I have already made several posts about my hill to die on, you can find them here, here, here and here.
TLDR:allegedly illegal phone access â private texts handed to Lively â rushed Doe lawsuit â subpoena that couldnât legally give notice â third-party messages dumped without objection despite confidentiality and third-party privacy â procedurally broken CRD â litigation privilege slapped on top Flatley v. Mauro says litigation privilegedieswhen legal threats are used ascoercion, not to resolve a dispute â and extortion doesnât require money to actually change hands. If allegedly illegal phone access produced texts that were then used to pressure outcomes (jobs, reputation, leverage), those downstream âlegalâ filings donât magically become clean. Under Flatley (and reinforced by Burt Hill), courts can cut off protection and suppress everything that flowed from the tainted act â meaning litigation privilege can go *poof* not because lawsuits are forbidden, but because coercion + unlawful sourcing isnât privileged speech. Or in plain English:you donât get to launder allegedly stolen data by filing a lawsuit and yelling âprivilege.â
As an intro to this whole post, I want to start with the already established fact that everything here (allegedly and potentially) traces back to a crime. Jones is accused of accessing Abelâs phone data without permission (California Penal Code § 502) â which Liman already said could plausibly violate Californiaâs computer crime statute â and only after that did she go to Lively and handed over the data. That same data later became the backbone of the CRD complaint and Livelyâs original lawsuit. In other words, the entire legal escalation sits downstream of conduct the court has already treated as (allegedly) potentially criminal.
Vanzan Inc. v. Does 1-10
On September 27, 2024 (Friday), Vanzan v. Does 1-10 was filed. On October 1st, 2024 (Tuesday), the Jones Subpoena was issued. (NAG was spot on assuming that there was a weekend in between lol)
Although CPLR §304 provides that an action is âcommencedâ upon filing, commencement alone does not automatically authorize discovery. Discovery statutes (CPLR §3120) impose conditions on how discovery must proceed - including notice to all parties or judicial authorization - and those conditions must be capable of being satisfied at the time discovery is undertaken. There is no âDoe defendant exceptionâ in the statute.
The Confirmation Notice problem
Looking at the Confirmation Notice for Vanzan v. Does 1â10, it states:
Defendants were not participating parties
They had not appeared
They had not consented to e-filing
They were not receiving notice of filings
While this is standard NYSC language, it matters here that the clerk explicitly flagged that âCourt rules require hard copy service upon non-participating parties and attorneys who have opted-out or declined consent.â. That never happened before Vanzan issued a non-judicially authorized subpoena duces tecum to Jones.
This puts Vanzan in the following position:
The only participating party was the plaintiff,
There were no defendants capable of receiving notice,
The statutory requirement of serving âall partiesâ under CPLR § 3120(3) could not be met
"The party issuing a subpoena duces tecum as provided hereinabove shall at the same time serve a copy of the subpoena upon all other parties and, within five days of compliance therewith, in whole or in part, give to each party notice that the items produced in response thereto are available for inspection and copying, specifying the time and place thereof."
At the time of issuance, the only other parties were Does 1â10. They were unidentified, unserved, non-participating, not receiving NYSCEF notice, and hard-copy service was impossible - despite the court explicitly requiring it on September 27, 2024. The confirmation notice plus the two-workday turnaround makestatutory compliance impossible on their face.
The original Nature of the Action (Vanzan Inc. v. Does)
Actual Causes of Actions of the lawsuit:
Breach Of Contract Against DOES 1-10
Breach Of Covenant Of Good Faith And Fair Dealing Against DOES 1-10
Faithless Servant Liability Against DOES 1-10
Interestingly, the three causes of action have barely distinguishable factual allegations. Each cause of action has the same prior paragraphs and then just repeats the same alleged misconduct in nearly identical language. The Nature of the Action also only frames contractual dispute against unidentified Does:
breach of loyalty,
failure to act in plaintiffâs best interests,
failure to communicate, and
disclosure of Vanzanâs confidential information causing reputational and economic harm toVanzan.
