Revisiting Taylor Swift’s “No Intent” Defense

I previously posted a commentary on Taylor Swift and Blake Lively’s texts.

(Note to readers who don’t care about this situation at all: I promise this isn’t going to become a regular topic here!).

I argued that based on the initial evidence, Taylor Swift’s team had constructed a defensible narrative. The core of their strategy was to create a distinction between Swift’s actions (being present at a meeting and discussing the Justin Baldoni situation with Blake Lively) and her intent (claiming she had no premeditated plan to influence Baldoni). I concluded that while the optics weren’t perfect, the narrative wasn’t definitively compromised.

I also noted that “Unless further information comes to light that clearly demonstrates intent… this aspect of the narrative remains supported.”

Well, that further information has now come to light. We now have the actual texts.

I wrote that previous when only the four screenshots of the court documents were available.

Some updates are required…

Let’s start with this text exchange:

In my original article, I wrote:

It [the court document screenshot] establishes that Swift did participate in this meeting. What it doesn’t establish is that Swift knew that Baldoni would be there or that she knew Lively intended her to read the scene so that she could defend it to Baldoni…

and

The information about Lively wanting Swift to read the scene because Baldoni was still there when Swift was on her way to Lively’s apartment came from Lively in an explanation of how Swift came to be at that meeting, talking about Lively’s rewritten scene. There’s nothing in this that suggests that Lively told Swift that Baldoni was there or that this was her intention behind sending the script.

Both referring to this document:

The texts show that Lively did tell Swift that Baldoni might still be at her apartment when Swift arrived. They show that Lively told Swift that she thought Swift’s commentary on the rewritten scene would help get Baldoni to consider using it.

These texts somewhat dismantle the narrative in Swift’s team’s response in the Daily Mail and CBS News (below):

‘Taylor is proud of the film because her music was featured in it, which gave her a sense of involvement, though she wasn’t fully aware of the extent of the project’s developments,’ they said.

‘She is confused by the claims in the suit, as her connection to Blake is purely a friendship, with no interest in influencing or controlling Blake’s projects.’

The source insisted that Taylor did not purposely plan to be there during the meeting.

Instead, they said she was simply coming over to hang out with her pal but arrived while the meeting - which was supposed to have been wrapped up - was still going.

‘She finds Justin’s interpretation of the encounter perplexing, and those close to her suspect she’s being drawn into the situation as a means to target Blake,’ the insider continued.

‘This was the first time that Taylor ever met Justin. She had no idea who he was and Taylor was simply being polite. She was polite to him as she is to everyone she meets.’

This statement that “She [Swift] had no idea who he [Baldoni] was” is directly contradicted by Lively’s text to Swift shortly before the meeting:

“If you get here w this doofus director of my movie is still here (I’ll be ushering him out, but hope he’s still here) can you do me a huge favor. I need help with him… Can you tell him you’re excited for the movie… What a magnetic scene that is… So having the greatest living story teller unknowingly echo to him how much you love what we’re doing… will go such a long way”

And Swift’s response is not one of confusion or reluctance:

“I’ll do anything for you !!”

This exchange makes it harder to believe the narrative that there was no premeditation or intent. The meeting was clearly not extensively pre-planned, as Swift was on her way to Lively’s apartment when she was sent the scene for review, along with Lively’s suggestion that she talk about it if Baldoni was still present. They hadn’t talked out it for days/weeks/months prior. But Swift was aware that he might be there and that there was a job for her to do with that scene… This statement below is quite strategically worded, given the information we have now. It still holds because Swift didn’t ‘purposely plan to be’ present at the meeting, but instead became aware that she would likely be present at it while she was traveling to Lively’s apartment:

‘The source insisted that Taylor did not purposely plan to be there during the meeting.’

Lively’s follow-up text after the meeting, celebrating Swift’s “heroic” performance and how the “clown” Baldoni was “falling for all of it”, and Swift’s reply, “I WON THE LOTTERY,” suggests that she was, at the time, a willing participant in Lively’s goal to get Baldoni to use this rewritten scene.

The strategy of separating action from intent is a little less viable when texts explicitly reveal some intent behind the action. Swift may not have had intent, but she knew what Lively’s was.

Swift was not a passive supporter of Lively

Swift’s team relied on the friendship between her and Lively in their response last year:

‘She is confused by the claims in the suit, as her connection to Blake is purely a friendship, with no interest in influencing or controlling Blake’s projects.’

However, even with these texts, their strategy of arguing that Swift was did not have “interest in influencing or controlling Blake’s projects” doesn’t entirely fall apart… because when you’re friends with someone and that friend has an issue with another person that they have clearly (based on the content of some of the other texts) discussed with you in detail, you’re likely to want to take the opportunity to support your friend if a situation arises where you can. So Swift’s intent may have been ‘support my friend’, not ‘influence or control my friend’s projects’.

Whether that is true or not is definitely up for interpretation.

Swift’s team’s statement that she “finds Justin’s interpretation of the encounter perplexing, and those close to her suspect she’s being drawn into the situation as a means to target Blake” is strategically distancing her actions from the effect of them. The encounter happened; Swift was a willing participant, but Baldoni misinterpreted the situation as intent that wasn’t there and is using that interpretation to strengthen his case against Lively.

(This is not a bad strategy for Baldoni’s team - in this article, I’m looking at these texts specifically from the angle of how they do or don’t align with Swift’s team’s messaging, not breaking down Baldoni’s team’s strategy or the overall situation. There’s too much going on in this case to cover all of it.)

The next set of texts, in which Swift refers to Baldoni as “this bitch” when referring to an article about Baldoni’s past sexual trauma (the “something is coming” part, I believe, refers to the contents of this article), are still consistent with this friendship narrative. As I said in my previous article, it’s not unusual for a friend to say things like this when they think they’re being a good friend to someone in a bad situation.

And Lively obviously spent a lot of time talking about the situation with Swift:

That Swift felt she “was used by Blake Lively in her war with Justin Baldoni” and “resents Blake calling her one of her ‘dragons’ and leveraging her name” (as reported in TMZ) after finding out that her encounter with Baldoni and these texts associated with the situation were being used in the case… makes sense. Perhaps with some perspective on the situation, she realized that, while she thought she was acting as a good friend, she was being manipulated into becoming an active participant in Lively’s campaign against Baldoni. Perhaps she started to change her perspective on what actually happened between Lively and Baldoni. (I don’t think we’ll ever know.)

Swift’s team built a narrative around the absence of intent, and while these texts complicate that framing, they do not conclusively dismantle it. The strategy is weaker now but still workable, provided it is not further stress-tested. At this point, I expect radio silence from Swift’s team unless anything else comes out... Silence may be the least risky move, as any attempt to refine or restate the narrative risks drawing sharper attention to intent, where the available evidence is now far less forgiving.

One thing we can all learn from this is that anything we say in writing can be used against us… and we’d better make sure we (a) have a clear understanding of how it might be interpreted when it’s no longer private and (b) are comfortable defending it when it’s no longer read by the person it was written for.