Hollywood publicists on high alert amid Blake Lively's lawsuit against Justin Baldoni

The intense legal dispute between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has sent shockwaves through Hollywood's publicity community, with several top PR executives becoming embroiled in the drama.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the scandal has already altered the way publicists operate, even those not directly involved in the case.

“This will change the personal publicist game forever, 100 percent,” predicted one veteran personal publicist. “When a client says, ‘I want you to protect my reputation and get ahead of this story,’ or, ‘I don’t like that headline, can you call reporter?’ No way. If what you’re doing has ramifications for another [celebrity], you’re now going to think that you could get sued.”

Consider one of the allegations made in Baldoni's lawsuit: that in August, Leslie Sloane, Lively's publicist, persuaded a Daily Mail reporter to alter a piece. 

The reporter intended to write that Lively had been "labelled as difficult" as a result of an internal power struggle with Baldoni on their movie It Ends With Us. “You have it all wrong … the whole cast hates [Baldoni],” Sloane told the reporter via text message.

Sloane apparently succeeded in changing the narrative. However, as any reporter can confirm, it is not uncommon for a publicist to provide extra background information in an attempt to make a story more favourable to their client; rather, it is quite prevalent.

Now, Lively is suing Baldoni's crisis manager Melissa Nathan and publicist Jennifer Abel, while Sloane is one of the people Baldoni is suing.

“I feel bad for them because [some of the things they] were asked to do are things that just about any [publicist] would have done without question,” adds the veteran publicist. “But not now.”

One longtime studio publicist notes, “I think good comms execs will always have plans in place to help protect their clients, but now they have to ask themselves: If their strategy is leaked, would they still stand by it? Protecting a client and playing defense is one thing; targeting others proactively is completely another.”

Some personal publicists worry about accruing crippling legal bills in addition to the potential embarrassment and damage to their reputation that could result from a lawsuit. Generally speaking, studio publicists are shielded from lawsuits brought by their employers. Large public relations firms also need indemnity.

“I wouldn’t even pick up the phone for a client without indemnification,” said one well-known major agency representative. “Sometimes [a prospective client’s] lawyers try to red-line that out, but we don’t take them on as clients without it.”