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A little-known Texas crisis consultant, Jed Wallace, on Tuesday sued Blake Lively for defamation, saying that she had caused him “millions of dollars” in reputational and emotional harm.
For nearly eight weeks, Lively and Justin Baldoni, who directed and starred alongside her in the movie “It Ends With Us,” have been at war. In a lawsuit filed in late December, Lively accused Baldoni and his team of running a coordinated smear campaign against her and tapping Wallace to assist by weaponizing “a digital army.” (Baldoni, his publicists and Wallace have denied these allegations.) In January, Baldoni sued Lively for defamation and extortion, which Lively’s legal team told BI was a “desperate” strategy.
Wallace owns a PR firm called Street Relations and has cultivated a certain mystique among his peers. On his LinkedIn page, which is no longer available, the crisis guru described himself as “a hired gun” with a “proprietary formula for defining artists and trends.” One entertainment industry executive familiar with Wallace’s services told Business Insider that Wallace “is the guy you hire if your kid is stuck in Bolivia or something.”
Wallace, 54, has represented the YouTuber Adin Ross, Paramount Pictures, and Hamilton Souther, a self-described shaman and ayahuasca-ceremony guide who offers life coaching services for CEOs and celebrities. In a 2021 lawsuit filed by Bam Margera, the star of MTV’s “Jackass,” against Paramount Pictures, Margera said that Wallace, who had no medical training or credentials, oversaw an “inhumane” substance-abuse treatment program that included requiring Margera to take medication during daily FaceTime calls with Wallace. Wallace denied those allegations, and the suit was settled in 2022.
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have been embroiled in a legal and PR battle surrounding their film “It Ends With Us.”
Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Sony Pictures; Gotham/WireImage
In December, The New York Times published an explosive story detailing Lively’s claims that Baldoni’s team deployed a “social manipulation” plan to “destroy” her reputation. The story cited a civil rights complaint filed by Lively and “thousands of pages of text messages and emails.” In turn, Baldoni, his publicists, and Wallace filed a libel lawsuit against the Times denying the allegations and accusing the paper of “cherry-picking” and altering private messages to deliberately mislead readers. Chip Babcock, a partner in the Texas law firm Jackson Walker, who represents Wallace, told BI that “Mr. Wallace has never participated in a smear campaign against Blake Lively and to suggest otherwise would be false and defamatory.” The Times has said they plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.
In his lawsuit against Lively, Wallace said the actor sowed confusion in the press by naming him as a defendant in her civil rights complaint but not in her lawsuit, which she filed 10 days later.
His filing comes after Lively filed a petition in Texas state court on January 21 requesting Wallace be deposed about the nature of his work with Baldoni. (That petition was withdrawn the same day Wallace filed his suit.)
Bryan Freedman — a Hollywood attorney representing Baldoni’s team and Wallace in their lawsuit against the Times — called Wallace a do-gooder.
“Jed Wallace helps with real-life human crisis, trauma, mental health concerns, addiction issues and personal safety issues,” Freedman wrote in an email to BI.
“Seemingly insurmountable situations” are Wallace’s specialty, Freedman added. “When good humans are fighting to save themselves, their families, or people they love,” he wrote, “that is when people engage Jed to assess, monitor and help them strategize.”
Wallace’s firm has no website. His name appears in archives of the student newspaper at Fordham University, where he played football in the late 1980s and early 1990s and still holds the record for fifth-longest punt.
Wallace has kept a low profile. His LinkedIn page is no longer active.
LinkedIn/Jed Wallace
Wallace moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, attending acting classes at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and working at a restaurant on Montana Avenue, a person who knew him at the time said. Eventually, he landed in public relations. Between 2004 and 2006, multiple press releases indicate he worked for MPH PR, owned by Mike Hiles, whose clients included the advertising agency RMD Entertainment Group and VirTra Systems, which creates training simulators for law enforcement and the military. Media runs in Wallace’s family. His father Roger, who died in 2021, was a communications professor at the University of Scranton and taught classes in radio production.
Wallace started Street Relations in Los Angeles in 2007. Over the years, he amassed a diverse client list, including Travis Allen, a California state assembly candidate, and Dr. David Alessi, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Wallace has also represented a number of substance-abuse recovery groups, including a now-shuttered addiction recovery center in New Jersey and a nonprofit that helps mothers struggling with addiction and mental illness. He’s also worked with Heather Hayes & Associates, a Georgia-based concierge service for addiction recovery. Wallace is now based in Dripping Springs, Texas.
In 2020, Paramount Pictures hired Wallace to oversee a substance-abuse treatment program for Margera, a stuntman who was part of the “Jackass” franchise. In his lawsuit against Paramount, which was eventually settled on undisclosed terms, Margera said that Paramount required him to participate in the program in order to remain involved in the production of the movie “Jackass Forever.” The lawsuit says Wallace assembled a team that included his client Heather Hayes.
