A dramatic development has emerged in the ongoing It Ends with Us legal battle, with claims surfacing about potential threats involving Taylor Swift‘s private messages. However, Blake Lively‘s legal representatives have firmly denied these allegations.
The situation intensified when Justin Baldoni‘s attorney Bryan Freedman recently named Swift as a key witness through a subpoena. Swift’s team quickly fired back, telling “Extra” that “This document subpoena is designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”
The plot thickened with Freedman’s latest letter to Judge Liman, addressing Venable law firm’s motion to block the subpoena.
According to Freedman’s letter, “The Wayfarer Parties anticipate that Venable’s motion to quash will be mooted in short order, as their counsel and Venable are conferring in good faith. However, the Lively Defendants’ insistence that the Subpoena seeks irrelevant information is wrong. The Subpoena aims to obtain discovery relating to witness tampering and evidence spoliation.”
The letter continues with explosive claims: “Specifically, the Wayfarer Parties’ counsel are informed and believe, based on information from a source who is highly likely to have reliable information, that (i) Ms. Lively requested that Taylor Swift delete their text messages; (ii) Michael Gottlieb of Willkie Farr, counsel for the Lively Defendants, contacted a Venable attorney who represents Ms. Swift and demanded that Ms. Swift release a statement of support for Ms. Lively, intimating that, if Ms. Swift refused to do so, private text messages of a personal nature in Ms. Lively’s possession would be released. The Wayfarer Parties’ counsel are further informed and believe that a representative of Ms. Swift addressed these inappropriate and apparently extortionate threats in at least one written communication transmitted to Mr. Gottlieb. It is those communications that the Wayfarer Parties seek to obtain by way of subpoena, as they would evidence an attempt to intimidate and coerce a percipient witness in this litigation.”
In a swift response to these allegations, Lively’s attorney Mike Gottlieb has denied the claim: “This is categorically false. We unequivocally deny all of these so-called allegations, which are cowardly sourced to supposed anonymous sources, and completely untethered from reality. 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.”
When Swift’s team addressed the subpoena last week, they made their position crystal clear, stating: “Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film, she did not even see ‘It Ends with Us’ until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history.”
Swift’s representatives further emphasized, “The connection Taylor had to this film was permitting the use of one song, ‘My Tears Ricochet.’ Given that her involvement was licensing a song for the film, which 19 other artists also did, this document subpoena is designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”
Gottlieb recently addressed speculation about potential subpoenas for Swift and Hugh Jackman, citing their close relationships with Blake and Ryan Reynolds.
Speaking to People magazine, Gottlieb stated, “It’s completely unclear what claims or defenses in the case any of these celebrities… have any relevance to at all. This is a case about what happened to Blake Lively when she raised claims of sexual harassment on the set. It’s not a case about how songs were chosen for the movie. It’s not a case about fictional Marvel characters in ‘Deadpool’ movies.”
He continued, “You have to ask the question, then, why are these people being subpoenaed? Do they have any actual relevance to the case at hand? You can’t just go around subpoenaing people because they’re famous and you think it will generate a bunch of headlines. And the federal courts don’t tolerate that kind of behavior.”
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