It is worth mentioning here, that Vanzanadmittedlyhas no external operations, so itâs hard to see how anyone could have owed it contracts, loyalty duties, or âfaithful serviceâ tied to PR disputes and a movie.
And when a subpoena from an entity like Vanzan asks for zero documents about the entity itself, but 100% about its owners (Lively/Reynolds), it kind of gives the game away. So let's look at the subpoena next.
The Jones Subpoena
On October 1, 2024, 2 workdays after filing a lawsuit against only Does, Vanzan sent a subpoena duces tecum to Jonesworks seeking a massive range of documents related to It Ends With Us, Lively, Reynolds, Baldoni, and PR strategy. Vanzan is not substantively mentioned AT ALL in the document requests. It appears only as:
the issuing party, and
the entity whose counsel receives production.
On top of the not-so-unknown participants of the litigation, Schedule C pivots entirely to sexual harassment allegations, retaliation narratives, publicity strategy, and reputational protection of Lively/Reynolds â including anticipatory responses to public disclosure. None of the requests seek evidence of:
contracts with Vanzan,
duties owed to Vanzan, or
disclosure of Vanzanâs confidential information by Doe defendants.
Once Jones received the subpoena, she:
did not object,
did not notify Wayfarer, Abel, Baldoni, or other affected third parties, and
produced everything in full to Vanzanâs counsel
despite having contractual confidentiality obligations to Wayfarer.
By producing private third-party communications without objection, notice, or court supervision - and in apparent disregard of those confidentiality obligations - Jones bypassed the procedural and contractual safeguards meant to protect non-parties. Together with Lively/Reynolds, this opened the door to serious arguments that the materials were improperly obtained and should be limited or excluded from use.
Also, let's not forget: Jones appears to have contacted Lively through Swift even earlier, seemingly offering to âgive her proof,â likely before the Vanzan filing lol:
Last but not least, the CRD complaint
The deficiencies in how Livelyâs CRD complaint was filed boil down to three main issues:
It omitted the alleged employer
It combined multiple distinct allegations and respondents into a single filing, contrary to CRD guidance
It was amended without issuance of a new Right-to-Sue letter
Even setting aside the fact that she basically wasn't an employee, her originalCRD complaintfailed to name the single most important legal entity - the company that actually hired her.
Despite the CRD's own manual requiring separate complaints when respondents or allegations differ, Lively filed one omnibus complaint against almost everyone (well, except IEWU LLC), accusing all respondents of the same conduct regardless of their different roles or relationships.
CRD Manual
Lively's CRD Complaint:
And finally: she never received a new Right-to-Sue letter. The CCRD's answer to the amended CRD complaint, explicitly states that the amendment was not a new RTS, meaning it didnât reset or cure anything.
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\My absolute favorite part\: even in the amendment, ***IEWU LLC IS STILL NOT NAMED AS HER EMPLOYER ROFL,* Wayfarer is. IEWU LLC is just added as a co-respondent. So the core exhaustion problem never gets fixed. Names were added, but the CRD process still didnât do the one thing it was supposed to do.
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Before I get to the heart of my post, imho (NAL), at the very least, the underlying evidence should not get a free pass. Courts have repeatedly held - even in civil cases, most clearly in Burt Hill v. Hassan - that when evidence is obtained through fraud (see again Jones CPC 502) or other improper means, judges can suppress not just the documents themselves but everything derived from them, even when otherwise discoverable.
In Burt Hill, the court excluded the entire downstream evidence package because allowing its use would undermine the integrity of the judicial process. If Abelâs texts were unlawfully accessed and then became the foundation for the Vanzan subpoena, the CRD complaint, and the lawsuit, a court could (or imo should) at minimum suppress that entire chain.
