Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

The legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni continues to, somehow, get even messier. Both parties are suing each other about the production and rollout of It Ends With Us, which came out last year — she’s saying he sexually harassed her on set; he’s saying she hijacked the movie from him and then libeled him in the press. Last week, after months of speculation that Lively’s (former?) best friend Taylor Swift had been mentioned in one of Baldoni’s suits, the singer was subpoenaed by Baldoni’s team as an alleged witness to Lively’s purported intimidation tactics. Now, Baldoni’s lawyer is accusing Lively of trying to blackmail Swift.

Following an attempt from Lively’s team to quash the Swift subpoena, Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, filed a letter to the court. In the letter, which was reviewed by the Cut, Freedman denied Lively’s allegation that he’s seeking “irrelevant information” and doubled down, accusing Lively of “witness tampering and evidence spoliation.” Citing an anonymous source who is, he claims, “highly likely to have reliable information,” Freedman wrote that his team believes Lively used “extortionate threats” to try to pressure Swift into deleting their text messages. He alleged that Michael Gottlieb, Lively’s lawyer, contacted one of Swift’s lawyers and “demanded” she make a statement of support. According to Freedman, Gottlieb intimated that if Swift didn’t comply, “private text messages of a personal nature in Ms. Lively’s possession would be released.”

A few hours later, one of Lively’s lawyers, Esra Hudson, filed a letter of her own, slamming Freedman for his “anonymously sourced, baseless allegations recklessly leveled without any supporting evidence.” (This letter was also reviewed by the Cut.) She stated that all of Freedman’s accusations are “unequivocally and demonstrably false,” and says that the purpose of his letter had nothing to do with their legal proceedings but was meant to “launder scandalous and defamatory allegations about Ms. Lively and opposing counsel into the press.” Hudson noted that “within minutes” of Freedman’s letter appearing on the court docket, media outlets began writing it up, with at least one publication asserting his claims “as fact.”

On Thursday, Freedman insisted in a signed affidavit that he was receiving his information from someone “very closely linked to Taylor Swift.” This mystery person allegedly told Freedman that Lively’s lawyer “requested, on Ms. Lively’s behalf, that Taylor Swift make a social media statement in support of Ms. Lively given her absence from the Super Bowl that year, and stated that if Ms. Swift failed to do so, Ms. Lively would release ‘10 years’ of private texts with Ms. Swift.”

After Freedman filed his affidavit, Judge Lewis Liman granted Lively’s motion to strike both his letter and subsequent affidavit from the docket, writing in a document reviewed by the Cut that the letter was “improper,” “irrelevant to any issue,” and also designed solely to “promote public scandal.”

“It took the court less than 24 hours to see through Mr. Freedman’s irrelevant, improper and inflammatory accusations, strike them, remove them from the court and warn Mr. Freedman that further misconduct may be met with sanctions,” a spokesperson for Lively said in a statement to the Cut.

Lively’s attorneys aren’t the only ones trying to keep Swift out of this legal battle — earlier this week, after the subpoena was initially filed, a spokesperson for the singer accused Baldoni’s lawyers of using the star’s name to “draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait.” Freedman claims this is not their intention, and that he’s merely seeking discovery related to their case. That being said, if he was hoping to get anti-Lively rhetoric into the headlines, he’d be doing a really good job at it.

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