Look what you made her do? Blake Lively would beg to differ.
In her contentious legal battle with her It Ends With Us director and costar, Justin Baldoni, the actress has been accused by Baldoni’s lawyer of threatening her mega-famous friend Taylor Swift in an effort to get the pop star to issue a statement of support on her behalf. But Lively’s own lawyer is vehemently denying the claim.
“This is categorically false,” Lively’s attorney Mark Gottlieb said Wednesday in a statement provided to Entertainment Weekly. “We unequivocally deny all of these so-called allegations, which are cowardly sourced to supposed anonymous sources, and completely untethered from reality.”
Last Saturday, Swift’s representation at the law firm Venable received a subpoena in the highly public legal dispute between Baldoni and Lively — a move that both Swift’s and Lively’s legal teams have requested to quash in the District of Columbia, arguing that the “Cruel Summer” singer is irrelevant to the case.
Nicole Rivelli/Sony
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni in ‘It Ends With Us’
But Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, disagrees. In a letter sent to the judge Wednesday, which EW has reviewed, Freedman argued that Swift is relevant to the case, because he alleges that Lively asked Swift to delete correspondence between them, and that Gottlieb attempted to intimidate Swift into publicly backing Lively. The letter did not include evidence for Freedman’s claims, and representatives for Baldoni didn’t immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.
In Gottlieb’s statement to EW, he went on to say that “this is what we have come to expect” from Baldoni’s legal team, “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.” Gottlieb also said Lively’s team plans to “imminently file motions with the court to hold these attorneys accountable for their misconduct here.”
A representative for Swift didn’t immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.
Freedman’s letter to the judge alleged that Swift’s subpoena was justified because it “aims to obtain discovery relating to witness tampering and evidence spoliation.” He claimed that an unnamed “source who is highly likely to have reliable information” told Baldoni’s team that “Ms. Lively requested that Taylor Swift delete their text messages,” and that Gottlieb contacted one of Swift’s lawyers and “demanded that Ms. Swift release a statement of support for Ms. Lively, intimating that, if Ms. Swift refused to do so, private text messages of a personal nature in Ms. Lively’s possession would be released.”
Freedman also alleged that one of Swift’s representatives “addressed these inappropriate and apparently extortionate threats in at least one written communication transmitted to Mr. Gottlieb,” and concluded that Swift’s participation in the case could potentially uncover “evidence [of] an attempt to intimidate and coerce a percipient witness.”
Lively’s attorneys filed a response letter Wednesday afternoon requesting to strike Freedman’s letter from the record, arguing that it was “not filed with any evidentiary support of any kind, much less anything under oath,” and that the letter was an attempt “to launder scandalous and defamatory allegations about Ms. Lively” to the media.
The legal battle between Lively and Baldoni began in December, when she filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment during production of the romantic drama It Ends With Us and subsequently orchestrating a smear campaign against her. Lively later filed a lawsuit against Baldoni in New York federal court, and Baldoni countersued.
Steph Chambers/Getty
Taylor Swift and Blake Lively at the Super Bowl in 2024
A representative for Swift recently blasted the singer’s subpoena in the case, saying in a statement to EW, “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 spokesperson added, “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.”
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Swift and Lively are longtime friends. Swift is godmother to Lively’s four children with husband Ryan Reynolds, including James, who cameos on the Reputation song “Gorgeous.” Swift also named Folklore characters after Lively and Reynolds’ kids James, Betty, and Inez.
Lively and Baldoni are slated to go to trial next March.
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