demanding all documents and communications relating to Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, their companies, and Baldoni.

A copy of the subpoena, which has not been made public, was reviewed by DailyMail.com.

Jones did not object to the subpoena and turned over a trove of private messages between Jennifer Abel, a former staffer at her PR agency who continued working with Baldoni, and crisis management guru Melissa Nathan.

Jones had retrieved the messages from Abel’s company-issued phone after Abel told her she was quitting Jonesworks in July.

The texts purportedly showed Baldoni, Abel, and Nathan coordinating a negative publicity campaign against Lively, even while they were meant to be promoting 2024 movie It Ends With Us, starring Lively and Baldoni, and created by Baldoni’s production company Wayfarer Studios.

LAWSUIT TIMELINE

August 6: It Ends with Us premieres in New York, with Blake and Justin appearing separately on the red carpet

August 7: Speculation and theories about a suspected feud within the cast begin circulating online

September 27: Blake files obscure lawsuit against ‘unknown’ defendants in New York under her company Vanzan Inc

October 1: Blake’s lawyer issues subpoena to Stephanie Jones

December 19: Blake drops lawsuit

December 20: Blake files California Civil Rights Department complaint against Justin and Wayfarer Studios

December 21: NYT publishes ‘expose’

December 31: Blake files formal lawsuit against Justin in federal court

December 31: Justin sues NYT for defamation

January 16: Justin sues Blake for defamation

In one now infamous text, Nathan wrote: ‘We can bury anyone’, allegedly referring to their strategy to deal with Lively. In another, Nathan referred to how they could ‘destroy’ Lively.

After quietly issuing the subpoena, Katze then asked for the Vanzan suit to be withdrawn without any further action on December 19.

The following day Lively formally filed her California Civil Rights Department complaint accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment and retaliation.

Records show that Vanzan was founded in 2010 in Delaware, a state notorious for its corporate secrecy. Public records there give no clue to its owner.

However, the firm later did business in California, requiring it to file in that state too, revealing Lively is behind the company.

A September 2023 California corporate filing lists ‘Blake Reynolds’ – Lively’s married name – as the company’s CEO, secretary and chief financial officer, and states the firm is in the ‘entertainment’ industry.

The only business the firm has been publicly recorded doing before the Manhattan lawsuit is importing some home goods from the UK.

US customs records list Vanzan as receiving two shipments of furniture, fabric and doors from The British Shop in 2019, delivered to Lively’s address in Westchester County, New York.

The imported goods were listed as for the attention of Molly Karow, a public relations officer who was also credited as a producer for Taylor Swift’s I Bet You Think About Me (Taylor’s Version) music video, which was directed by best friend Lively.

Legal experts asked to review the Vanzan case by DailyMail.com warned the alleged scheme looked bad for Lively’s legal team.

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Subsequent filings show the Vanzan dropped the lawsuit on December 19, just one day before Lively formally filed her complaint against Baldoni with the California Civil Rights Department

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Public records for Vanzan Inc list a business address in New York City and its CEO as ‘Blake Reynolds’

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Fans began to speculate that there was a potential feud among the cast after Lively and Baldoni appeared separately at the premiere of It Ends With Us in New York on August 6

‘This is a sham lawsuit generated for an ulterior motive, which can be sanctionable for a waste of judicial resources,’ said Ron Zambrano, employment litigation chair at California firm West Coast Trial Lawyers.

‘They intentionally did this to really work in a very surreptitious and clandestine way. It’s super shady.’

Celebrity attorney Peter Gleason, who has represented dozens of Hollywood clients, told DailyMail.com: ‘This looks like a ruse to try and interject legitimacy into obtaining discovery that is intended to be used in another cause of action.

‘If that is the case, it’s totally inappropriate.’

The experts pointed out that it is highly unusual that a firm would sue its own staff or representatives, without apparently even knowing who they are.

Litigator Keith Davidson, a co-host of Ask 2 Lawyers, a legal podcast that has covered the Baldoni-Lively case said: ‘It’s very rare to sue only Doe defendants. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

The text messages in question were featured prominently in the New York Times report about Lively’s complaint in December. Among them was a now infamous text from Baldoni’s crisis PR guru Melissa Nathan that read: ‘We can bury anyone’

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The texts purportedly showed Baldoni, Abel, and Nathan coordinating a negative publicity campaign against Lively, which the actor’s lawyers later claimed were ‘cherry picked’ and edited

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Baldoni’s legal team claimed the texts included in the New York Times article were doctored and taken out of context and even published the complete exchanges to show the omissions

‘And the fact that it’s on a vague complaint, the whole thing appears to be a fig leaf,’ said the co-founder of Albertson & Davidson.

