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Texts in a Legal Filing Indicate Blake Lively and Taylor Swift’s Friendship Had Issues Earlier Than Publicly Disclosed
Perhaps Taylor Swift and Blake Lively’s friendship started going through a rough patch long before the public came to know of any issues between the two.
Two days before the summary judgment hearing, a text snippet between two people, which appears to reveal some of their fallout, was included in legal documents unsealed on Jan. 20 that revealed Lively’s lawsuit against Justin Baldoni. The messages which refrain from naming the two nevertheless, the other papers in the legal filing refer to the communication as between Lively and Swift.
One message indicates that Lively has been thinking about Swift and feels that she has not been much of a friend to her. “I really oughtn’t to ask but ooh… I’ve been feeling like I should… do you guys ok?” she says, further explaining that she had been feeling like a “downer” who talked of her own problems for months. Lively, also, is thankful that Swift was “really nice” to her during that time, and gave her “grace that she deserved.”
She went on to say that her husband, Ryan Reynolds, pushed her to confront Swift directly about her worries.
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Taylor Swift Tells Blake Lively She Misses Their “Normal” Friendship Dynamic
Taylor Swift eventually answered Blake Lively’s emotional message after more than an hour. In her reply, Swift recognized Lively’s worries but disagreed a bit about how their friendship has changed.
“For some reason I just feel drained in every corner of my life and between other things I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret some of the changes in your attitude towards me during the last few months,” Taylor wrote. She implied that since Lively has been going through “a lot of Justin stuff,” she could relate to how such things take up the most of a person’s time.
Taylor then explained that she thought the real problem was something different. “Your last few [messages]…I’ve had the feeling that you were sending out a mass corporate email to 200 employees,” she explained. “And the least I could do was be grateful for you but deep down I wish my sad, funny, normal friend who I get along with has stopped using the language of human self‑help as talking to me.”
Taylor admitted that Blake seemed to have felt overwhelmed by criticism coming from various directions, consequently, she felt the necessity to give extra explanations. “Yet. It is me! That’s just resulted in a little distance,” she wrote. “And you don’t have to say sorry. Just come back please.”
Blake Lively Opens Up to Taylor Swift About Justin Baldoni Incident and How It Impacted Her Friendships
Within a few hours of Swift’s message, Lively wrote back saying she had “become digitally paranoid” and detailed how her communication style now reflected this.
“So yeah, I’ve been texting like I’m writing. Not like me talking. I didn’t realize that till you pointed it out, but I got it,” Lively acknowledged. Besides that, she mentioned that she’d been explaining too much even simple things because she felt so misunderstood and she almost didn’t trust her own judgment anymore.
“This f—king guy and what he did to me gave me an identity crisis. Legitimately,” she said to Swift, while referring to Justin Baldoni.
Besides that, Lively also talked about the effects of the incident on her other relationships. “The thing that scared me the most in all this, though, wasn’t the bad guys being bad. It was the good guys, my lifelong friends—women’s allies—who silently left,” she revealed. “And so I’m probably being really dramatic with the friends who stayed because I’ve never felt so alone.”
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Blake Lively Apologizes to Taylor Swift as Their Friendship Strained by Legal Battle
Blake Lively further thanked Taylor Swift and apologized “to you… to me and to our kids” while also emphasizing, “F— that guy and f— his whole gaggle of supervillains.”
The text conversation happened only three days before Swift finished her Eras Tour. Lively concluded her message with words of encouragement to the Grammy winner saying she was “excited” for her to finally be free of “suitcases, constant sinus infections and torn up kneecaps.”
Sources told PEOPLE that the friendship between Swift and Lively has become complicated due to Lively’s ongoing legal battle with Justin Baldoni, whom she has accused of sexual harassment and retaliation—claims that Baldoni has denied.
In text messages that were supposedly sent by Lively to Baldoni and were part of Baldoni’s January 2025 countersuit against Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds—later dismissed by a judge—the actress referred to Reynolds and Swift as her “dragons,” a Game of Thrones reference suggesting that they are fiercely protective of her.
Blake Lively Referenced Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Swift as Her “Dragons” in Texts to Justin Baldoni
According to reports, Blake Lively referred to her husband Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Swift as protective shields around her when texting with Justin Baldoni.
“I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually for better,” Lively’s alleged message read. “Because my dragons also protect those I fight for. So really we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. [Smiley‑face emoji] you will too, I can promise you.”
In May 2025, when Baldoni’s attorneys tried to subpoena Swift, her representative released a statement separating the singer from the film It Ends With Us.
“Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film, she did not even see It Ends With Us until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history,” a spokesperson for Swift said.
The statement added: “Taylor’s only connection with this film was the permission to use one song, ‘My Tears Ricochet.’ Given that her involvement was licensing a song for the film, which 19 other artists also did, this document subpoena is aimed at using Taylor Swift’s name to attract the public’s attention by creating tabloid clickbait rather than focusing on the facts of the case.”
