UPDATE, Thursday, 12:00 pm Pacific:
Lively’s attorneys filed a motion to have the letter stricken from the record, which was granted. A spokesperson said in a statement, “It took the court less than 24 hours to see through Mr. Freedman’s irrelevant, improper and inflammatory accusations, strike them, remove them from the court and warn Mr. Freedman that further misconduct may be met with sanctions.”
Judge Lewis Liman wrote in his ruling, “The Letter is improper and must be stricken. It is irrelevant to any issue before this Court and does not request any action from this Court … The sole purpose of the Letter is to ‘promote public scandal’ by advancing inflammatory accusations, on information and belief, against Lively and her counsel.”
Original story:
Justin Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman has claimed in a new letter that Blake Lively’s lawyer threatened to release Taylor Swift’s “private text messages of a personal nature” unless the singer agreed to delete supposedly incriminating texts.
Swift’s attorney Mike Gottleib quickly responded, “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.”
In a statement shared with TheWrap, Gottlieb also said that Wayfarer Studios, the company co-founded by Baldoni “love nothing more than shooting first, without any evidence, and with no care for the people they are harming in the process.” He added, “We will imminently file motions with the court to hold these attorneys accountable for their misconduct here.”
The letter sent by Wayfarer on Wednesday to the presiding judge in the case, which was obtained by TheWrap, cited “a source who is highly likely to have reliable information” about the alleged extortion of Swift, but did not identify them by name or job title.
The Wayfarer letter went on to claim 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.”
The missive argued that a search warrant for a letter supposedly sent from Swift’s rep to Gottlieb would “evidence an attempt to intimidate and coerce a percipient witness in this litigation.”
Lively’s legal team later sent a letter to the judge asking him to strike the Freedman letter. The which was signed by Esra A. Hudson of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, stated that it “was not filed with any evidentiary support of any kind, much less anything under oath,” adding, “It should be unnecessary to respond to anonymously sourced, baseless, allegations recklessly leveled without any supporting evidence.”
A rep for Swift did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on Wednesday. However, in a recent statement relating to Baldoni’s camp subpoenaing Swift, her spokesperson stressed that the singer’s only involvement in the making of “It Ends With Us” was allowing one of her songs to be used in the film.
Editor’s note: Later Wednesday afternoon after this story was published, Blake Lively’s legal team filed a motion to strike the related letter from the court’s docket. The story has been updated to reflect that filing.
