{"id":7853,"date":"2025-09-17T07:32:33","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T07:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/taylor-swift-deposition-neil-young-case-lil-durk-more-music-law\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T07:32:33","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T07:32:33","slug":"taylor-swift-deposition-neil-young-case-lil-durk-more-music-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/taylor-swift-deposition-neil-young-case-lil-durk-more-music-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift Deposition, Neil Young Case, Lil Durk & More Music Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tTHE BIG STORY: <\/strong>Taylor Swift was once again dragged into the never-ending legal war between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni over the movie It Ends With Us <\/em>\u2014 with a confusing back-and-forth over whether the superstar was going to be deposed.<\/p>\n

\n\tBaldoni has been claiming for months that Swift\u2019s friendship with Lively makes her a key witness in the ugly case, in which Lively alleges Baldoni sexually harassed her and then orchestrated a retaliatory smear campaign. In June, a judge granted him access to Swift and Lively\u2019s text messages as part of the document discovery process.<\/p>\n

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\n\tNow, Baldoni wants to depose Swift. In a court filing last week, his lawyers claimed the superstar had \u201cagreed to appear for deposition\u201d after her schedule opened up next month. But Swift\u2019s attorneys quickly said that wasn\u2019t what had actually happened.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy client did not agree to a deposition,\u201d Swift\u2019s attorney wrote. \u201cBut if she is forced into a deposition, we advised (after first hearing about the deposition just three days ago) that her schedule would accommodate the time required during the week of October 20.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs is so often the case in the frenetic Baldoni-Lively spectacle, it was all over quickly: A judge denied Baldoni\u2019s request for special accommodation to depose Swift. To understand why, go read the full story here, featuring access to the judge\u2019s full written ruling.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re reading The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from <\/em>Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, go subscribe here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\n\t\tOther top stories this week\u2026\t<\/h3>\n

\n\tTORT OF GOLD<\/strong> \u2013 Neil Young was hit with a lawsuit over the name of his new backing band, called The Chrome Hearts, filed by a fashion brand that has used the same name for decades. The luxury apparel company says the rock legend\u2019s new name \u2014 he usually tours and records with another group called Crazy Horse \u2014 clearly infringes its trademark rights to the name.<\/p>\n

\n\tA \u201cMEASLY\u201d DEAL<\/strong> \u2013 A class action settlement for songwriters that netted their lawyers a far larger payout is officially history. The 2019 deal, which secured a total of $53,000 for songwriters but paid their lawyers a whopping $1.7 million, was struck down in 2023 by an appeals court that said the ruling left them in \u201cdisbelief.\u201d Following that slapdown, a lower judge heeded the warning this week: He awarded the lawyers just $86,022.<\/p>\n

\n\tDUA LIPA MERCH<\/strong> \u2013 Sony merchandise venture Ceremony of Roses sued to stop bootleggers from selling knockoff Dua Lipa merch during her Radical Optimism <\/em>tour \u2014 the latest in a recent spate of anti-counterfeiting lawsuits brought by official merch retailers.<\/p>\n

\n\tLIL NAS X UPDATE<\/strong> \u2013 Weeks after the star was arrested and hit with felony charges for allegedly attacking police officers and resisting arrest while wandering naked in Los Angeles, a judge said Lil Nas had entered an inpatient treatment program: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to get specific about where he is,\u201d the judge said at a court hearing: \u201cIt\u2019s private, nobody needs to know where he is, but he is in treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDURK<\/strong> TRIAL DELAY<\/strong> \u2013 Lil Durk\u2019s trial on federal murder-for-hire charges might be postponed from October to January, after prosecutors and several of his co-defendants agreed to the change. Durk himself didn\u2019t consent to the delay, but prosecutors argued that a three-month wait won\u2019t violate his constitutional right to a speedy trial. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCOMPLETE BOONDOGGLE\u201d <\/strong>\u2013 Calvin Harris took legal action against his longtime financial adviser Thomas St. John, claiming that he duped him into investing $22.5 million in a doomed real estate project as a means \u201cto simply steal\u201d funds from the star DJ. The revelations came in court filings that revealed details of a private arbitration case that has been underway since June.<\/p>\n

\n\tCOMEY SUES DOJ<\/strong> \u2013 Maurene Comey<\/strong>, the lead prosecutor at Sean \u201cDiddy\u201d Combs\u2019 sex-trafficking trial, filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department claiming her July termination was an \u201cunlawful and unconstitutional\u201d act of political payback by President Donald Trump against her father, former FBI director James B. Comey. Maurene Comey was previously one of the lead prosecutors in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell, a top accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n

\n\tSMOKEY CASE UPDATE<\/strong> \u2013 A Los Angeles judge ruled that the former housekeepers accusing Smokey Robinson of rape can stay anonymous at this stage of the lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial in 2027. The singer\u2019s lawyers argued it\u2019s unfair that the accusers can remain Jane Does while dragging Robinson through the mud, but the judge was unmoved: \u201cFor now, this early on in this case, I don\u2019t think their identities need to be revealed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRECORD SETTLEMENT<\/strong> \u2013 Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Concord reached a settlement to end their lawsuit against the Internet Archive over the \u201cGreat 78 Project\u201d \u2014 a program to digitize thousands of old vinyl records from Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and other iconic artists. The Internet Archive claimed it was just trying to preserve the works, but the labels called it \u201cwholesale theft of generations of music.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDIDDY APPEAL<\/strong> \u2013 Making the Band<\/em> contestant Sara Rivers launched an appeal following the dismissal of her sexual assault lawsuit against Sean \u201cDiddy\u201d Combs. The move will challenge a ruling last month that dismissed the case, which accused Diddy of sexually harassing and groping Rivers during the filming of the 2000s MTV reality show, because Rivers waited too long to sue.<\/p>\n

\n\tTRIAL AVERTED<\/strong> \u2013 Trey Songz reached a settlement to end a lawsuit claiming he sexually assaulted a woman named Jauhara Jeffries at a Miami nightclub on New Year\u2019s Eve in 2018. The pair \u2014 and the nightclub itself \u2014 had been preparing to go to trial next month when the settlement was reached.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE BIG STORY: Taylor Swift was once again dragged into the never-ending legal war between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni over the movie It Ends With Us \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[294,1075,3891,153,1916,593,954,3029,3028,1094],"class_list":["post-7853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-case","tag-deposition","tag-durk","tag-law","tag-lil","tag-music","tag-neil","tag-swift","tag-taylor","tag-young"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853","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=7853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}