For as long as It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have been battling in court, Taylor Swift’s name has been linked to the case. Baldoni’s camp said Lively used her close friend Swift as a “dragon” to wrest control of the movie. Lively accused Baldoni of maliciously planting media stories about her relationship with the pop superstar.
The crux of the dispute is Lively’s allegation that Baldoni and his associates orchestrated a PR smear campaign in retaliation for her complaints that Baldoni, both the co-star and director of the August 2024 film, sexually harassed her on set. Baldoni initially countersued Lively for defamation, among other things, but all his claims were dismissed. Now fully in defense mode, Baldoni still maintains that there was zero harassment and that his media strategy was merely a response to Lively’s bad-faith efforts to seize creative control of the film and ruin his reputation.
The lawsuit is finally headed to trial next month for a New York jury to decide which version of events is true. This means that after more than a year of Swift’s name popping up in court filings and getting spun into endless tabloid fodder, we’re finally getting a sense of how big a role the singer will actually play in the trial.
Swift is not a witness, and she was never deposed (despite the Baldoni team’s efforts). Her name is, however, included on a long list of individuals who might come up during the testimony, along with dozens of others, including Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds, It Ends With Us supporting actress Jenny Slate and music mogul Scooter Braun, who has close ties to Baldoni’s lead publicist, Melissa Nathan.
The most concrete way Swift could be part of the evidence is via her text messages with Lively, which Baldoni’s team obtained from Lively after initially trying to subpoena the singer herself. Lively’s lawyers have indicated that they plan to object to this evidence as irrelevant, but the Baldoni camp will likely argue that the messages show that Lively tried to leverage her friendship with Swift against him.
These communications, included in the Baldoni exhibit list and posted to the court docket earlier this year, include Swift agreeing to talk up Lively’s version of a script rewrite to Baldoni (“I’ll do anything for you !!”) and celebrating the use of her hit Folklore track “My Tears Ricochet” in the movie’s trailer.
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“If Justin was strategic he would be like no Taylor Swift in the trailer because that gives you more power over the film, that’s your ally not his,” Swift wrote to Lively in April 2024. Lively responded, “Get yourself a best friend who thinks like the actual Roman Empire.” Swift replied, “His misogyny runs so deep he thinks women are incapable of winning chess matches or making long game power plays.”
Other messages show Swift supporting Lively’s legal action against Baldoni. Before the case was filed, she wrote, “I think this b—- knows something is coming because he’s gotten out his tiny violin,” and, “He needs to be beaten by his OWN words…it’s the only way to beat liars and hypocrites.”
Lively’s camp has consistently maintained that Swift had no meaningful involvement in It Ends With Us and is only now being invoked by Baldoni for clout. Swift’s reps said the same when she was subpoenaed last year, writing in a statement that the maneuver was “designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”
Lawyers for Lively say this is not a new strategy for Baldoni’s team. A key piece of evidence for them is a summer 2024 strategy document authored by Baldoni’s publicists, which recommends “planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in BL’s circle, like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.”
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Along these lines, Lively’s lawyers plan to bring up Swift’s name at trial in order to show that Baldoni’s team was really the one to leverage the singer’s superstardom for its own ends. In addition to the scenario planning document, their exhibit list includes a 2024 story in the Daily Mail titled, “How Blake Lively COPIED best friend Taylor Swift to promote It Ends With Us before turning to singer to help crisis manage backlash and Justin Baldoni drama,” as well as documents that trace the origin of this article.
According to Lively’s team, Baldoni’s publicists urged a Daily Mail reporter to run this story instead of a different article about human resources complaints during the filming of It Ends With Us. In one piece of evidence, the reporter was encouraged to write about how Lively was “emulating her best friend Taylor with the charm bracelets and s—.”
Finally, Swift and her music might come up in the trial as it pertains to the process of incorporating the “My Tears Ricochet” synch for the trailer of It Ends With Us. The messages on Baldoni’s witness list reference this; when discussing the synch with Lively in 2024, Swift wrote, “I fire off those texts to Austin” — presumably a reference to her brother, Austin Swift, who manages the singer’s licensing operations.
If Baldoni’s team argues in court that the “My Tears Ricochet” synch was part of Blake’s plot to weaponize her friendship with Swift, Lively’s lawyers might respond with evidence showing that the idea to use the song came from the movie’s producers and studio, not her. Lively has also obtained evidence showing that the trailer was viewed as a major success by everyone, drawing record viewership and raising the film’s profile.
