THE BIG STORY: Taylor Swift’s text messages with Blake Lively have officially been deemed fair game in the messy legal battle over the movie It Ends With Us. On June 18, a federal judge in New York ordered Lively to hand over the messages to her onetime director and co-star Justin Baldoni, whom Lively alleges sexually harassed her on set and then orchestrated a retaliatory smear campaign after she complained.
Judge Lewis J. Liman said Baldoni has the right to see what Lively and her longtime friend Swift said to each other about It Ends With Us. The reason? Lively’s own discovery disclosures identified Swift as someone who knew that she complained about the working environment Baldoni created on set, meaning the duo’s text messages might be evidence that either backs up or disproves Lively’s harassment and retaliation claims.
It’s been a winding path to this ruling. Baldoni first sought to obtain the text messages via witness subpoenas to Swift, in the process drawing fierce criticism from the pop superstar’s reps for supposedly “creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.” Baldoni later dropped the Swift subpoenas and successfully petitioned to get the texts directly from Lively through the normal discovery process.
From a practical perspective, this means Baldoni will now have access to some potentially juicy Swift-Lively text chains, but legal confidentiality rules prevent him and his lawyers from sharing these messages with anyone else for the time being. If the case goes to trial as scheduled in 2026 — that is, if Judge Liman doesn’t decide the claims as a matter of law, and Lively and Baldoni don’t resolve their issues with a settlement — these text messages could be shown to the jury as evidence and, as a result, made public for the rest of us too.
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Other top stories this week…
COPYRIGHT CLAIMS – GloRilla was sued by social media personality Natalie Henderson, a.k.a. @slimdabodylast on Instagram, who claimed the rapper stole her viral catchphrase about Brazilian butt lift cosmetic surgery for a song off the chart-topping debut album Glorious. Henderson said her ditty “All natural, no BBL/ Mad hoes go to hell” was the basis for GloRilla to rap “Natural, no BBL/ but I’m still gon’ give him hell” on the 2024 bonus track “Never Find.”
RIHANNA RUM RUSE – Beverage startup The3rdBevco and its founder, Peter Scalise III, agreed to pay a $1.1 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for allegedly touting a nonexistent partnership with Rihanna to develop a new alcohol brand called “RiRi Rum.” The3rdBevco, which reached a settlement with the SEC but neither admitted nor denied the federal investment regulator’s claims, supposedly tried at one point to hire Rihanna’s brother to facilitate a deal with the music icon, but a consulting contract was never finalized.
T.I. AS IN TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT? T.I. was hit with a lawsuit claiming his upcoming movie, Situationships, stole the title from a web series of the same name. Atlanta-based producer Cylla Senii allegedly spent years working on both TV and movie adaptations of her Situationships series before learning last fall that T.I. and his company, Grand Hustle Films, were about to start shooting an infringing movie — “ironic” behavior, said Senii, for a rapper who recently won a big IP case of his own.
RACKETEERING LAWSUIT – Fat Joe was accused in an explosive new lawsuit filed by his former hypeman, Terrance “T.A.” Dixon, of running a wide-ranging criminal enterprise that included forced labor and the trafficking of underage girls. Lawyers for Fat Joe fervently denied the claims as entirely fabricated, and the rapper already has a pending counter-lawsuit of his own accusing Dixon and his attorney of extortion. The lawsuit also targeted Fat Joe’s management company, Roc Nation, which quickly asked to be dismissed from the case and said it “has nothing to do with any of this.”
MURDER PLOT UPDATE – R. Kelly lost his request to get out of prison over concerns that jailhouse officials orchestrated a murder plot to stop the disgraced R&B star from revealing supposed prosecutorial misconduct in his sex crime trials. A judge in Chicago said she doesn’t have jurisdiction over the matter and that any bid for release must be brought as a civil rights lawsuit or habeas corpus petition in North Carolina, where Kelly is serving his 30-plus-year prison term for two different federal convictions.
CUSTODY BATTLE – DDG asked for court permission to visit the son he shares with Halle Bailey in Rome, where the 25-year-old singer and actress is filming a movie and has sole custody of the child amid domestic violence claims against the rapper. A judge in Los Angeles said it’s “reasonable” for DDG to see his son, but that the visits must be supervised by an independent monitor rather than the 27-year-old Twitch rapper’s mother, as he had proposed.
K-POP FIGHT – A Korean appellate court upheld a previous legal injunction requiring K-pop group NewJeans to stay with its label, ADOR. The five-member group sought to strike out on its own under the moniker NJZ, citing alleged mismanagement by ADOR and its parent company HYBE. But the ruling by Seoul’s High Court, which could have major implications for artist-label contracts in the K-pop industry, said ADOR and HYBE acted in good faith by providing major support for NewJeans’ debut and rise to stardom.
ASSAULT CASE – Chris Brown pled not guilty to a criminal assault charge in London for supposedly attacking a music producer with a bottle at a Mayfair nightclub in 2023. The troubled R&B singer was arrested and spent a week in jail when he arrived in Europe for his Breezy Bowl XX tour in May, but he’s now out on a nearly $7 million bail package and performing shows in the U.K. throughout June and July.
TOURING TIFF – A settlement was reached to end dueling legal claims between Chicago rapper Polo G and Dutch concert booking agency J. Noah B.V. over a canceled European tour from 2023. Polo G had accused the agency of violating intellectual property law by continuing to promote shows using his name and image after their deal was terminated, while J. Noah said the rapper improperly canceled the tour after hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been deposited for performance venues and production staff.
SMOKEY’S DEFAMATION CLAIMS – Four former housekeepers suing Smokey Robinson for rape asked a judge to toss the Motown legend’s defamation counterclaims against them. The women said that a press conference they gave announcing the bombshell lawsuit is shielded from defamation claims by the so-called litigation privilege under the First Amendment, and they accused Robinson of using the countersuit to retaliate against them for speaking out about an alleged years-long pattern of sexual assault that the singer denies.
