Taylor Swift’s ‘Life of a Showgirl’ Trademark Fight Escalates

Taylor Swift’s legal war with real-life Las Vegas showgirl Maren Wade took center stage again Wednesday, with the singer’s lawyers blasting Wade’s trademark infringement lawsuit as “meritless” ahead of an early October hearing on Swift’s bid to toss the case.

“Plaintiff’s overarching assertion that consumers are – or could be – confused into believing that Ms. Swift, a 14-time Grammy Award winner and global musical icon, is the source of or is associated with plaintiff’s podcast, book, or live cabaret performances at golf resorts and RV parks is nonsensical,” Swift’s lawyers wrote in their new filings obtained by Rolling Stone. “The court may dismiss where confusion is unlikely, and the court should do so here.”

In a pair of replies filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Swift’s lawyers again argued that her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, is a “quintessential expressive work” protected from trademark claims. They said album T-shirts and other promotional merchandise are similarly off-limits as “a logical extension of the expressive work.”

The lawyers also argued that Wade’s claims under California’s Unfair Competition Law (UCL) improperly seek to apply the statute “extraterritorially to a Nevada plaintiff.” They said Wade had failed to “identify a single case where trademark infringement served as the basis of an unfair UCL claim,” contending that the cases she cited instead involved false advertising.

Swift’s lawyers further claimed that the Los Angeles federal court lacks personal jurisdiction over the singer because she is a Tennessee resident. They rejected Wade’s claim that Swift specifically promoted the allegedly infringing album in California when she appeared at the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Awards to accept an Artist of the Year award. “Stretching an award show acceptance speech to constitute ‘advertising’ is ridiculous,” they wrote.

“Plaintiff’s claims were – and are still – baseless,” Swift’s lawyer Max N. Wellman and his co-counsel at Venable wrote in their main 16-page filing. “Having already amended once and still failing to plausibly allege any claims, plaintiff is not entitled to anything more. This case should be dismissed with prejudice.”

Wade sued Swift for trademark infringement in March and asked for an emergency moratorium on merchandise sales while the case plays out. Her lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Wade is a working performer who parlayed her 2014 “Confessions of a Showgirl” column in Las Vegas Weekly into a live show, a touring production, a book, a podcast, and her trademark. She claims that when Swift announced her album name, she was excited at first, but then the album’s overwhelming success quickly overpowered and drowned her out.

“‘Confessions of a Showgirl’ is not one mark among many for plaintiff. It is the only one she has,” her court filings, obtained by Rolling Stone, say. “[Wade] has built her professional identity under it for more than a decade, and she has no portfolio of alternative brands, no corporate backing, and no global marketing operation to compete for consumer attention. Defendants have all of these. That asymmetry is directly relevant to the equities, and it tips in plaintiff’s favor.”

At a hearing last May, Swift’s lawyer pointed out that Wade actually saw an opportunity when Swift named her album, and she seized it. He said Wade used hashtags related to Swift to direct traffic to her commercial website and asked people to follow her in her “Showgirl era.”

“There is absolutely no doubt that this woman, because of exuberance or trying to realize commercial gain, was very much affiliating herself with Ms. Swift for eight months while millions was spent to get this album out there, and it can’t be undone,” Swift’s lawyer J. Douglas Baldridge told the court. “It was eight months of not objecting to an expressive work while she glommed onto it.”

But Wade’s lawyer pushed back. He said his client spent 12 years building her own brand, writing a column, staging her own show, touring, publishing a book, and winning an “incontestable federal registration,” only to see her trademark “absorbed in real time into a multi-billion dollar commercial machine,” referring to Swift’s label partners, UMG Recordings and Bravado, who are co-defendants in the litigation. He said Swift, on the other hand, was a “sophisticated repeat trademark holder” who knew her attempt to get a trademark for her album didn’t succeed and who suspended her application rather than try to cure it.

“The hardship is not even close,” Wade’s lawyer Jaymie Parkkinen said. “They knew what they were doing, and they proceeded anyway.”