Justin Baldoni's Crisis PR Firm Tied to Exposure of Consumer Safety Advocate

The actor worked with an executive at a vitamin company that appears to have hired the same agency at the center of the Hollywood exposé scandal.

Tamara Rubin is an Oregon-based consumer product safety advocate who runs Lead Safe Mama, a popular online resource that focuses on the risks of exposure. He is baffled that he has apparently found himself the target of the same Hollywood smear machine that is said to specialize in entertainment industry actors, from a movie producer and former child star to a music mogul and an opera actress. As he says, "One thing is not like another."

In February, he told The Hollywood Reporter that he discovered a defamatory website about him in October 2024, as well as defamatory edits to his Wikipedia page. He didn't know who was behind them. "It's a game of clues," he said at the time. "The people who own these companies we call them are trying to discredit us." Rubin explained that the attacks have "significantly affected my donation-based business. It's also intruding on my personal life," explaining that "I'm behind on my mortgage and car payments, and my family is struggling with food shortages. It's exhausting to have a target on my back."

Blake Lively signed a lawsuit with powerful journalist Kelly Bush Novak after Justin Baldoni settled.

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In September, Rubin believes he found out who was secretly targeting him: sugar-free vitamin brand Haya Health. The company's name surfaced as a TAG PR client, with a TAG employee referring to work on a "crisis scenario plan" in October 2024, evidence that has since surfaced in an ongoing defamation lawsuit filed by Stephanie Jones against TAG President Melissa Nathan and other defendants.

Rubin reported on Lead Safe Mama last month — in September 2024 — that HIA products tested positive in a lab for lead and other heavy metals. The company, in turn, challenged his findings. "It's a relief to finally know, to have closure," Rubin told THR in September. "It's also appalling, the lengths a children's vitamin company will go to discredit me." At the time, Haya was in the midst of a deal with another nutritional supplement company that was set to close in December 2024 for $260 million. They were trying to protect the bottom line.

Rubin says he has since realized what he thinks is the connection between Haya and Hollywood. It turns out that Benita Litt, the company's chief social officer and also the wife of Hiya's founder and CEO, once served on the board of actor-director Justin Baldoni's nonprofit, aka The Wayfarer Foundation, which describes itself as "a Baha'i-speak organization." (Baldoni and Wayfarer's backer Steve Sarowitz are prominent adherents of this religion.)

August 2024 Baldwinder hires TAG for Nathan's crisis management services amid the troubles surrounding It Ends With Us with Blake Lively, just before the start of Robin's conflict with Haya. Court documents in that case — in which Lively accused Nathan, Baldoni and other defendants of orchestrating a smear campaign against him — included Baldoni's email advice to Lively from a nutritionist. Among Haya's recommendations were: "This is a great chewable multivitamin that's super clean and great for kids."

Litt, a lawyer turned entrepreneur, is known for his longtime friendship with Meghan Markle. Harper's Bazaar wrote about the Leith family's participation in the royal wedding of the Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry.

Neither Baldoni nor Haya responded to THR's questions. Nathan did not respond to requests for comment about his ongoing legal cases.

Rubin says that when she first learned of the attacks, she felt a bit like Karen Silkwood, the real-life nuclear lab technician and whistleblower played by Meryl Streep in the 1983 tragedy Silkwood. "Now with this Baldoni thing, I'm telling my friends it's as absurd as a Coen Brothers movie," he says.