Margera said his substance-abuse treatment program, which Wallace oversaw, left him “a shell of his former self.”
Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
Margera alleged that the treatment program was “psychological torture,” comparing it to Britney Spears’ conservatorship. He said he was required to have daily FaceTime calls with Wallace, during which Margera had to take “a cocktail of pills” that left him “physically and mentally drained, depressed, and a shell of his former self.”
I am often brought in on cases where previous treatment and recovery attempts have failed
Jed Wallace
At the time, Margera believed that Wallace had the final say on which medications were prescribed to him based on Wallace’s “repeated statements” that he was in charge of the program, per the complaint. But Wallace was not qualified to manage his treatment program, Margera said later in his lawsuit. Wallace didn’t have the bachelor’s degree in biology from Fordham that he claimed to have, the complaint says. In a supplemental declaration, Wallace called the suggestion that he had lied “offensive and irresponsible.” He told the court he’d dropped out of Fordham due to a “family emergency” and transferred to the University of Scranton. His “understanding,” he said, was that he had fulfilled Fordham’s graduation requirements. Fordham confirmed to BI that Wallace attended between 1989 and 1993 but did not graduate.
In an affidavit, Wallace said he had more than 17 years of experience working in the substance-abuse and behavioral-health fields and had worked with treatment centers, first responders, and law enforcement to create treatment programs. He said he’d also worked as a crisis and wellness consultant on hundreds of cases, including for celebrities and movie studios. “I am often brought in on cases,” Wallace wrote, “where previous treatment and recovery attempts have failed.”
Lively’s lawsuit says Wallace was retained by The Agency Group PR firm, which was founded by Melissa Nathan in 2024 and represents clients including Drake, Johnny Depp, and Hybe America, an entertainment company run by Scooter Braun. Nathan, whom Baldoni hired as a crisis publicist after negative rumors started swirling around the movie, was working alongside the director’s longtime publicist Jennifer Abel.
In an August 6 text message to Abel and Baldoni’s business partner, Jamey Heath, Melissa Nathan provided quotes for two unnamed digital teams that she said she’d used in the past, according to Lively’s suit. The services included a “website (to discuss), full reddit, full social account take downs, full social crisis team on hand for anything,” as well as starting “threads of theories” and social fan engagement to help “change narrative.” Nathan wrote of the proposed social media work: “All of this will be most importantly untraceable.”
A few days later, Nathan texted Abel a message she said was from Wallace: “We are crushing it on Reddit.”
While some social media accounts accused Baldoni’s team of using bots to amplify pro-Baldoni content, Nathan texted Baldoni that they did not do so because it would’ve been too obvious.
Lively’s lawsuit says that on August 9, the day “It Ends With Us” was released, Abel texted the team a screenshot of a woman’s post accusing Baldoni of exploiting her friend for his 2016 documentary, “My Last Days,” for which he interviewed people with terminal illnesses. According to Lively’s complaint, the woman’s post said that none of the documentary’s proceeds benefited the subjects and that Baldoni misportrayed her friend’s hometown.
“I’m assuming this is not true in the slightest,” Abel wrote, adding, “Either way, we’ve flagged to Jed and his team for more serious action on the social side.”
In text messages, one of Baldoni’s publicists praised Wallace’s efforts to “shift the narrative” on social media.
Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
Later that month, according to Lively’s lawsuit, an employee of Nathan’s firm texted Abel and Nathan: “Let us chat to Jed as well on this” about another negative post circulating about Baldoni.
Whatever Wallace was doing, Baldoni’s team seemed pleased with it. The day after “It Ends With Us” hit theaters, one Agency Group publicist texted the team that they had “started to see a shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative towards shining a spotlight on Blake and Ryan.”
Baldoni’s team denied going on the offensive against Lively, but it’s not unheard of to use social media to curry favor in the midst of controversy. Filippo Menczer, the director of Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, said social media manipulation services are “everywhere” in the entertainment world. Anyone can pay to have content shared, reposted, commented on, or upvoted. Once this artificial engagement kicks off, the content can go viral on its own as real people engage with it, Menczer added. It’s possible to detect the existence of these campaigns, he said, but finding out who’s behind them is another story.
While some platforms may require a phone number to enlist their services, people can use disposable numbers, and a device’s IP address can be rerouted through a VPN, Menczer said. “There is no way to know who’s behind them,” he said. “OK, if you’re the FBI, if you’re some other powerful agency, there is.”
One Los Angeles-based crisis publicist said the Lively-Baldoni blowup is not ideal for someone like Wallace.
“I imagine Jed has no interest in having his name out there,” the publicist said. “I imagine all his work is word of mouth and he doesn’t want to be known, because if he’s the guy who makes things untraceable, that’s the value.”
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