The Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni lore deepens. Amidst the legal battle between the two parties who will go to trial next year, more and more names are being added to the controversy and the latest addition to it all is Ari Emanuel, the owner of talent agency, WME. The talent agency dropped Justin Baldoni as their client shortly after Blake Lively went public with her s*xual harassment complaints and filed a lawsuit against her It Ends With Us co-star.
Ari Emanuel has been pretty vocal in his support of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. He has previously been linked to Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against his former business managers and is now being roped into the latest celebrity courtroom battle.
What’s going on with Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and Ari Emanuel?
Author, socialite, and television personality, Lady Colin Campbell recently blew our minds away with a claim that will have your eyes popping out of your skull. If what she has to say about the Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni controversy is true, it could be pretty big.
According to Campbell, there is a “growing disquiet” in the entertainment industry about how Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and WME’s Ari Emanuel are “conducting themselves.” Apparently, a top-class actor working with the talent agency is thinking of leaving WME as he is “disgusted by their behavior.”
Reportedly, one of the biggest reasons behind the A-lister’s discomfort with the talent agency is the pressure that is being put on actresses Isabela Ferrer and Jenny Slate to testify against Baldoni, bordering on blackmail.
Campbell writes that both Ferrer and Slate have “declined to be named in Lively’s amended lawsuit despite overwhelming persuasion being brought to bear to allow their names to be used to shore up Lively’s claims of s*xual harassment against” Baldoni.
She has been told that “The Hollywood Reporter is being used as a club to batter those poor women into submission.” As for how THR plays a role in all of this, Campbell points out that Emanuel, who is the CEO of Endeavour, is connected to THR by Endeavour’s acquisition of their parent company, MRC.
Campbell’s post states that there is a buzz going around that Slate and Ferrer are being “publicly warned that their careers are going to sink like stones” if they don’t testify against Baldoni. Check out the entire post below:
My Hollywood bongo bongo drums are beating out a very ominous message. According to them, there is growing disquiet in Hollywood about the way @blakelively, Ryan Reynolds @VancityReynolds, @AriEmanuel of @WME are conducting themselves. “One of the world’s top actors just told…
— Lady C (@LadyColinCampb) February 20, 2025
This is clearly a lot to take in. But the question is, where does Johnny Depp fall into it all? Well, netizens have put their detective hats on and are linking Emanuel’s alleged conduct to what happened with Depp during his courtroom drama.
Johnny Depp’s $650 million loss and Hollywood’s alleged playbook
After reading about what Campbell had to say, fans were quick to state that this was a page out of the industry’s playbook which has been in use for years now. A netizen stated that something similar happened with Depp where Jay Penske and his media publications were all apparently “peddling the same narrative.”
Penske is the Chairman and CEO of Penske Media Corporation (PMC). PMC operates and owns an array of media brands, data services, and more, including Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, Deadline, and you guessed it, The Hollywood Reporter.
Check out the tweet below:
This is THE playbook. They did the same thing with Johnny Depp. Jay Penske was there with all the publications under Penske Media, owner of The Hollywood Reporter, peddling the same narrative.
— Lovely (@iLovely2404) February 20, 2025
Moreover, Emanuel was also linked to Depp’s lawsuit against his former business managers, Joel and Robert Mandel. Back in 2017, the actor charged the Mandel brothers with fraud. This is essentially where the bad press around his name began.
When asked in court about Amber Heard‘s 30th birthday party, it was revealed that he arrived late to the Eastern Columbia Building, Los Angeles, where they had been living. Why? Well, Depp stated that he was in a meeting with accountant Edward White where he learned that he had lost $650 million due to alleged financial mismanagement (via Variety).
According to Depp, his taxes remained unpaid for seventeen years, putting him in a position where he owed the IRS a hundred million dollars.
As per Vanity Fair, Depp worked with White and lawyer Adam Waldman to file a lawsuit against The Management Group owned by the Mandel Brothers. They sought $25 million in damages for negligence, fraud, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, and more.
As retaliation, TMG filed a countersuit calling him a spendthrift who refused to put a stop to his “selfish, reckless, and irresponsible lifestyle” despite the countless warnings from his manager.
Coming to where Emanuel’s name fit in this mess, rumors circulated that out of the allegedly embezzled $650 million, $400 million went to WME, aka Emanuel.
Exactly! The bad press around Johnny Depp started with him suing his managers, the Mandel brothers, who embezzled 650 mio. $ of his money.
It’s rumoured, that 400 mio. $ of that stolen money went to WME (Ari Emanuel). https://t.co/lRMZlMLWkm pic.twitter.com/3a4SbSmdkD— Audrey 🇩🇪🏴☠️👑 (@XoxoAudrey4ever) February 20, 2025
How much truth is in this statement, we cannot say. However, Emanuel’s name being mentioned in two big celebrity courtroom dramas sure seems a little bizarre. Coincidence?
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
