On Jan. 21, Blake Livelys legal team petitioned a Texas court to depose Jed Wallace. The attorneys say hes a key player in the alleged smear campaign she believes Justin Baldoni enacted to counter her claims that he engaged in unprofessional and sexually harassing conduct while they worked together on their summer 2024 hit It Ends with Us.

The filing noted that Wallace, 54, who resides in an affluent area south of Austin, runs a crisis consultancy for high-profile and high-net worth clients, including by contracting with other public relations and brand management firms to perform discrete work. It adds that he specializes in executing confidential and untraceable campaigns across various social media platforms (including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and X) to shape public perception of his clients and their adversaries and to perpetuate those perceptions by, among other things, creating social media accounts with inauthentic users. Lawyers for Lively contended that Wallace weaponized a digital army around the country, including in New York and Los Angeles, to create, seed, manipulate, and advance disparaging content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums.

On Feb. 4, Wallace fought back, filing a multi-million-dollar defamation suit in Texas federal court accusing Lively of defamation for her claims. Neither Wallace nor [his firm] had anything to do with the alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, failure to investigate or aiding and abetting the alleged harassment or alleged retaliation, argued his lawyer. The filing describes Wallaces operation as a crisis mitigation firm engaged by clients to help navigate real-life human crisis, threats, trauma and mental health concerns. It helps primarily families and individuals when they find themselves unjustly attacked, extorted, doxed, swatted, scammed or need help navigating through the most frightening situations. Livelys team dismissed the action as just a publicity stunt, declaring it pleased that Mr. Wallace has finally emerged from the shadows. Her legal representation has since pulled its Texas deposition request, apparently focusing efforts on its New York litigation, where the case is now heading toward a 2026 federal trial, and on Feb. 12 subpoenaed Wallace as part of the discovery process. We look forward to investigating more about Jed Wallaces entire business model and what else he was doing to distract from the very real sexual harassment and retaliation claims made by Ms. Lively, her attorneys announced in a statement.

Perhaps by design, Wallace has to this point maintained a negligible public footprint, with little known about his operations or client base. On his since-deleted LinkedIn profile, he positioned himself as a hired gun with a proprietary formula for defining artists and trends. His role was first revealed when earlier legal filings showed communications between representatives for Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer praising how social media had turned against Lively and her husband, actor-producer Ryan Reynolds, largely [due] to Jed and his teams efforts to shift the narrative.

Documentation in Livelys litigation and complaint filed with Californias Civil Rights Department in 2024 shows that executives working at and on behalf of Wayfarer were in contact with Wallace about these efforts. Livelys lawyers appear to believe that his consultancy did its work for Wayfarer or else via its crisis publicist Melissa Nathan, whose own firms other clients include Johnny Depp and Jake Paul.

Wallace has his own relationship with Bryan Freedman, the prominent attorney representing Baldoni and Wayfarer. He told Variety that while he wouldnt describe Wallace as a fixer, hes an extraordinarily adept and well-resourced operator across international jurisdictions. (Both that publication as well as The Hollywood Reporter spoke to individuals who compared Wallace to Ray Donovan, the eponymous problem-solver for entertainment elites on the Showtime series.)

The extent of Freedmans professional involvement with Wallace is unclear. The lawyers own crisis publicist briefly included Wallace in correspondence during the 2024 reporting of a THR profile that Freedman considered adversarial.

Neither Wallace nor Freedman agreed to speak for this coverage. Instead, Freedman, decrying unspecified inaccuracies, suggested that because Disney and Marvel are advertisers with THR and its parent company, Penske Media Corporation, that this publication is doing the bidding of Reynolds. In January, Freedman sent a publicized letter to those companies CEOs, contending that Reynolds had used their tentpole Deadpool Wolverine to unfairly mock Baldoni with a minor character called Nicepool.

Last year, a tech CEO named Christian Lanng alleged in a defamation and extortion action that Freedmans law firm hired third parties to create deepfake stories by utilizing counterfeit websites and inauthentic social media accounts in an attempt to leverage a higher settlement against him. Lanng later claimed that an unnamed consultant had pseudonymously posted on X, formerly Twitter, as a fictitious character, claiming to have been sexually victimized by the chief executive and encouraging others to come forward to Freedman. This consultants other plans purportedly included trolling on Reddit forums that would harm the opponent and his company.

In court, Freedman has denied these claims, and hes previously toldTHRit sounds like a spy novel about the CIA. Now Lanngs lawyer Christopher Frost says of the Wallace revelations, were watching this matter closely. He adds of their own assertion of a social media smear campaign: If those [Lanng] allegations were met with any skepticism, I suspect there is less skepticism today, given Wallaces since-publicized connection to Freedman.

In 2009, THR wrote about how Freedmans representation of gossip blogger Perez Hilton (currently a vociferous Baldoni supporter) had led him to establishing a lucrative niche practice protecting celebrities and others who want defamatory statements about them removed from the Internet. At the time, Freedman noted that this subsidiary, Electronic Reputation Protection Services, tracked down anonymous posters, explaining, Ive been inundated over the past year with people wanting to clean up their reputation.

Crisis communications experts observe that the social manipulation campaign Wallace allegedly performed is increasingly common across the entertainment industry as social media now often drives traditional medias narratives and framing. Its more prevalent than you think even if you think its prevalent, says one of these professionals. People sub-contract out to Eastern Europe and India to operate these bot and sock puppet accounts. Its pennies per post. (Sometimes it even occurs in-house; in 2023, HBO CEO Casey Bloys apologized that he and his division used fake Twitter accounts to troll TV critics.)

A digital marketing veteran who works with major celebrities explains that such work is borne out of a desperate impulse: When traditional PR people cant kill a story, this is the obfuscation technique. Its taking a crayon and scribbling all over the picture. The goal is to make things unclear. You dont even want to look at it anymore.

Wallaces role in the off-screen drama around another production, years prior to the Baldoni-Lively scandal, reveals a further dimension to his activities. In 2021, Bam Margera, who has long publicly battled alcoholism, sued Paramount Pictures, Johnny Knoxville and others affiliated with Jackass Forever, alleging hed been wrongfully fired from the franchise film for violating a wellness agreement.

Margera ultimately dropped the suit. But beforehand lawyers for Paramount explained to the court that Jackass production company Dickhouse tasked Wallace, who it described as a leading expert in developing and assisting in the execution of treatment and recovery plans, to manage Margeras wellness program, whose compliance determined the performers participation in the movie. Coincidentally or not Freedman has also done legal work for Dickhouse.

THRs conversations with the players who deal in the high-profile end of the recovery community indicate that Wallace, whose qualifications in addiction treatment are unknown, isnt as much of an established figure in that realm as the Paramount filing suggests. However, he does possess experience handling communications for rehabs as well as working with the interventionist Heather Hayes, who was featured on AEs Intervention. (His name has been scrubbed from a page on her website which details her companys crisis intervention services.)

So far, the details of Wallaces work have mostly remained a mystery. The dueling litigation indicates it likely wont remain that way for long.