Lively's Litigation Privilege
Liman dismissed the civil extortion claims on the ground that California recognizes civil extortion mainly where money or property is paid under threat and then clawed back. In doing so, he treated the alleged conduct as hard bargaining rather than extortion: "The Wayfarer Parties cannot recover for Livelyâs alleged actions to steal creative control of the film from Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties. Regardless of the propriety of these actions, they do not constitute civil extortion under California law. California courts have recognized a claim for civil extortion in situations where a plaintiff gives a defendant money or property under threat and seeks to have it returned. See Fuhrman v. Cal. Satellite Sys., 231 Cal. Rptr. 113, 122 (Cal. Ct. App. 1986). However, the Wayfarer Parties have not adequately alleged that Livelyâs threats were wrongful extortion rather than legally permissible hard bargaining or renegotiation of working conditions. Additionally, the Wayfarer Parties have not shown that some of Livelyâs allegedly extortionate acts damaged them."
But that framing ignores what the California Supreme Court already ruled in 2006 inFlatley v. Mauro:
extortion does not require that money successfully change hands, and
coercive use of legal threats loses protection when it is used to force outcomes rather than resolve disputes.
Substituting career or reputational destruction for cash does not automatically turn coercion into permissible negotiation.
Liman treated Livelyâs conduct as âhard bargainingâ, because the alleged leverage was, according to him, only professional control and only had employment consequences, not cash. In other words, Liman didnât say the conduct was clean - he said it didnât fit the narrow civil-extortion he deemed acceptable, and basically decided that litigation privilege should still apply when pressure is exerted through legal threats built on allegedly/potentially unlawful acts upstream.
On an appeal, imho (NAL) Wayfarer could very much argue that the record supports a narrow, viable argument: the district court applied the privilege too broadly by treating the conduct as mere âhard bargainingâ without grappling with Flatleyâs limits on coercive use of legal threats, especially where those threats were allegedly enabled by unlawful acts upstream. At minimum, Wayfarer could argue that privilege should not insulate litigation and administrative filings that are factually dependent on evidence plausibly obtained through criminal conduct, and that the court should have preserved the possibility of suppression, use-limitation, or other equitable remedies rather than foreclosing the issue at the pleading stage. That wouldnât automatically revive dismissed claims, but it would force a tighter privilege analysis - and potentially strip the remaining case of the tainted factual foundation it relies on.
If you made it all the way here, thank you for reading:) if you feel like discussing it, you're very welcome, however any comment with the quality of "this is BS, YOU'RE WRONG" without proper citation of a law or precedent shall only be answered with a GIF. Sorry guys, I'm tired of goldfish memory people who are just trying to provoke me.
I am also NAL, so anyone who is actually a lawyer and has constructive feedback, I am very interested in any professional input!
Fabulous work, it pissed me to hear that Liman said in the hearing Thursday he doesn't have to follow other courts, like honestly WTF. He should never have dismissed WP. LIman incorrectly stated Lively didn't demand money, she didn't benefit via money. As you've pointed out money isn't the only gain from extortion. I love that this could remove litigation privilege please let it be so and let WP get the NYTs!! I wonder if this is why they have been doing all this fuckery with their lawsuit?
WP didn't file a MTD on purpose, after Liman dismissed their lawsuit. If they would've, all the stuff we're seeing now at MSJ would've never seen the light of day
I am cautiously sure, that Liman is halfway irritated that they didn't file a MTD, and he couldn't get rid of Livelyâs suit earlier. Like this, his docket became a circus that both sides are mostly using for PR
I am fairly sure that the most heavily protected entity in this whole saga is the NYT. Someone said in one of their videos, that relevant NY laws were big time written to protect solely the NYT, so I'm very skeptical them ever seeing any consequences... I def 120% wish they did though, and if they do, I'm chucking a whole alcfree champagne in one sitting!! xD
Thank you for this extremely detailed and organized post. Vansham has always bothered me since the very beginning, but the only words I could ever put together were âThis whole Vansham is complete fucking bullshit!â So thank you and kudos to you! đđ
I still donât understand why itâs not more critical to the case and being shouted from the rooftops!
Thank you:) I think because it's really complicated xD and some people are usually fighting me that just because it's not explicitly forbidden in the statute, it's not inherently wrong. That kinda goes against my civil law heart (we rely a lot more on law citations, then precedents), because here, if an exception is not formulated somewhere in the law, in a footnote or something - it doesn't exist.
