If World War III Doesn’t Blow Up the World, the ‘It Ends With Us’ Lawsuits Might
This week, Justin Baldoni's lawyer claimed Blake Lively tried to extort Taylor Swift into publicly supporting her, and it feels like this legal mess is a collapsing star on the brink of explosion.
We’re still 10 months out from Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni‘s March 2026 trial, and I sincerely don’t know if we’re going to make it. I fear the tabloid drama is just going to get bigger and spicier, sucking everything into its orbit until it collapses under its own weight, swallowing us all into a dark, eternal void.
If you’ve successfully cleansed your brain of the last six months, Lively sued Baldoni in December for sexual harassment on the It Ends With Us set, and Baldoni retaliated with a $400 million defamation suit against Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the New York Times, while claiming that Lively hijacked the film. Taylor Swift was named in Baldoni’s lawsuit, which included a text from Lively to Baldoni where she refers to Swift and Reynolds as “her dragons.” Lively and Swift haven’t been spotted together in public since, and Travis Kelceunfollowed Reynolds on Instagram. Soooo, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not Swift and Lively are still besties.
Now, Baldoni’s lawyer is accusing Lively of trying to blackmail Swift into publicly supporting her.
On Wednesday, Bryan Freedman—who, for what it’s worth, argued Baldoni’s side on The Megyn Kelly Show, of all fucking places—wrote a letter to Judge Lewis J. Liman, claiming that a “source who is highly likely to have reliable information” told him that Lively’s lawyer made “extortionate threats” to Swift’s lawyers. This made me laugh because that’s also what I say when I’m trying to gossip, but my informant is a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.
Lively’s lawyer quickly called the allegations “categorically false” and “completely untethered from reality.” They also asked the judge to toss the letter out. But Freedman doubled down on Thursday and filed a signed affidavit further claiming he had an hour-long call with someone “very closely linked to Taylor Swift” on February 14. But he still didn’t name the source.
According to the affidavit, the anonymous source told Freedman that Lively threatened to release “10 years” of private texts with Swift if she didn’t make a statement after Lively missed the Super Bowl. She also allegedly asked Swift to delete the past “four or five months” of their texts.
“Another day, another bogus filing designed for clickbait,” Lively’s lawyer said in a statement to People following Freedman’s affidavit. “We reiterate our unequivocal denial.” Judge Liman ultimately granted the request to throw out the letter, calling it “improper” and “irrelevant to any issue before this Court.”
This follows news last week that Swift was subpoenaed by Baldoni’s team, which I guess is because they believe her testimony would support their argument that Lively is a power-hungry set hijacker. On Friday, May 9, Swift’s reps released a statement accusing Baldoni’s team of using her name “to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.” Honestly, if there’s anything to know about Swift, it’s that, for her Vogue “73 Questions” interview in 2016, when the outlet asked what advice she has for someone who wants to be a singer, she responded, “Get a good lawyer.”
Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian, and Lauren Sánchez hung out in Paris. I think I had a nightmare like this once. [People]
