The legal drama between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, her co-star and director of It Ends With Us, may end with a settlement… possibly enticed by the threat of a Taylor Swift deposition.
Swift, 35, is a close friend of Lively, 37, and her husband Ryan Reynolds, 48, and was present during a now-infamous meeting where Lively, Reynolds and Baldoni were working out the film’s rooftop scene which Lively had re-written.
Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman was a guest on TMZ’s new legal podcast Two Angry Men with Harvey Levin and Mark Geragos.
Levin, a longtime attorney himself before creating TMZ, assumed Freedman would be deposing Swift, though Levin was quite surprised when Freedman played coy.
‘I don’t know that we’re going to depose Taylor Swift or not. I think that’s probably going to be a game-time decision. I don’t know that that decision has been made,’ Freedman coyly revealed.
He added, ‘I can tell you this. Anyone that reasonably has information that can provide evidence in this case is gonna be deposed.’
The legal drama between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni , her co-star and director of It Ends With Us, may end with a settlement… possibly enticed by the threat of a Taylor Swift deposition
Swift, 35, is a close friend of Lively, 37, and her husband Ryan Reynolds , 48, and was present during a now-infamous meeting where Lively, Reynolds and Baldoni were working out the film’s rooftop scene which Lively had re-written.
Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman was a guest on TMZ ‘s new legal podcast Two Angry Men with Harvey Levin and Mark Geragos
A surprised Levin insisted, ‘That’s Taylor Swift. She was there for that meeting,’ as Freedman admitted, ‘She was there for that meeting.’
Levin gleefully added, ‘OK, well I’m a lawyer, I know what that means,’ as he speculated about the possibility of Swift being deposed in this legal battle.
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He added that just the threat of Swift’s deposition might accelerate a settlement offer, to avoid the biggest pop star in the world being put on the stand, ‘and being grilled by Bryan Freedman.’
While Freedman wouldn’t clarify about deposing Swift, he did add, ‘I would imagine that they’re probably gonna take some legal actions that are beyond the bounds of decency and we’ll see if they can try to avoid a deposition.’
Levin and Geragos believed that Lively and her team would do whatever they could to protect Swift by trying to avoid taking this matter to trial.
Also complicating matters for Lively is yet another lawsuit she’s facing, with Baldoni’s PR specialist Jed Wallace now suing her for defamation.
Lively listed Wallace as a defendant in her administrative complaint filed against her co-star in December.
Her filing described Wallace as a Texas-based contractor ‘who weaponized a digital army’ to help ‘create, seed, and promote’ social media content attacking her and defending Baldoni.
A surprised Levin insisted, ‘That’s Taylor Swift. She was there for that meeting,’ as Freedman admitted, ‘She was there for that meeting’
Also complicating matters for Lively is yet another lawsuit she’s facing, with Baldoni’s PR specialist Jed Wallace now suing her for defamation
Her filing described Wallace as a Texas-based contractor ‘who weaponized a digital army’ to help ‘create, seed, and promote’ social media content attacking her and defending Baldoni
Described as a ‘precursor to a lawsuit’, the document was attached to the original civil rights complaint that Lively filed in California on December 20 to kick off legal hostilities against her It Ends with Us co-star.
When the actress’s actual federal complaint was filed 11 days later, neither Wallace nor his Street Relations crisis management firm were among those accused, his lawyers say.
But it was too late to stop media outlets wrongly naming him and his company as defendants as they relied on the version Lively’s team had already distributed to the press.
‘Lively or her agents provided the Precursor to various media entities for out-of-court republication and, because of the allegations contained therein, it made ‘headlines around the world’ according to Elle Magazine which linked to the Precursor document as did many other media,’ Wallace says in a complaint filed in Texas federal court Tuesday.