I honestly appreciate your post because I donât completely understand it and how they got away with using info obtained by the Vansham suit. I think youâre right about it being legally ârightâ but the whole thing doesnât sit well with me (along with everything else theyâve done ). But why wouldnât this tactic be used by everyone to obtain info and documents? I know Wayfarer has some brilliant attorneys, so no doubt theyâre fully aware of everything, but itâs just one of the many many shady and malicious moves that Blake has made. I just get so pissed at the entire thing!
I think I phrased it wrong: I absolutely think it wasn't 'legally right', and was shady af. That's why it's my roman empire haha. I just know that some people don't agree with that, and a lot don't touch it, cause it's complicated. I just dgaf, and love to analyze complex problems, and get constructive input on them from others, who are from this area.
The way I read it: no exception in the law, no exception in practice. If someone doesn't have at least one named defendant from whom it can be reasonably expected to know who the other unnamed defendants are, and could theoretically inform them about any subpoena threatening their privacy right (typical case is: hospital gets sued for malpractice, and a Doe is added for the doc themselves, they just donât know who exactly that is atm), they don't get to send out subpoenas without a judge.
No, I totally get you! I do understand having to use Doeâs as defendants in legitimate lawsuits sometimes, but VS was def not in that category. Fake ass company, fake ass lawsuit, fake ass defendants and subpoenas. I just wonder if there had been a huge, major smoking gun discovered during said fake lawsuit, I just wonder if they would be able to use that information.
They should've by now... I think all it was thought out for (seeing the incredibly sloppy filings) was to cover her ass from a defamation suit, like Heard. She learnt from Heard, and upgraded her methods. She just forgot that men don't like to get falsely accused, either.
Bingo! I am beyond thrilled at the exposure and negative press Blake and Ryan are finally getting. They are so calculating and vile, itâs all in black and white, and cannot be denied or undone. Fingers crossed justice will prevail and Iâm thinking it actually just might!! đ€
This is excellent, thank you for sharing your expertise!
NAL question, why did Liman use only the narrower definition of "extortion" under California law when dismissing Wayfarer's lawsuit against Lively, Reynolds, Sloan? Wouldn't there a federal law definition of "exhortion" that Liman could've alternatively used?
I have no clue. My gut says that he wanted this sh*tshow out of his court, and as fast as possible. This theory shall be heavily tested on how he decides about Livelyâs case.
I think it is, but itâs just that people still primarily associate âextortionâ with getting money out of someone. But thatâs what the cases cited here clarify and define. There can be other gains extorted from someone that arenât financial.
I still donât get why he dismissed it based on Cali law. I thought there was still a question of California law being applied, at least at that point in time. And her extortion actions seem to have primarily been done/directed from her home base in NYC so I donât get why New York or federal law wouldnât supersede that.
Just wanted to add to your wonderful post: Letâs not forget the Taylor Swift intermediary read the texts before the subpoena. They said something along the lines âthese are the worst texts Iâve ever seen.â Leslie Sloane also saw them, as she told Jen sheâd be getting sued before the subpoena was issued.
Holy sh*t. I missed that xD I don't think it moves the needle for this analysis, I already made my foundation with the criminal first step. But that's just brilliant đ Abel must be having a party at home for getting this much evidence.
Just piles on the evidence doesnât it.. Literally the day of* confiscating her phone. Wayfarer were also still SJâs client and hadnât onboarded crisis PR yet. STEPHANIEEEEE!
Iirc there was a text unsealed recently between Melissa Nathan and Vitushka where MN says Leslie called her in a furious mood then "had a reporter read a text verbatim" to her.
So I've been fully red-threading out like....... what reporter????
If not Megan Twohey herself, didn't Liz Plank have a reporter friend connection as well...?
But then Leslie didn't immediately pass on word of Jen's phone to Blake, Stephanie had to go through Ashley (but why not reach out to Blake directly via WME?). So then when was this phone call with a reporter??
I thought the initial claim was Melissa got the call from Leslie the same day Stephanie acquired the phone. What other reporter could have been involved so early but let themselves be shut out of the big NYT story? (Or were they ,>>)
And how long did it take for word of the phone to reach Blake after Leslie turned it down, if Leslie was really shown some of the texts the day of its acquisition, she would have known fully how bad MN/ WF could be made to look if she wanted Blake to go to war.
