The high-profile legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has been rumbling on since December, with Taylor Swift regularly being bought into the row.

This week, a judge decided that texts between Taylor Swift and Blake Lively will be handed over to Justin Baldoni as part of his ongoing legal battle with the actress. Lively had asked the judge to prevent Baldoni from accessing these messages and argued that Baldoni was pulling Swift into the conflict as part of a public relations strategy.

According to Variety, the judge ruled that correspondences between Lively and her friend Swift about the environment on the It Ends with Us film set are ‘relevant’ to the high-profile case. ‘Lively herself has identified Swift as someone likely to have knowledge about complaints or discussions regarding the working environment on the set of It Ends with Us,’ he wrote, noting the pair’s friendship and Swift’s cameos in the situation.

Lively sued Baldoni and his studio in December. She alleges she was sexually harassed on set and that he led a campaign to ‘destroy’ her reputation. In Lively’s complaint, she details a number of alleged incidents in which Baldoni and lead producer, Jamey Heath, allegedly violated physical boundaries and made inappropriate sexual comments to Lively during the first part shooting in spring 2023.

Baldoni’s legal team called the allegations ‘categorically false’ and he filed a $400-million countersuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and others, and a $250-million defamation claim against The New York Times, which first reported Lively’s legal complaint. He accused Lively and Reynolds of trying to destroy his reputation by accusing him of sexual harassment and retaliation on the set of the film, which he directed and starred in. Both lawsuits were dismissed by the judge last week.

Like so many others, I’ve felt the pain of a retaliatory lawsuit, including the manufactured shame that tries to break us,’ Lively shared on her Instagram Stories in June shortly after the dismissal. ‘While the suit against me was defeated, so many don’t have the resources to fight back.’

She continued, ‘With love and gratitude for the many who stood by me. Many of you I know. Many of you I don’t. But I will never stop appreciating or advocating for you.’

Swift and Lively have a friendship that stretches back as far as a decade and have shared photos of their close bond on social media. However, as Lively’s legal drama with Justin Baldoni rumbles on, reports have suggested their friendship is becoming strained. In 2025, People reported that their friendship had ‘halted’ amid the lawsuit.

In May, Baldoni’s lawyers tried to get hold of the text messages between Swift and Lively directly from the singer herself with subpoenas. At the time, Swift’s spokesman shared a statement stating that Swift had nothing to do with It Ends With Us apart from licensing a song and hadn’t seen the film until weeks after it was released.

The subpoenas were dropped after Swift’s lawyers objected that they amounted to an ‘unwarranted fishing expedition.’ Lively’s legal team then argued that Swift is irrelevant to the case.

But this week, the judge wrote: ‘Given that Lively has represented that Swift had knowledge of complaints or discussions about the working environment on the film, among other issues, the requests for messages with Swift regarding the film and this action are reasonably tailored to discover information that would prove or disprove Lively’s harassment and retaliation claims.’

A spokesperson for Lively issued a statement in response to the judge’s decision, telling Billboard that Lively had ‘produced far more documents in this case’ than Baldoni. They added that Baldoni and his publicity team had been trying to ‘drag Taylor Swift’ into the legal drama since last summer.

‘We will continue to call out Baldoni’s relentless efforts to exploit Ms Swift’s popularity, which from day one has been nothing more than a distraction from the serious sexual harassment and retaliation accusations he and the Wayfarer [Studios] parties are facing,’ the spokesperson said.

In the wake of the allegations against Baldoni, Lively has received support from fellow A-listers – and Colleen Hoover, the author of It Ends With Us. In a post to her Instagram stories, Hoover wrote: “@blakelively you have been nothing but honest, kind, supportive and patient since the day we met. Thank you for being exactly the human that you are. Never change. Never wilt.’

Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Schumer, Amber Heard and America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, and Alexis Bledel – Blake Lively’s longtime friends and co-stars on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – have all showed their support for Lively on social media and interviews. In fact, comparisons have been drawn to the way Heard’s reputation was impacted online during her highly publicised defamation trial in 2022, brought by ex-husband Johnny Depp.

A New York judge has set a March 2026 trial date.