A social media and public relations specialist is seeking answers from Blake Lively after becoming entangled in the widening legal fallout surrounding It Ends With Us.
Jed Wallace, the PR figure named in Lively’s high-profile administrative complaint in 2024, is now pushing to question the actress under oath as she seeks to recover legal fees from him.
Court documents obtained by The Daily Mail show Wallace wants Lively to sit for a deposition before he is required to pay the $800,000 in attorneys’ fees she has requested.
Wallace previously sued Lively, 38, for defamation in Texas after he was included in her initial complaint but was not named in the later federal complaint she filed.
The defamation case was ultimately dismissed by a judge on “personal jurisdiction grounds,” according to the documents. Lively later moved to recoup $800,000 in legal fees from Wallace.
Wallace has now asked the court to allow him to question Lively about the allegations she made against him, including whether she knew the claims were false, whether she “acted with reckless disregard of the truth or with ill will,” or whether she held a “good-faith belief” in the accusations, the court filings state.
Blake Lively is facing another hurdle as the fallout from her It Ends With Us legal ordeal continues
“The central question is Lively’s state of mind—whether she (i) knew her allegations were false; (ii) had a good-faith belief in the truth of her statements about Respondents specifically, or (iii) acted with reckless disregard of the truth or (iv) with ill will,” the documents state.
‘Lively is the best person to testify about her subjective knowledge and intent regarding the Wallace Parties at the time she made the challenged statements. Because malice is an inherently subjective inquiry, other evidence such as documents or third-party testimony is subordinate to Lively’s own testimony about what she knew and believed when she falsely accused the Wallace Parties of sexual harassment.’
The court documents claim Lively was scheduled to appear at a deposition over the matter on August 4 but didn’t show up, with her attorneys informing Wallace’s team the deposition notice had ‘no legal basis’ and was ‘null and void.’
In a statement obtained by The Daily Mail, Lively’s lawyers hit back at his ‘desperate, meritless’ filing and noted she had already sat for a deposition.
‘Jed Wallace already took Ms. Lively’s deposition. His case was dismissed. Ms. Lively won.
‘This is yet another desperate, meritless attempt by Wallace to go after Ms. Lively out of fear that he may face the same kind of fee award that Ms. Lively won from Justin Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios in New York.’
Wallace filed his lawsuit against Lively last year, claiming he was dragged into the actress’s bitter legal battle with Justin Baldoni after she listed him as a defendant in her administrative complaint filed against her co-star in December 2024.
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Her filing described Wallace as a Texas-based contractor ‘who weaponized a digital army’ to help ‘create, seed, and promote’ social media content attacking her and defending Baldoni.
Lawyers for Lively told The Daily Mail the actress had already sat for a deposition as they hit back at his ‘desperate, meritless’ filing
Described as a ‘precursor to a lawsuit’, the document was attached to the original civil rights complaint that Lively filed in California on December 20 to kick off legal hostilities against her It Ends with Us co-star.
When the actress’s actual federal complaint was filed 11 days later, neither Wallace nor his Street Relations crisis management firm were among those accused, his lawyers say.
But it was too late to stop media outlets wrongly naming him and his company as defendants as they relied on the version Lively’s team had already distributed to the press.
‘Lively or her agents provided the Precursor to various media entities for out-of-court republication and, because of the allegations contained therein, it made ‘headlines around the world’ according to Elle Magazine which linked to the Precursor document as did many other media,’ Wallace says in a complaint filed in Texas federal court Tuesday.
Wallace filed his lawsuit against Lively last year, claiming he was dragged into the actress’s bitter legal battle with Justin Baldoni after she listed him as a defendant in her administrative complaint filed against her co-star in December 2024
‘The Precursor was followed on or about December 31, 2024, by a ‘formal suit’ in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
‘Wallace and Street were widely reported to be defendants in the Formal Lawsuit although they were not, the confusion having been sown by the Precursor.’
The mix-up meant Texas-based Wallace was wrongly accused of harassment and retaliation against Lively by the media, his suit filed in Federal court states.
He sued for emotional harm and loss of business and asking for damages exceeding $1,000,000, but a judge ultimately dismissed it later that year on account of a lack of personal jurisdiction, according to TMZ.
