The Target-only notebooks that accompanied Taylor Swift’s seventh studio album, Lover, allegedly plagiarized Teresa La Dart’s 2010 poetry collection of the same name, according to a new lawsuit the novelist and poet has filed against Swift. La Dart allegedly claimed that Swift’s notebooks “contained a number of creative aspects that mimicked the expressive patterns and arrangements” of her own collection of poetry, according to documents obtained by Parade. In essence, she believes Swift plagiarized the atmosphere of her book, including the color scheme, the image groupings, and the historical reflection. The diary was published in four separate iterations by Swift, each of which featured unique scans of writings from her childhood journals, handwritten song lyrics, and images arranged almost like a scrapbook at the beginning and conclusion of the first section. Each book’s second half is made up of blank journal pages, and the covers of the journals and the corresponding albums are identical. According to La Dart, Swift’s Lover book, which attributes all creative credit to Swift, contains “substantially” similar formats, including the placement of “interspersed photographs and writings throughout” and the “recollection of past years memorialized in a combination of written and pictorial components.” La Dart, who claims Swift generated more than $1 million in revenues from utilizing her work, has asked for a jury trial and is suing to recoup all of those earnings. Swift is yet to respond to the accusations, but La Dart’s attorney told Pitchfork as paraphrased, “Glad to share some perspective as many critics seem to think this was badly conducted.”
