Justin Baldoni Drags Taylor Swift Into New Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds Lawsuit

Justin Baldoni filed a new lawsuit Thursday against Blake Lively, alleging that she used her industry “power”—including her friendship with Taylor Swift—to seize control of their film It Ends With Us and “destroy” him.

The 179-page suit includes text messages that name Swift as the “megacelebrity friend” who attended a meeting wherein Baldoni, Lively, and husband Ryan Reynolds discussed Lively’s rewrites of the film’s pivotal rooftop scene. It was during that meeting that Reynolds and Swift “began praising Lively’s script.”

Lively admits in the presented text messages that Baldoni’s hesitance about her version “of course, didn’t feel great for me.” Baldoni said that instead of accepting his stance on the issue, she enlisted Swift to “pressure” him.

To smooth over Lively’s hurt feelings about the pages, Baldoni texted her, according to screen grabs in the suit, “I really love what you did” and “I would have felt that way without Ryan and Taylor.” Lively replied with a long text praising his talents and her gratefulness for the partnership: “We’re in this together.” She added, however, that Reynolds and Swift are her “most trusted partners,” and it “didn’t feel great” for “them” to “have my passion be praised instead of any specific contribution.”

Baldoni and his attorney Bryan Freedman believe this interaction and the others presented will prove that Lively had been working behind the scenes to “control” Baldoni before filing her December lawsuit against him. Freedman said in a statement to the Daily Beast, “Ms. Lively and her team attempted to bulldoze reputations and livelihoods for heinously selfish reasons through their own dangerous manipulation of the media before even taking any actual legal action.”

“It is clear based on our own all out willingness to provide all complete text messages, emails, video footage and other documentary evidence that was shared between the parties in real time, that this is a battle she will not win and will certainly regret,” he added. “We know the truth, and now the public does too. Justin and his team have nothing to hide, documents do not lie.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to representatives for Lively, Reynolds, and Swift for comment.