A former publicist for actor and director Justin Baldoni filed a lawsuit on Tuesday that adds a new dimension to an alleged campaign to undermine actor Blake Lively. The publicist, Stephanie Jones, says she was forced out of representing Baldoni and his film studio amid concerns that Lively would go public with accusations of misconduct against him.

Jones’ lawsuit, filed in New York and alleging breach of contract, follows a separate legal complaint in California on Saturday by Lively. The actor asserted that Baldoni, his film studio, Wayfarer, and their public relations representatives retaliated against her after she raised her misconduct allegations during the filming of It Ends With Us.

Lively’s legal complaint included excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and emails she had obtained through a subpoena. Jones’ lawsuit reveals that those messages came from a company phone used by one of her former employees, Jennifer Abel, who was among those Lively accused of helping to orchestrate a smear campaign against her.

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Jones said she fired Abel earlier this year after discovering that Abel had been stealing documents from her firm as she prepared to start her own business. According to the lawsuit, the phone was voluntarily returned to Jones’ company, Jonesworks, “in the presence of an employment lawyer” and the messages and emails “were forensically extracted directly from that company phone” and “have been preserved in their original state”.

Abel had been the Jonesworks’ point person for Baldoni and Wayfarer, and the messages show that she worked closely with Melissa Nathan, a crisis communications manager, as soon as Wayfarer and Baldoni hired her. The lawsuit says that Jones saw the messages from the phone after she fired Abel and Wayfarer stopped working with Jonesworks.

Jones says in the lawsuit that in reviewing the messages, she discovered that her former employee had been involved in a retaliation campaign against Lively. Abel has since opened her own firm and has continued working for Wayfarer.

As the release of It Ends With Us neared, Baldoni began to fear that allegations about his on-set misbehavior would come out, the lawsuit says. The suit says that without Jones’ knowledge or approval, and with encouragement from Jamey Heath, another head of Wayfarer, Nathan and Abel began “to formulate a no-holds-barred strategy to discredit and suppress any potential revelations about Baldoni’s on-set behaviour”. The suit says they launched “a smear campaign against Lively”.