Taylor Swift's Five Godchildren Were All Missing From Her Wedding
Taylor Swift got married at Madison Square Garden on July 2-3. Her five godchildren were not there.
The absences tell a story about how much Swift's inner circle has shifted over the past few years — and which friendships survived the journey to the altar.
Swift is godmother to five children total. She's godmother to Leo, 10, the son of actress Jaime King, a role she took on in 2015 after the two grew close when King was pregnant. She's also godmother to all four of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds' kids — James, 11, Inez, 9, Betty, 6, and Olin, 3 — children whose names were woven so deeply into Swift's music that "Betty" became a Folklore track.
None of them were at the wedding. The flower girls were Travis Kelce's nieces — Jason Kelce's daughters.
Why Each Friendship Frayed
King and Swift's friendship quietly faded over the past several years. A source close to King told reporters in April 2025 that the relationship had "suffered because of the personal challenges" King has faced — she lost custody of both Leo and her older son James after failing to complete a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. Swift and King haven't been photographed together in years.
"Taylor gets really close to the people in front of her fast," a music insider said. "She and Jaime just happened to be friends when Jaime was pregnant, and that's why Jaime asked — but they didn't have a super long history together."
The Lively situation is more publicly documented and more complicated. Swift and Lively's friendship unraveled amid Lively's legal battle with It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni, which revealed that Lively had enlisted Swift to vouch for her script revisions to Baldoni. Private texts between the two women surfaced in December 2024, including one from Swift acknowledging "a little bit of a shift" in their friendship and saying Lively's communication had started to feel like "a mass corporate email sent to 200 employees."
On the day of Swift's rehearsal dinner, Lively and Reynolds were at daughter Betty's horse show in Lake Placid.
Reps for King, Swift, and Lively did not respond to requests for comment.
The Longer List of Friendships That Didn't Make It
The godchildren absences sit alongside a broader pattern of friends who were once prominently in Swift's orbit and are no longer there.
Singer Todrick Hall, once a fixture at Swift's events and outspoken advocate for her during the Scooter Braun fallout, was reportedly dropped from the wedding guest list because he "yapped about anything and everything" to do with Swift, according to the insider. Model Martha Hunt, who appeared in the "Bad Blood" video and was photographed in Swift's VIP tent at the Eras Tour in 2023, also wasn't invited. "That was the last time they talked," the insider said.
Lorde wasn't there either — reportedly because Lena Dunham's 2026 memoir Famesick suggested, without naming her, that the New Zealand singer got inappropriately close to Dunham's then-fiancé, music producer Jack Antonoff. Swift and Antonoff have been close collaborators for years. Loyalty apparently travels in both directions.
Former close friends Selena Gomez and Gigi Hadid, who were fixtures in Swift's "squad" era of the mid-2010s, have faded from the visible inner circle without any public falling out. Karlie Kloss, once one of Swift's most photographed companions, drifted away after her marriage to Josh Kushner — a split that was widely attributed to the political complications of Kushner's family ties, though neither ever confirmed it.
What the Pattern Might Actually Suggest
Swift's friendship history reveals a recurring dynamic that several people close to her have described in similar terms — intense closeness, rapid bonding, and then a quiet fade when circumstances change or trust breaks down.
"Taylor gets close to people fast and they'll hang out a lot and then they'll just drift," the music insider said.
That framing is generous. The fuller picture suggests something more intentional — Swift appears to run a tight operation around her personal life, and loyalty is the price of admission. People who talk, who leak, who get publicly messy, or who align with people Swift feels wronged by tend to quietly disappear from the frame. The exits are rarely dramatic and almost never publicly confirmed — they just happen, and you notice it when someone who was once everywhere in Swift's world suddenly isn't.
What's striking about the wedding guest list is how it crystallizes this. The people in the room at MSG were people who had proven, over years, that they could keep a secret, stay loyal, and not complicate things. Emma Stone was there. Lena Dunham was there and gave a speech. The friends who remained are the ones who never became a headline.
The godchildren — five kids who carry Swift's name in a formal religious and legal sense — weren't there because their parents didn't make the cut. That's a particular kind of complicated. It’s also unfortunate for the children involved.
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