Judge Tosses Out Claims Made by Justin Baldoni’s Lawyer Regarding Blake Lively & Taylor Swift

A judge in Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively’s legal case is throwing out a letter and affidavit that make inflammatory statements about Blake.

The letter and affidavit, written by Justin’s lawyer Bryan Freedman, claim Blake threatened to blackmail her friend Taylor Swift by exposing personal texts if the singer didn’t take her side in the case.

Thursday, news broke that Judge Lewis J. Liman responded to Lively’s team’s request to toss out the letter, saying, “The Letter is improper and must be stricken. It is irrelevant to any issue before this Court and does not request any action from this Court.”

His response later insisted, “The sole purpose of the Letter is to ‘promote public scandal’ by advancing inflammatory accusations, on information and belief, against Lively and her counsel… Counsel is advised that future misuse of the Court’s docket may be met with sanctions.”

According to People magazine, Freedman wrote the letter and then doubled down on his claims and provided more details to the judge. Freedman signed an affidavit, under penalty of perjury, claiming a reliable, unnamed source who is close to Taylor told him that Lively’s legal team contacted Swift’s legal team.

Freedman claimed that the lawyers "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."

He claims the unnamed source told him that Lively had asked Swift to delete their past texts about four or five months prior.

The judge reportedly threw out the affidavit as well.

Blake’s spokesperson told “Extra” in a statement, “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.”

Last week, Freedman subpoenaed Swift as a star witness in Justin and Blake’s ongoing “It Ends with Us” case, while Taylor’s rep hit back in a statement to “Extra,” saying, “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.”

Afterward, Freedman wrote the letter to Judge Liman addressing a request by the law firm Venable to quash that subpoena.

He stated, “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 goes on, “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.”

Lively’s attorney Mike Gottlieb told “Extra,” "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." 

Meanwhile, When Taylor’s rep addressed the subpoena last week, she said in full, “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.”