All I Am Asking For Is Some Critical Thinking About The Blake Lively And Taylor Swift "Reports"

Note: This post is an Op-Ed and shares the author’s personal views.

If you’ve vaguely been keeping up with the ongoing legal saga between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, then you’ve likely heard Taylor Swift’s name being tossed around.

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Last year, Blake accused the It Ends With Us director and star of sexual harassment and retaliation. He then countersued and alleged that Blake had, among other things, used the influence of people like Taylor to try to exert control over the movie, with Blake referring to the singer as a “dragon” to her “Khaleesi” over text message. Justin’s $400-million lawsuit against Blake has since been thrown out.

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Still, a line of “sources” has been telling a story of the decade-long friendship between the two disintegrating. Back in May, a source said that their friendship had “halted” as “Taylor wants no part in this drama.” This weekend, a source told People, “Taylor and Blake aren’t speaking.”

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Here’s the thing: I think there’s a possibility it’s all bullshit.

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I think it’s worth considering that Justin’s team has been called out by the judge on their case for evoking Taylor before. When Justin’s lawyer tried to claim that an unspecified source had informed him that Blake had threatened to release texts between herself and Taylor if she didn’t support her, the judge struck it from the record and said, “The sole purpose of the Letter is to ‘promote public scandal’ by advancing inflammatory accusations, on information and belief, against Lively and her counsel…It transparently invites a press uproar by suggesting that Lively and her counsel attempted to ‘extort’ a well-known celebrity.”

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We know that evoking Taylor was likely considered as part of Justin’s PR strategy from at least last August. Blake’s lawsuit provides a “Scenario Planning Document” created by Justin’s PR team “should [Ms. Lively] and her team make her grievances public.” It suggests that Justin’s team should “also explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in BL’s circle like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.” Justin’s team has said that they created the document because they believed Blake and Ryan Reynolds were taking “extreme measures” to “undermine” Justin.

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We also know that Justin’s team probably had a meeting with at least one contributor to various tabloids who, according to messages from Justin’s PR team that appear in Blake’s lawsuit, “hates Blake” and “will do anything for [Justin’s team].” A member of Justin’s team also expressed fear that Blake would “activate” Taylor’s fans against Justin, according to court documents.

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Now, Justin’s team has denied orchestrating a smear campaign against Blake. But I do think it’s fair to question the validity of stories that seem to want to weaponize the Swifties against Blake. These stories could easily serve two end goals: 1) Make Blake the bad guy in the court of public opinion, and, 2) Distract from ongoing news from the court case that doesn’t exactly paint Justin in a great light.

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You might subsequently ask, Well, why hasn’t Taylor come to Blake’s defense? Why haven’t they even been seen in public? To that, I’d say that this is an ongoing legal case. Given that Justin’s team are essentially arguing that Blake uses Taylor to strong-arm people into getting her way, it wouldn’t be a great look for either one of them to make a big public show of support.

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None of this is even getting into the fact that this isn’t some petty “drama.” Real domestic violence organizations have argued that this case could have affected how we litigate and talk about sexual harassment. Remember, underneath all of the noise is a documented allegation of sexual harassment. This is true regardless of whether or not someone made a cringe comment about an old HBO show. So when you comment about how you can’t be fucked to hear about this anymore, remember that all the money and privilege in the world could allegedly not stop someone from being smeared for raising a workplace complaint. If Taylor has broken up with Blake over the “drama,” then what does that say about her?

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