Blake Lively has signed with Kelly Bush Novak, the founder of PR firm ID and the publicist to Lady Gaga and Christopher Nolan, according to Page Six. The signing comes one day after she dropped Leslie Sloane, her publicist of 20-plus years and co-defendant in the Justin Baldoni lawsuit.
A celebrity's publicist is the closest thing to a war general. When you lose the war, you do not keep the general. Sloane wasn't just a general, she was a co-defendant, which is the most intimate relationship in the business: two women whose lawyers shared a subpoena. The Baldoni fight was an 18-month brawl that, per Page Six, burned through $60 million in combined legal fees. The settlement came, no money changed hands, and the first thing the machine did was swap the brass.
The pitch from the new side is the tell. Novak's offer, per sources, was to "focus back on Lively's acting career." In PR, that sentence translates to: we will now spend two years making sure nothing about you is news. That is not a strategy, that is an anesthetic. And you do not hire a general for an anesthetic, you hire a shield. ID's roster is the proof. Nolan, Bardem, Seth Rogen, Lady Gaga, Jake Gyllenhaal. Every name on that list is someone whose public image has survived something. The pitch was not representation. It was survival.
The rest of the team stays. WME, management, the lawyers. Only the publicist gets swapped. Which means that in the post-mortem of a $60 million war, the most expensive person you can fire is the one who made the news for you, because they became the news.
YOUR TURN: Is "focus back on the acting" a reset or a surrender?
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