Every friendship has ups and downs, right? The truest blue of pals weather the thick and thin, highs and lows, celebrations and commiserations, seeing one another through subpoenas and Super Bowls.
Wait, fact check—maybe that last one is more of a Taylor Swift and Blake Lively thing than a normal-people thing.
Swift and Lively’s relationship has made headlines recently, thanks to Lively’s ongoing legal dispute with It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni. Baldoni and Lively have been entangled in suits and countersuits against one another since late 2024, suing for millions over allegations of sexual harassment, retaliation, defamation, and extortion (which each party denies to the other). Swift, whose song “My Tears Ricochet” is on the film’s soundtrack, has been invoked by name several times in legal proceedings, and was subpoenaed by Baldoni’s legal team on May 8. And yet…
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“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,” reads a statement from Swift’s rep following the subpoena. “The connection Taylor had to this film was permitting the use of 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 designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”
Baldoni’s legal team has suggested literally selling tickets to court proceedings, and alleged that Lively threatened to extort Swift if she didn’t publicly support her, a claim that was thrown out by the judge in the case.
Swift and Lively haven’t stepped out together publicly in months, and People reported this week, citing an anonymous source, that “their friendship has halted.”
“Taylor wants no part in this drama,” the source, described as someone close to Swift, continued.
Swift’s and Lively’s representatives did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment on the current status of the friendship.
Now seems like a good time to talk a little pap walk down memory lane and recall the origins of the pair’s bestie-dom: A 2015 Instagram caption promoting shampoo, gone horribly awry. Plus ça change, right?
In a now-deleted Instagram post on September 10, 2015, Lively shared a photo of herself and a handful of other celebrities—Karlie Kloss, Julianne Moore, Naomi Watts, Jane Fonda, Amber Heard, Doutzen Kroes, Aishwarya Rai, Liya Kebede, Fan Binbing, Eva Longoria, and John Legend—lounging in formalwear and smiling softly at one another with the sort of fond expression usually only found in commercials about probiotic yogurt marketed to women of a certain age.
You know the one. The post was part of an advertising campaign for L’Oreal’s Color Riche hair care, evidently.
Meanwhile, “Bad Blood” had been released as a single in May of that year. As you’ll recall, the song’s music video, also released prior to the Lively post, features Swift and members of her squad—Selena Gomez, Hailee Steinfeld, Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss, Zendaya, and others—as ladies who Do Crime And Also Fashion.
“Soooo, turns out this WASN’T a video shoot for John Legend’s cover of Bad Blood,” she wrote in the caption. “@lorealparisofficial blew it out for this one. My #pinkobsession is exposed now. Ok your turn. I won’t tell! #AlsoTurnsOutJohnLegendIsntCoveringBadBlood Time to start a petition!”
Because the internet is the internet, some interpreted the caption as Lively taking a jab at Swift, to whom she had no public connection at the time. A few days later, Lively posted another now-deleted shot, this one of members of husband Ryan Reynolds’ family backstage with Swift at a stop on her 1989 tour.
“Umm whoever thought I was throwin’ shade clearly doesn’t know I have a ‘Taylor Swift Please Be My Wife Voo Doo Doll,’” she wrote. “Look how rad she is here making my niece Heather feel like a rock star. Love my Canadian family almost as much as I love Taylor Lively. I mean Swift. Ok, FIIINE we can hyphenate our last names. Xo Blake Swift-Lively 4eva.”
By early December 2015, the two were not married, but did hang out in Australia, and shared photos of themselves bonding with a koala (not entirely dissimilar to a zoo outing Swift would share years later during the Eras Tour with boyfriend Travis Kelce, chilling with kangaroos).
The rest is history: Swift has name-dropped Lively’s children across various songs, and even featured a voice cameo from Lively’s daughter James on her track “Gorgeous.” There have been Fourth of July parties and birthday parties and flowers and so, so, so many paparazzi shots. There was one Super Bowl, and then—gasp!—not another. What does it all mean? Is there any possible way that we can interpret all of this as a series of Easter eggs for the release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version)? There has to be, just give Reddit, like, 20 minutes and a corkboard.
The good(?) news is, the hearing for Lively and Baldoni isn’t until March 2026, so we still have the better part of a year to wade through all this. Who even knows how many new albums Swift could release by then?