Lively’s attorney Esra Hudson said: ‘Doe lawsuits are common and entirely appropriate legal tools for pursuing claims and uncovering the identity of unknown perpetrators of unlawful activities.

‘This lawsuit unearthed the Wayfarer parties’ documented plan – in their own words, in their own text messages—to “destroy” Blake Lively. Their faux outrage has nothing to do with legal ethics or the law, which are not an issue here, and is entirely about the fact that they got caught doing something that they insisted would be “untraceable”.’

Hudson was backed by Los Angeles-based attorney Lincoln Bandlow, who said it is ‘not unusual’ to file a lawsuit against unnamed defendants if the plaintiff doesn’t know their names yet, for example in defamation cases against anonymous social media users.

Bandlow said Lively may have just used Vanzan to avoid attracting media attention.

‘If they were trying to stay a little bit under the radar with this it’s not surprising,’ he said.

Attorney Samantha Katze filed Lively’s secretive lawsuit

‘There’s nothing unusual about using this kind of mechanism to uncover who’s doing things you believe are improper.’

Until DailyMail.com’s discovery of the Vanzan lawsuit, the timeline of the courtroom battle between Lively, 37, and Baldoni, 41, appeared to begin in December, when she filed a California Civil Rights Department complaint and a federal lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment and retaliation.

Lively claimed he had acted unprofessionally on the set of the domestic abuse movie It Ends With Us in which the pair starred and Baldoni also directed.

She also accused Baldoni and his team of publicists of launching a smear campaign against her amid the release of the film last summer.

Baldoni filed a countersuit in January. Both parties deny the allegations against them.

The New York Times published an explosive story about the alleged sexual harassment and smear campaign immediately after Lively’s California filing, referring extensively to the embarrassing texts between Baldoni’s publicists obtained by Lively’s lawyers.

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Baldoni’s PR Jennifer Abel worked for Jones but quit over what she called a ‘toxic’ work environment

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Baldoni’s lead lawyer Bryan Freedman said he had no knowledge about the secret lawsuit until DailyMail.com contacted him for comment

The paper reported that the texts included in Lively’s filing had been obtained by a subpoena – a curious detail that raised eyebrows at the time.

Freedman pointed out that he wasn’t aware of a subpoena and that none of his clients had been subpoenaed in the matter at that stage.

He also noted that a subpoena can’t be issued without a case number tied to a formally filed legal complaint – which to his knowledge – didn’t appear to exist at that point.

But DailyMail.com’s investigation has since revealed that the dramatic legal war had quietly been in the works three months before Lively publicly sued Baldoni.

Hollywood publicist Jones had fallen out with Baldoni and the rest of his PR team that summer in the lead up to the film’s release.

Weeks after Lively filed her CRD complaint, Jones launched her own suit against Baldoni for breach of contract.

According to her December 26 filing, Baldoni had terminated her contract at the end of August. Jones accused Abel, who had recently left Jonesworks, of conspiring with Nathan to steal Baldoni as a client.

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In her December complaint, Lively claimed he had acted unprofessionally on the set of the domestic abuse movie It Ends With Us in which the pair starred and Baldoni also directed

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Baldoni filed a countersuit in January. Both parties deny the allegations against them

Baldoni claimed in his lawsuit that by August, Jones ‘was acting purely out of spite’ towards Abel and had leaked the infamous texts to Lively’s team.

But Jones maintains she has always acted professionally and merely wanted to clear her name.

Responding to Baldoni’s countersuit against her last week, Jones vehemently denied leaking the messages and claimed they were subpoenaed.

Jones’s attorney Kristin Tahler told DailyMail.com that her client ‘did not “leak” but rather complied with a legal, court-ordered subpoena’.

‘Ms. Jones provided materials to Ms. Lively’s team in response to the October subpoena,’ said Tahler. ‘Why would Ms. Jones fight a subpoena when she had nothing to hide?’

However, Baldoni claims at least one person knew what was on Abel’s phone in August – more than a month before the subpoena was issued.

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The film at the heart of the feud, based on the 2016 bestseller by Colleen Hoover, was released in August and was a box office hit

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The movie follows Lily Bloom, a florist played by Lively, who falls in love with a charming but abusive neurosurgeon played by Baldoni, who was also the film’s director

He claimed that in an August 21 phone call, Lively’s publicist Leslie Sloane ‘boasted to Nathan that she had seen her texts and that Nathan would soon be sued’.

If Sloane already had the text messages by August 21, it would mean she received them weeks before the subpoena from Vanzan was issued.

And also in August, in a parting missive to Jonesworks, Abel said: ‘I’ve enjoyed working with you both and wish you nothing but the best’

‘Unfortunately your company phone says otherwise,’ an unidentified staffer said.