Taylor Swift Asks Judge To Dismiss ‘Absurd’ Lyrics Lawsuit ‘Once And For All’

Taylor Swift’s attorneys are seeking to end an “absurd” lawsuit over claims she stole lyrics from a self-published Florida poet, saying the accuser’s “baseless” claims must be rejected “once and for all.”

Kimberly Marasco claims the star lifted material from her poems for more than a dozen songs, spanning Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department. One such case was tossed out of court in September, but another case remains pending.

In a scathing motion on Thursday, Swift’s lawyers asked the judge to permanently dismiss that second lawsuit – saying Marasco had “no conceivable case” against the superstar, and that she had already been told that by the same judge.

“This is plaintiff’s second frivolous and harassing lawsuit against artist,” writes Swift’s longtime attorney Douglas Baldridge. “Plaintiff’s claims are, as in her last lawsuit, absurd and legally baseless.”

Swift’s lawyers told the judge that Marasco is trying to claim ownership of “basic themes” and “ubiquitous metaphors,” as well as an assortment of words seemingly “plucked from random spots” in the disputed works.

“Plaintiff has wasted the time and resources of artist, the other defendants, and this court for long enough,” Swift’s lawyers write. “Plaintiff’s frivolous and harassing claims should be dismissed once and for all.”

Marasco first sued Taylor’s company in 2024, claiming the superstar had stolen material for lyrics to songs like “The Man,” “My Tears Ricochet,” “Illicit Affairs” and many others. But that case was dismissed in September, when Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Marasco didn’t own any rights to the “common” phrases she claimed Swift had copied.

“Plaintiff’s poems amount at most to ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes — none of which is a proper subject of copyright protection,” the judge wrote at the time.

Though that ruling dismissed a case Marasco filed against the star’s Taylor Swift Productions, the accuser filed a separate case in February against Swift herself over largely the same allegations.

In seeking to dismiss that case on Thursday, Swift’s lawyers echoed Judge Cannon’s ruling. Marasco is seeking to monopolize basic concepts “found throughout the world in countless works of art,” they wrote, including something as simple as a “female worker navigating a patriarchal corporate system.”

“Plaintiff alleges that artist unlawfully used plaintiff’s ideas about time, a false or betrayed love, a woman being “gaslighted,” guilt, abandonment, and the concept of using a chair in a dance routine,” Taylor’s attorneys write.

On Monday, Marasco quickly filed a response in court, arguing it was too early to dismiss her case. She claimed that she had, in fact, cited “multiple instances of verbatim phrasing” pulled directly from her poems. But when she actually included those examples in the court filing, they were not actually verbatim.

In one comparison, the poem says: “You caged me and told me I’m crazy”; Taylor lyrics from “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” instead say: “You caged me and then you called me crazy.” In another comparison cited by Marasco, her poem says: “I’m running behind, you it’s his word against mine”; in Taylor’s line from “The Man,” she instead says: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I were a man.”