Taylor Swift had to expect she’d one day get a subpoena to testify in Blake Lively’s legal drama with Justin Baldoni.
After all, Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, has hinted for months that he’d like to depose the superstar singer over what she knows — or what she may have been complicit in — with regard to her friend’s dealings with Baldoni during the production of their 2024 film, “It Ends With Us.”
Once the subpoena was finally issued Friday, Swift felt compelled to finally speak out publicly on the case. Her representative issued a blistering statement in which she denied she was involved in any aspect of the film’s production. The statement also accused Baldoni’s legal team of using the subpoena to create “tabloid clickbait” around the case.
But as much as Swift rebuked Baldoni’s legal tactics, others have taken the statement to mean that Swift is finally done with Lively after more than 10 years of friendship and is going on the record to create distance between them. The “Bad Blood” singer may understand that the subpoena comes from Baldoni and his attorney, but she may still blame Lively for dragging her “into this mess,” said Elaine Lui of Lainey Gossip.
The Daily Mail certainly buys this reading. The U.K. tabloid reported Sunday that Swift was left “devastated” and “completely floored” on Friday when she received the subpoena, even though she couldn’t have been too surprised. She also was spotted smiling while on a Mother’s Day outing in Philadelphia with boyfriend Travis Kelce and his family. Still, the legal move marked an escalation in the case and has apparently forced Swift to re-evaluate the friendship, according to the Daily Mail.
“Taylor has been aware that Blake has been exploiting her name for a while now, but this subpoena takes it to a whole new level,” a source told the Daily Mail.
Up until this year, Swift counted Lively among her closest confidantes, according to the Daily Mail. They live just close to each other in New York’s trendy Tribeca neighborhood, and Swift is godmother to Lively’s three daughters.
But things began to sour in December when Lively filed a lawsuit against Baldoni, her co-star and director for the film, the Daily Mail said. Lively alleged that he engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior on the set and launched a retaliatory smear campaign after she spoke up during the production.
Baldoni denied the allegations and, in January, filed a countersuit, alleging defamation and extortion against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and their publicity team. Baldoni contends that Lively and Reynolds worked to take control of the film, which he has said he spent years developing from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel about a woman surviving domestic violence.
Among Baldoni’s specific claims are that Swift and Reynolds pressured him into accepting one of Lively’s rewrites for the script, People reported. In his complaint, he described an alleged meeting at Lively and Reynolds’ Tribeca penthouse where Swift praised Lively’s script. “Baldoni understood the subtext: he needed to comply with Lively’s direction,” his complaint said.
In an alleged text exchange between Baldoni and Lively following that interaction, the director referred to feeling this pressure from “Ryan and Taylor,” but nonetheless complimented the actor on her script changes. Lively allegedly responded by comparing herself to Khaleesi from “Game of Thrones” and called her husband and Swift her “dragons.”
Swift’s statement clearly seemed designed to distance herself from any role in the production of “It Ends With Us.”
“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, according to People.
“The connection Taylor had to this film was permitting the use of one song, ‘My Tears Ricochet,’” the statement continued. “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.”
But Swift’s effort to distance herself from the film’s production stands in contrast to how Lively described her as being with her during “the whole process,” according to BuzzFeed News.
Indeed, if Swift feels “exploited” by Lively, it could be in the way that the actor frequently invoked her name while promoting the movie’s release in August 2024. At the New York screening, for example, Lively said: “I mean, honestly, she was with me on this experience the whole time, all throughout it, so she really lived this with me. She’s a person who shows up for you, and I’m so grateful to have that love and support.”
Also, contradicting the statement from Swift’s representative that she was not involved in any casting decisions, actor Isabela Ferrer said that Swift was instrumental in landing her role in “It Ends With Us.” Ferrer played the teenage version of Lively’s character, Lily Bloom. During an interview with Access Hollywood, Baldoni also said that he had showed Ferrer’s audition tape to both Lively and Swift and they both agreed that she should be cast.