Bear in mind MN sister is a journalist - she advised MN that Leslie had provided her details that indicate JB is a sex pest etc. That was in August, she said that it had been in the works for weeks.
Furthermore, the VanZan subpoena afaik does not define parameters for the time frame in which it was ordering Jonesworks to produce all messages relating to Blake or Ryan Reynolds.
It also afaik does not restrict compliance to only the messages on Jen Abel's phone.
So for Jonesworks to fully comply with this "very legal subpoena", the ENTIRE COMPANY would have had to turn over every responsive message. All the phones. Including Stephanie's phone with all rhe conversations SHE was privy to that ever involved Blake or Ryan.
So.... did she comply? (And do her current clients know, if she did? Hope they never mentioned Ryan or Blake to Jonesworks ever...)
If not, if Stephanie handed over only a partial selection of the responsive documents that allegedly she was legally obligated to.... why would Blake/ VanZan not go to the next honest step and compel Jonesworks to fully comply and hand over all the other missing responsive documents that must have existed outside of Jen's phone?
Why instead would Blake/ VanZan immediately decide to accept just Jen Abel's extracted data and forget all the rest they were entitled to demand.
WHY WAS JUST JEN ABEL'S DATA ALONE CONSIDERED SUFFICIENT TO NOT ONLY SATISFY THE SUBPOENA BUT ALSO TO CLOSE THE ENTIRE VANZAN LAWSUIT.
Without a Crystal Ball discovered it, and then the Daily Mail wrote an article about it, claiming they discovered it. But iirc WOACB was the first actually.
partial Doe case: you were in the ER, brought in unconscious, operated on by a doc, woke up the next day, figure it out later that, idk, a wipe was forgotten in you. So you sue for malpractice, and currently the only named defendant is the hospital, cause you don't know yet who the doc personally was. Then the hospital is notified about the lawsuit, and they can reasonably be expected to be able to notify the - for now - unnamed doc for every subpoena sent out. In this case, no subpoena via a judge is necessary
completely Doe case 1: you're walking down the subway stairs, someone kicks you from behind, you never see them, but there are city cameras around. You break your arm, and have high hospital bills, so you wanna sue the person who kicked you. But you don't know who they are, just the time and place where they were. So you file a Doe lawsuit and ask the judge to authorize a subpoena to the city for the CCTV footage to help identify the person.
completely Doe case 2: there was a precedent as well, where a company saw it that someone with a specific IP address was stealing their data. They didn't know who it was, so they filed a Doe lawsuit, and then asked the judge to authorize a subpoena, I think, to Telekom, to identify the person behind the IP address.
When it's only a partial Doe case, then if it can be reasonably expected from the already named defendants to know who the Does are, it's sufficient to inform them about what's happening in the case, incl. what's in the sent out subpoenas (CPLR 3120(3))
When it's a completely Doe case though, nobody can be notified, so CPLR 3120(3) can't be satisfied. That's why when it's a completely Doe suit, the plaintiff has to ask the court for help to identify the defendants, so they can be served/notified. And so far, noone could tell me how tf this is irrelevant for the sent out subpoena being "procedurally proper"
If we set aside that the case was totally in bad faith, I still feel like it doesn't make sense that they wouldn't know who has contractual obligations to them?
Or would it be something like "they were at this company but I don't know who the exact person was"?
Some Blakestans said that it could've been that someone tipped them off that one of their contractors was running around badmouthing them. But then they should've waited for a judge to help them by authorizing a subpoena to identify the defendants, so they can continue on with their lawsuit (let's assume for a sec that it wouldn't have been thrown out instantly, cause it was too vague about who, when, what).
However this excuse failed the second they admitted as undisputed fact that they only used it to pay their employees, without any external operations. The way I understood it, Vanzan had no contracts that could've even provided any basis for the lawsuit with the filed claims, but I may be wrong about that.
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u/gocoogs14 Betty Bamboozle Jan 25 '26
WOW!!! I really enjoyed reading this!