“Look What You Made Me Do”: Subpoenas, Social Media Rumors, and the Science of E-Discovery
Rumors finally met the court docket as Taylor Swift was formally served a subpoena in Justin Baldoni’s $400 million countersuit against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds.
Why target Swift? According to the subpoena, Baldoni’s lawyers have requested Swift’s phone, cloud, and carrier records to see whether her private messages were leveraged to pressure the director into accepting last-minute script changes on It Ends With Us. Messages quoted in Baldoni’s complaint suggested that Lively pointed to Swift’s approval of the revised pages to pressure him into agreement, and his lawyers believe that the pop star’s texts could reveal whether that influence crossed a legal line. It has been hinted for months that “anyone with relevant knowledge” could be called; this has now been crystallized into a fully executed subpoena. Baldoni alleged that Blake Lively contacted her superstar friend during a contentious rooftop scene rewrite for It Ends With Us.
Swift’s legal team responded with what some might call a “Fearless” clapback. Her spokesperson told both CNN and ABC News that the singer “never set foot on the set,” had no creative input, and merely licensed one track—“My Tears Ricochet”—just as 19 other artists had done. The statement brands the subpoena a bid for click-bait rather than genuine discovery. Lively’s own spokesperson echoed that sentiment, accusing Baldoni of turning “a very serious legal matter into Barnum & Bailey’s circus.”
If the court determines that Swift’s data is important and relevant, investigators will image Swift’s iPhone and/or extract data from her iCloud with validated tools such as Cellebrite, hash the data to confirm integrity, and document every action in chain of custody logs. Carrier call-detail records and encrypted app data may supplement the collection, but strict retention limits and end-to-end encryption often mean only metadata survives. Whether it’s a timestamp, attachment, or iMessage sequence number, each artifact is filtered to the relevant parties, keyword-searched, and ultimately packaged into a load file so opposing experts can verify authenticity. Any data that did not involve relevant communications would likely be redacted or excluded from the data production for privacy purposes.
Complicating matters, Baldoni also dragged Marvel Entertainment into discovery over the “Nicepool” character he said mocked him. Marvel petitioned the federal judge to squash that subpoena and protect confidential Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) storylines. The studio’s resistance undercut claims that Marvel had “already complied,” highlighting how online chatter can sprint ahead of procedural reality.
For any forensic vendors involved in this case, sound methodology matters. Verified toolsets, reproducible workflows, and transparent reporting will determine whether any “Bad Blood” revealed in the data holds evidentiary weight – or gets shaken off before a jury ever hears it.
