A new twist has emerged in the ongoing legal drama surrounding the movie It Ends With Us. Justin Baldoni’s lawyers are now claiming that actress Blake Lively tried to pressure her close friend, Taylor Swift, into publicly supporting her — and even threatened to leak private conversations if she didn’t.
In a court filing on Wednesday, May 14, Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, said that Lively allegedly told Swift to delete text messages and pushed her to issue a public statement of support. The filing also claims that Lively’s lawyer reached out to Swift’s legal team with the same demand — and allegedly warned that if Swift refused, her private texts could be exposed.
Freedman said the information came from a reliable source and insisted that the subpoena issued to Venable, the law firm representing Swift, is necessary to the case. “The Lively Defendants’ insistence that the subpoena seeks irrelevant information is wrong,” he wrote in the letter.
Blake Lively’s attorney, Mike Gottlieb, strongly denied the accusations, calling them “categorically false.” He slammed the claims as baseless and coming from anonymous sources. “We unequivocally deny all of these so-called allegations, which are cowardly sourced and completely untethered from reality,” Gottlieb said in a statement to PEOPLE.
Gottlieb also accused Baldoni’s legal team of trying to stir controversy without proof and said they would be filing motions to hold his attorneys accountable for their actions.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, who was subpoenaed on May 9, has distanced herself from the case. Her spokesperson clarified that Swift had no part in the movie’s production, never visited the set, and didn’t work on the score or editing. Her only involvement, they said, was licensing her song My Tears Ricochet for use in the film.
Swift’s team suggested that her name is being dragged into the legal fight just to grab headlines and stir up tabloid interest.
The legal battle continues — and now it has some of Hollywood’s biggest names caught in the middle.
