She does not sound, on the whole, to be too happy about this. Swift has been very loosely in the orbit of the Lively/Baldoni feud for months, owing to her friendship with Lively, her licensing of one of her songs to the movie, and a text in which Lively used an admittedly embarrassing Game Of Thrones metaphor to refer to her. (A self-reference as “Khaleesi” was involved.) Swift’s irritation at being dragged closer to the Hollywood black hole du jour came through very clearly in a statement that a rep for her gave to TMZ after it reported on the subpoena, saying, “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. The connection Taylor had to this film was permitting the use of one song, ‘My Tears Ricochet.’ Given that her involvement was licensing a song for the film, which 19 other artists also did, 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.”
Baldoni’s side has long suggested that Swift was at least tangentially connected to the film; in his earliest filings, when he was first accusing Lively of mounting a smear campaign against him, he said a “megacelebrity friend” of Lively’s arrived at her home during a meeting they were having about a re-write of a scene that Lively had done, at which point this “famous, and famously close, friend” began praising the script changes. “Baldoni understood the subtext,” the legal filing stated. “He needed to comply with Lively’s direction.” (Said filing does not suggest what Swift would have done to him had he not complied; the suggestion seems to be that her mere existence as Taylor Swift was threat enough.) Anyway, Swift is now officially embroiled, much to her quite obvious annoyance.
