Taylor Swift and Jameela Jamil’s unsealed texts to their friends don’t make them mean girls, regardless of where you stand on the It Ends With Us lawsuit.
In the past few days, the It Ends With Us lawsuit we all wish would end forced us back into the discourse through unsealed court documents that allegedly reveal private text messages and emails between various members of Hollywood’s upper echelon, and to call them juicy would be an understatement.
Yesterday, I found myself grappling with unease over reading the texts between Swift and Blake Lively. On the one hand, it’s an obvious invasion of privacy that neither party could have expected at the time of their correspondence. On the other, I’m nosy by nature and found myself moved by the way the pair navigated their shifting dynamic with honesty and empathy.
But today, as I look at the online responses to Jameela Jamil’s texts with Justin Baldoni’s publicist, Jennifer Abel, as well as Swift’s additional comments about Baldoni, I’m just exhausted.
In alleged text messages with Lively prior to the lawsuit, Swift described Baldoni as a “bitch,” among other insults. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the PR war, Jamil allegedly referred to Lively as a “villain” and a “suicide bomber,” suggesting she was tanking her own reputation with “cold” surface-level messaging about the film’s domestic violence themes, which was a common criticism during the film’s 2024 press run.
To many on Lively’s side, these texts are proof Jamil is a “faux feminist,” while those in Baldoni’s corner say Swift has been stripped of her “nice girl facade.” To me, they’re both being normal friends, and online reactions say more about us—and our need to find a villain in every situation—than it does about them.
Who among us hasn’t let our close friends vent about a coworker or hookup we don’t know personally but have declared a sworn enemy by proxy? I know I’ve said much worse about people I’ve never met over far less egregious accusations made by my friends. If that makes me a mean girl, so be it.
At the end of the day, neither of these women suspected their words would be plastered over the internet for public consumption. Should all of our texts be edited for a potential subpoena and reflect only the thoughts we’d be comfortable with the internet picking apart? Messaging a friend is supposed to be a safer outlet for unloading than sharing our grievances on the internet and having them bite us in the ass.
Unfortunately, too many of us don’t actually have a strong enough support system in place to recognize this. According to the results of the 2025 American Perspectives Survey, the “percentage of U.S. adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12% since 1990.” That’s a big problem when the American Psychologists Association declares that close friendships can improve our quality of life and protect against depression, anxiety, and other health issues.
I’m not saying these text should be ignored or are impertinent to the court case at hand. That’s for lawyers to argue about when this goes to trial in May. They’re just not a good barometer of who these women are on a daily basis, especially considering both women could only know what they’d been told by their own inner circle. The fact that Swift and Jamil resorted to name-calling isn’t proof they’re fake or mean-spirited, it’s evidence they’re imperfect people who were trying to support friends who were clearly in crisis mode.
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