Justin Baldoni's lawyer claims Blake Lively threatened to leak Taylor Swift's texts if she won't show public support in legal saga
Justin Baldoni's lawyer claimed that Blake Lively had threatened Taylor Swift to leak the pop star's private messages if she wouldn't publicly support her in the legal saga between the It Ends with Us stars.
PEOPLE Magazine reported that Bryan Freedman, in a letter to the judge, claimed receiving a tip from a "source who is highly likely to have reliable information."
The source said Lively had asked Swift to delete text messages.
Freedman also wrote that Lively's lawyer contacted Swift's, "and demanded that Ms. Swift release a statement of support for Ms. Lively," and "intimating that if Ms. Swift refused to do so, private text messages of a personal nature in Ms. Lively's possession would be released."
According to him, Swift's lawyer responded to Lively's camp, and "addressed these inappropriate and apparently extortionate threats."
"It is those communications that the Wayfarer Parties seek to obtain" as potential evidence of 'an attempt to intimidate and coerce a percipient witness in this litigation,'" Freedman said, referring to the legal team representing Baldoni.
Lively's lawyer Mike Gottlieb, meanwhile, called Freedman's claim "categorically false."
"We unequivocally deny all of these so-called allegations, which are cowardly sourced to supposed anonymous sources, and completely untethered from reality," Gottlieb said. "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," he added.
Freedman made the claim after Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, pushed back on the subpoena issued to Swift to serve as a witness by Baldoni's legal team.
Swift had been issued a subpoena amid allegations that she pressured Baldoni into accepting one of Lively's rewrites for It Ends With Us.
Swift's lawyer, meanwhile, said she didn't have any active participation in the film other than the use of her song, my tears ricochet, adding that the subpoena was used "to draw public interest" as a "tabloid clickbait."
Ongoing legal battle
The legal saga of Lively and Baldoni stemmed from the former filing a sexual harassment complaint against the latter and Jamey Heath of Wayfarer Studios, the producer of It Ends with Us. Lively also accused them of running a smear campaign against her.
In her complaint, Lively accused Baldoni and Heath of telling her about their past sexual relationships and "previous porn addiction." Heath also allegedly showed Lively a video of his wife naked and giving birth. Baldoni and Heath likewise supposedly entered Lively's makeup trailer without permission, "including when she was breastfeeding her infant child." Lively also recalled Baldoni claiming he could communicate with the dead, including her father, Ernie Lively. She found it "off-putting and violative."
The New York Times then published a report titled 'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine. The report used excerpts from alleged text messages and emails that Lively obtained through a subpoena and detailed the work of crisis management firm TAG PR for Baldoni, including allegedly planting negative stories in the media.
Baldoni's camp has called the accusations in the report "categorically false."
Later, Baldoni's camp released a series of video takes during the production of It Ends with Us in an attempt to debunk Lively's sexual harassment allegations against him. Lively and Reynolds, in turn, requested a gag order.
On Feb. 3, Baldoni launched a website containing two documents: his $400 million 224-page amended complaint against Lively and Reynolds and a 168-page "timeline of relevant events," which included a compilation of screenshots as an additional exhibit to his amended complaint. It came two days before their first court hearing.
The trial for the "Lively v. Wayfarer Studios et al." case is scheduled for March 2026.
