Reading Time: 4 minutes
As it turns out, the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni legal saga actually can get crazier.
And it’s all because of Taylor Swift.
The actress and the singer have been close friends for years, of course, but that friendship has been in an unexpected spotlight over the past few months due to Lively ongoing lawsuit battle with It Ends With Us co-star Baldoni.
(Lively has accused Baldoni of sexual harassment on the set of that movie, while Baldoni has countered with documentation that claims Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and their publicity team conspired to defame and extort him.)
Cut to May 14 and a new twist in this legal fight.
Five days after Swift was subpoenaed to testify in the upcoming trial between Lively and Baldoni — because the latter alleges that the artist was present for a meeting at the former’s penthouse, during which Baldoni felt pressured to accept certain script changes — Baldoni’s lawyer said that Lively “demanded that Ms. Swift release a statement of support for Ms. Lively.”
In this new court filing, Baldoni’s attorney cites a “source who is highly likely to have reliable information” and this information centers on Lively having asked Swift to delete text message related, we presume, to Baldoni’s case against the movie star.
Another allegation included in the letter?
That Lively’s lawyer contacted Swift’s lawyer “and demanded that Ms. Swift release a statement of support for Ms. Lively” — while also “intimating that if Ms. Swift refused to do so, private text messages of a personal nature in Ms. Lively’s possession would be released.”
Yes, this is a way of alleging that Blake Lively has tried to blackmail Taylor Swift with the public unveiling of seemingly embarrassing text messages if Swift does NOT come out to the world and support her friend.
In a scathing response, Lively attorney Michael Gottlieb slammed the accusation on Wednesday as “categorically false” and “cowardly sourced to supposed anonymous sources, and completely untethered from reality.”
He continued:
“This is what we have come to expect from the Wayfarer parties’ lawyers, who appear to love nothing more than shooting first, without any evidence, and with no care for the people they are harming in the process.
“We will imminently file motions with the court to hold these attorneys accountable for their misconduct here.”
Lively’s camp went on to file a letter of its own to Judge Liman, asking for Baldoni’s aforementioned accusation to be struck from the record.
“On behalf of our client, Blake Lively, we respectfully move to strike the letter signed by Mr. Bryan Freedman and filed earlier today,” reads this official note.
“That letter, which was not filed with any evidentiary support of any kind, much less anything under oath, falsely accuses Ms. Lively, and her counsel, of engaging in ‘witness tampering and evidence spoliation’ based on an undisclosed anonymous source.
“It should be unnecessary to respond to anonymously sourced, baseless, allegations recklessly leveled without any supporting evidence. It is worth stating for the record, however, that each of the allegations in the Freedman Letter is unequivocally and demonstrably false.
“As a legal matter, the Freedman Letter is improper. It does not seek any form of relief, is irrelevant to any motion currently pending before the Court, and serves no legitimate purpose. It is not useful to the Court in any respect.”
From what we’ve heard, Lively’s relationship with Swift has been impacted by these back-and-forth lawsuits and allegations.
Back in January, as par tof Baldoni’s defamation lawsuit, the actor included texts between Lively and Baldoni in which Lively appears to refer to Swift as “one of her dragons.”
Hence why his legal team is trying to drag the wildly popular into this legal mess.
After news broke of the subpoena, a representative for Swift denied any involvement in Lively and Baldoni’s film It Ends with Us, from which the litigation between them has stemmed.
This statement reads as follows:
“Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film, she did not even see ‘It Ends With Us’ until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history.
“Given that her involvement was licensing a song for the film, which 19 other artists also did, this document subpoena is designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”
