No one is excluded from the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively narrative. Just days after scoring a major legal win when a federal judge granted her motion to dismiss Baldoni’s $400 million countersuit against her, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and her longtime publicist Leslie Sloane, Blake Lively is launching a brand new volley. Her team has now subpoenaed HYBE America, run by former talent manager Scooter Braun (notably, Lively’s friend Taylor Swift’s nemesis), with the first attempt to serve it set for Thursday, Deadline reports.
You may be wondering how the hell Braun is involved in this whole mess. (Or maybe you’re unsurprised that it’s spiraled out to claim yet another major pop culture name.) Braun has run the U.S. arm of Korean entertainment company HYBE since 2023, when it merged with his Ithaca Holdings in a billion-dollar deal. HYBE America also owns a majority stake in Melissa Nathan’s The Agency Group crisis PR firm, according to the trade. Followers of this case will know the name Melissa Nathan as one of the alleged masterminds behind the smear campaign Lively is accusing Baldoni of launching against her. The subpoena reportedly looks to gather any documentation HYBE America has on the work Nathan did for Baldoni.
None of the involved parties had any comment for Deadline, but Nathan—who also serves as Braun’s publicist—emphasized the fact that the subpoena was for HYBE America, not Braun personally.
Baldoni and Braun go way back—perhaps unsurprisingly, given how sprawling this whole thing has become. In 2018, the two appeared in a men-only roundtable discussing the #MeToo movement produced by Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios and the company’s CEO Jamey Heath, who’s also named as a defendant in Lively’s case. “We are all flawed,” Braun says at one point in the over-an-hour-long video. If, for some reason, you want to watch it, you can do that below:
