Even the judge in the It Ends With Us feud is like, “Please, leave Taylor Swift out of this.” Justin Baldoni and his Wayfarer production team have been trying to drag Swift into the legal drama from the beginning, on account of one time Lively ambushed him into meeting her uber-famous friend and he was really intimidated by it. Not the strongest legal argument, nor was his lawyer’s specious claims that Lively extorted Swift to support her publicly. The pop star hasn’t publicly weighed in on the feud, making those meaningless, and even if it was true, what place does it have in this court case?
No place, Judge Lewis J. Liman has ruled. Per Deadline, Judge Liman (brother to director Doug Liman, as if this situation needed to get any more star-studded) responded on Thursday to the letter submitted by attorney Bryan Freedman about the so-called extortion. “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,” he wrote. He means irrelevant quite literally; Baldoni’s subpoena for Swift isn’t even for Liman’s New York court, it’s for a suit filed in D.C. (There are too many damn lawsuits flying around this situation.)
“The sole purpose of the Letter is to ‘promote public scandal’ by advancing inflammatory accusations, on information and belief, against Lively and her counsel,” Judge Liman wrote. “It transparently invites a press uproar by suggesting that Lively and her counsel attempted to ‘extort’ a well-known celebrity. Retaining the Letter on the docket would be of no use to the Court and would allow the Court’s docket to serve as a ‘reservoir[] of libelous statements for press consumption.'”
This comes after Freedman doubled down on the extortion claim on Thursday (per People), saying his anonymous source close to Taylor Swift told him that Lively demanded her friend release a statement of support around the time of the Super Bowl. At the time, lookie-loos were speculating about their ruined friendship because Lively didn’t show up in Swift’s box like she had at last year’s game. (Swift’s only public comment on the matter has been to deny any involvement with the making of It Ends With Us, besides permitting the use of her song.) Lively’s legal team has dubbed all Freedman’s insinuations as “scandalous” and “completely false.”
“Another day, another bogus filing designed for clickbait. We reiterate our unequivocal denial,” Lively’s attorney Mike Gottlieb stated to People. Freedman’s allegations “rely completely upon a source, no matter who it is, that doesn’t even claim to have witnessed the conversations that Freedman describes, making this triple-hearsay statement as unreliable as information reported from children in a game of telephone,” he added. “These claims remain completely untethered from reality—to be clear: The conversations as described did not happen, and we will hold Mr. Freedman accountable for his misconduct.”
On this, Lively’s team and Judge Liman are more or less agreed. The judge wrote in his ruling that “the Wayfarer Parties’ subsequent submission” about the Super Bowl would be stricken from the court “for the same reasons” as the original letter. He concluded with a warning that if Freedman continues with this tack, he “may be met with sanctions.”
