‘Felt like a bad friend’: Taylor Swift-Blake Lively text messages reveal friendship fallout

Pop juggernaut Taylor Swift has once again been pulled into the legal battle between It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

Text messages between long-time friends Swift and Lively were unsealed on Tuesday (US time) amid the ongoing legal drama, which began in December 2024 when Lively filed a complaint against her co-star and director, accusing him of sexual harassment and running a smear campaign against her. Baldoni categorically denied all accusations against him. The trial is set for May.

In May 2025, Swift was subpoenaed as a witness in Baldoni’s $US400 million defamation countersuit – which has since been dropped – against Lively. A spokesperson for Swift said at the time this was designed to generate public interest by “creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case”. Though the subpoena was dropped later that month, Swift’s name has emerged again amid the legal mayhem.

According to the unsealed messages, seen by this masthead, Lively spoke openly about the concerns she had while on set for the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us. At one point, the actress referred to Baldoni as her “doofus director”. In December 2024, the close friends texted again shortly before the publication of a New York Times expose regarding Lively’s accusations against Baldoni and the film’s production company Wayfarer Studios.

“I think this bitch knows something is coming because he’s gotten out his tiny violin,” Swift texted Lively alongside a screenshot of a People article about Baldoni saying he’d been “sexually traumatised”. Swift later described the situation as “a horror film no one knows is taking place” and said Baldoni “needs to be beaten by his OWN words”.

In the same conversation, Lively wrote to Swift: “Can you imagine feeling as confident as these predators that you’re going to always get away with it. Him accepting an award as an ally for women ... And Scooter going about [the] world with his head held high as he co-owns and funds a crisis PR company that silences women.”

Scooter Braun, who was subpoenaed by Lively, was in a long-running feud with Swift over the ownership of her music.

An earlier exchange in April 2023 appeared to show Lively asking Swift to praise Lively’s revised version of the script for It Ends With Us in front of Baldoni. Swift was allegedly on her way to meet the director at Lively’s New York apartment.

“He’s a clown and thinks he’s a writer now,” Lively wrote. “So having the greatest living storyteller unknowingly echo to him how much you love what we’re doing (giving him credit as if he wrote them with me) will go such a long way.” According to the filing, Swift responded, “I’ll do anything for you!!”

The unsealed correspondence also revealed the impact the legal feud had on Swift and Lively’s decade-long friendship.

“I have no reason to ask, but I donno, I’ve been feeling like I should … is everything OK?” Lively wrote to Swift in early December 2024. “I felt like a bad friend lately because I was such a sad sack who only talked about my own shit for months. You were generous to not only be the key person there for me during all of it, but also to let me off the hook for being so in it. But I still have a feeling something may not be right.”

In response, Swift said her friend wasn’t wrong, but that it wasn’t “a big deal”.

“I think I’m just exhausted in every avenue of my life and in recent months had been feeling a little bit of a shift in the way you talk to me … I feel really bad saying anything about this because your texts have been so nice in their intent but your last few… it’s felt like I was reading a mass corporate email sent to 200 employees,” Swift wrote. “It feels awful to be in any way critical of any way you process what you’ve been going through but I just kinda miss my funny, dark, normal-speaking friend who talks to me as herself, not like. A plural unit.”

The pop star said Lively didn’t need to apologise, but implored her to “come back”.

Sigrid McCawley, a member of Lively’s legal team, told CNN the unsealed evidence “shows the concerns of Ms Lively and others were documented in real-time as early as Spring 2023, and Wayfarer understood them as ‘sexual harassment’ concerns”.

“The evidence also documents how Wayfarer refused to investigate, but instead attempted to ‘bury’ Ms Lively and others who spoke up through retaliation,” she said.

In response, Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Feldman said the evidence did not support the claims as a matter of law. “A simple read of the newly released message exchanges make the truth abundantly clear. We remain confident in the legal process and clearing the names of all of the Justin Baldoni parties,” he said, per CNN.

Swift’s representative has been contacted for comment.

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