Taylor Swift & Blake Lively’s Relationship Takes a Dramatic Turn After Justin Baldoni Accused the Actress of Blackmailing Her Friend
A new development on Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni‘s case has to do with pop star Taylor Swift again. Lawyers for Baldoni claimed that Lively had brought her friend to express support for her on purpose.
Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, claims that Taylor Swift was threatened to support Blake Lively through a “source who is highly likely to have reliable information.” Allegedly, Lively requested that Swift delete their text messages. They also claimed that Lively’s attorney, Michael Gottlieb, allegedly contacted one of Venable’s attorneys, who has been a longtime legal representative of Swift, and demanded that she release a “statement of support” for Lively.
Gottlieb immediately released a statement responding to the claims. “This is categorically false,” Gottlieb writes. “We unequivocally deny all of these so-called allegations, which are cowardly sourced to supposed anonymous sources, and completely untethered from reality. 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.”
The attorney added that his team “will imminently file motions with the court to hold these attorneys accountable for their misconduct here.”
Later, Gottlieb filed a letter to Judge Lewis J. Liman to strike down Freedman’s “unnecessary, improper, and abusive” filing from the docket.
“It should be unnecessary to respond to anonymously sourced, baseless allegations recklessly leveled without any supporting evidence,” the lawyers continued. “It is worth stating for the record, however, that each of the allegations in the Freedman letter is unequivocally and demonstrably false.”
Swift’s camp recently criticized Baldoni’s request to subpoena the “Lover” artist. “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,” the statement said.
Her rep continued, “The connection Taylor had to this film was permitting the use of one song, ‘My Tears Ricochet.’ 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.”
Venable filed a motion on May 12 seeking to cancel the subpoena, which Lively and Reynolds’ legal team joined in on the filing.
The tensions arose after text messages emerged in Justin Baldoni’s countersuit against Lively, where the actress allegedly referred to Swift as one of her “dragons” alongside husband Ryan Reynolds. After meeting with Justin Baldoni to discuss a change in the film, Lively texted the director that reads “If you ever get around to watching Game of Thrones you’ll appreciate that I’m Khaleesi and, like her, I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually for better. Because my dragons also protect those I fight for. So really we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. You will too, I can promise you.”
Sources close to Swift initially told TMZ she was “royally pissed off” about being characterized this way, especially since she “never had a dog in the fight.
However, it doesn’t seem like there’s bad blood between the close friends. “Blake knew she and Taylor would come back from this at some point and that their friendship wasn’t done for good,” a source told People at the time. “Taylor was really hurt by this situation, so she’s relieved they were able to recover from this and put it all behind them because it wasn’t something she took lightly.”
