Taylor Swift’s Lawyers Fight Subpoena from Justin Baldoni in Blake Lively Legal Battle

Taylor Swift’s longtime lawyers are asking a court to throw out a subpoena they were served by Justin Baldoni in his feud with Blake Lively over the movie It Ends With Us, just a few days after Swift’s own reps slammed Baldoni for targeting the pop star with a similar subpoena.   

The Washington, D.C.-based law firm Venable, which has represented Swift for more than a decade, revealed in a Monday (May 12) motion that Baldoni’s lawyers served it with a subpoena on April 29 seeking all communications between the firm on one side and Lively, the actress’ husband Ryan Reynolds and/or their attorney Michael Gottlieb on the other.

The subpoena specifically name-drops Douglas Baldridge, a Venable partner who’s worked with Swift since 2013 and recently returned to the firm after a stint as general counsel at her company, 13 Management.

“Venable had nothing to do with the film at issue or any of the claims or defenses asserted in the underlying lawsuit,” wrote the firm in a so-called motion to quash, which, if granted, would throw out the document request. “There is no reason for this subpoena other than to distract from the facts of the case and impose undue burden and expense on a non-party.”

The law firm described Baldoni’s subpoena as a “fishing expedition,” noting that “even if Venable were somehow involved (again, it is not),” the documents that Baldoni seeks should be sourced from Lively and Reynolds themselves. The actor power couple is supporting Venable in its quest to throw out Baldoni’s subpoena, calling it an “abuse of the discovery process” in a court filing on Tuesday (May 13).

Revelations of the Venable subpoena come just a few days after Swift’s representatives confirmed that she, too, had been served with a document request in the Baldoni-Lively feud. Mirroring the language in Venable’s motion, a representative for Swift said she had no involvement in It Ends With Us and slammed the subpoena as “designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”

Venable did not immediately return a request for comment, nor did reps for Swift, Lively, Reynolds or Baldoni.

The It Ends With Us legal battle began when Lively launched bombshell claims in December, alleging that Baldoni, her co-star and director on the movie released last summer, sexually harassed her on set and then orchestrated a public relations smear campaign to retaliate against her after she complained.

Baldoni vehemently denied the claims and countersued Lively for defamation and other wrongdoing in January. Baldoni’s suit said Lively leveraged her close relationship with a “megacelebrity friend,” presumed to be Swift, to take control of the movie.

The Baldoni filing includes text messages concerning an alleged meeting attended by “Ryan and Taylor,” seemingly referencing Reynolds and Swift. In one message sent by Lively, the actress called Swift and Reynolds her “most trusted partners” and compared them to the “dragons” in the show Game of Thrones.

“The message could not have been clearer,” Baldoni’s lawyers wrote in the countersuit. “Baldoni was not just dealing with Lively. He was also facing Lively’s ‘dragons,’ two of the most influential and wealthy celebrities in the world, who were not afraid to make things very difficult for him.”