Blake Lively allegedly threatened to leak Taylor Swift’s texts to force her public support, claim Justin Baldoni’s lawyers

In another twist in the legal war between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the latter’s legal team has claimed that Lively’s lawyers have allegedly forced Taylor Swift into giving a statement to support their client. Although Taylor Swift herself has not commented on the situation, Baldoni's team is trying to build a case that Blake Lively used her close relationship with Taylor Swift to get the upper hand in her current legal battle against their client.

Baldoni's lawyer, Bryan Freedman, addressed his grievances in a letter addressed to the judge overseeing the case and gave his reasons for wanting Swift to appear before the court. According to Freedman, the accusations were brought to light by a credible source, whose identity is yet to be revealed. The letter written to the judge is now going viral on social media, and excerpts from the letter read something like this:

"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. 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.”

As soon as the letter was released, Blake Lively's attorney, Michael Gottlieb, fired back at Baldoni's counsel and accused them of not playing by the book. In a statement released to PEOPLE, he revealed:

"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."

Blake Lively's legal team has since filed a series of motions in court in their efforts to quash the opposing team's claims. The recent allegations were put forth in the public domain after Taylor Swift was subpoenaed by Baldoni's lawyers, who have accused Blake Lively of misusing her celebrity connections to push her agenda. Taylor's legal team had rejected the idea in a statement last week, and in the process, had seemingly nipped the allegations in the bud.

But the claims have only intensified since then, and the new allegations leveled against Blake Lively present a fresh twist in the lawsuit. Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have been engaged in a lawsuit against each other since their time together on the sets of It Ends With Us, which ended with a lot of creative differences and allegations leveled against the stars by the other.

While Blake Lively and Taylor Swift have been friends for over a decade, it remains to be seen if Swift will pay heed to the subpoenas and appear before the court. Both Blake and Swift's camps have continued to deny the claims as baseless, but the coming months will give us a clearer picture of the lawsuit.

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