{"id":10328,"date":"2026-04-18T01:33:49","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/taylor-swift-in-blake-lively-justin-baldoni-trial-will-she-factor-in\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T01:33:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:33:49","slug":"taylor-swift-in-blake-lively-justin-baldoni-trial-will-she-factor-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/taylor-swift-in-blake-lively-justin-baldoni-trial-will-she-factor-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift in Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni Trial: Will She Factor in?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tFor as long as It Ends With Us <\/em>co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have been battling in court, Taylor Swift\u2019s name has been linked to the case. Baldoni\u2019s camp said Lively used her close friend Swift as a \u201cdragon\u201d to wrest control of the movie. Lively accused Baldoni of maliciously planting media stories about her relationship with the pop superstar.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crux of the dispute is Lively\u2019s 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\u2019s bad-faith efforts to seize creative control of the film and ruin his reputation.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThe 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\u2019s name popping up in court filings and getting spun into endless tabloid fodder, we\u2019re finally getting a sense of how big a role the singer will actually <\/em>play in the trial.<\/p>\n

\n\tSwift is not a witness, and she was never deposed (despite the Baldoni team\u2019s 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\u2019s husband Ryan Reynolds, It Ends With Us <\/em>supporting actress Jenny Slate and music mogul Scooter Braun<\/strong>, who has close ties to Baldoni\u2019s lead publicist, Melissa Nathan<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most concrete way Swift could be part of the evidence is via her text messages with Lively, which Baldoni\u2019s team obtained from Lively after initially trying to subpoena the singer herself. Lively\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese communications, included in the Baldoni exhibit list and posted to the court docket earlier this year, include Swift agreeing to talk up Lively\u2019s version of a script rewrite to Baldoni (\u201cI\u2019ll do anything for you !!\u201d) and celebrating the use of her hit Folklore<\/em> track \u201cMy Tears Ricochet\u201d in the movie\u2019s trailer.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cIf Justin was strategic he would be like no Taylor Swift in the trailer because that gives you more power over the film, that\u2019s your ally not his,\u201d Swift wrote to Lively in April 2024. Lively responded, \u201cGet yourself a best friend who thinks like the actual Roman Empire.\u201d Swift replied, \u201cHis misogyny runs so deep he thinks women are incapable of winning chess matches or making long game power plays.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOther messages show Swift supporting Lively\u2019s legal action against Baldoni. Before the case was filed, she wrote, \u201cI think this b\u2014- knows something is coming because he\u2019s gotten out his tiny violin,\u201d and, \u201cHe needs to be beaten by his OWN words\u2026it\u2019s the only way to beat liars and hypocrites.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLively\u2019s camp has consistently maintained that Swift had no meaningful involvement in It Ends With Us <\/em>and is only now being invoked by Baldoni for clout. Swift\u2019s reps said the same when she was subpoenaed last year, writing in a statement that the maneuver was \u201cdesigned to use Taylor Swift\u2019s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLawyers for Lively say this is not a new strategy for Baldoni\u2019s team. A key piece of evidence for them is a summer 2024 strategy document authored by Baldoni\u2019s publicists, which recommends \u201cplanting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in BL\u2019s circle, like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to \u2018bully\u2019 into getting what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tAlong these lines, Lively\u2019s lawyers plan to bring up Swift\u2019s name at trial in order to show that Baldoni\u2019s team was really <\/em>the one to leverage the singer\u2019s superstardom for its own ends. In addition to the scenario planning document, their exhibit list includes a 2024 story in the Daily Mail <\/em>titled, \u201cHow Blake Lively COPIED best friend Taylor Swift to promote It Ends With<\/em> Us<\/em> before turning to singer to help crisis manage backlash and Justin Baldoni drama,\u201d as well as documents that trace the origin of this article.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to Lively\u2019s team, Baldoni\u2019s publicists urged a Daily Mail <\/em>reporter to run this story instead of a different article about human resources complaints during the filming of It Ends With Us<\/em>. In one piece of evidence, the reporter was encouraged to write about how Lively was \u201cemulating her best friend Taylor with the charm bracelets and s\u2014.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFinally, Swift and her music might come up in the trial as it pertains to the process of incorporating the \u201cMy Tears Ricochet\u201d synch for the trailer of It Ends With Us<\/em>. The messages on Baldoni\u2019s witness list reference this; when discussing the synch with Lively in 2024, Swift wrote, \u201cI fire off those texts to Austin\u201d \u2014 presumably a reference to her brother, Austin Swift<\/strong>, who manages the singer\u2019s licensing operations.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf Baldoni\u2019s team argues in court that the \u201cMy Tears Ricochet\u201d synch was part of Blake\u2019s plot to weaponize her friendship with Swift, Lively\u2019s lawyers might respond with evidence showing that the idea to use the song came from the movie\u2019s 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\u2019s profile.<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
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For as long as It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have been battling in court, Taylor Swift\u2019s name has been linked to the case. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4556,4554,7754,4555,3029,3028,342],"class_list":["post-10328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-baldoni","tag-blake","tag-factor","tag-livelyjustin","tag-swift","tag-taylor","tag-trial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}