Taylor Swift Opens Up About How Her ‘Career Was Taken Away’ Over A Kanye West Lyric

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Taylor Swift is opening up about being interrupted by Ye aka Kanye West—but not the way you might think. The “Cruel Summer” singer isn’t harping over her 2009 MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech that was famously interrupted by Ye’s impromptu shout-out to the superiority of Beyoncé videos. Instead, Swift is getting candid about the emotional toll caused by her years-old public feud with Ye and Kim Kardashian over lyrics in Ye’s 2016 song, “Famous.”

For those who are unfamiliar with the song, it includes the lyrics: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that b-tch famous.” Kim Kardashian claimed at the time that Swift was aware of the lyrics and that she gave the green light for Ye to release the song. Kardashian even showed what appeared at the time to be receipts in the form of a recorded conversation in which Swift gave the OK. But during a recent interview for Time’s Person of the Year issue, Swift said she was only aware of the first part of the rap line, but not the part about how Ye “made that b-tch famous.” She said that what the public actually saw was “an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar.”

Because the internet is full of people who never met a juicy headline they didn’t want to immediately form a knee-jerk opinion over, people on social media overwhelmingly sided with Ye during the dispute. Then, in 2020, internet sleuths (or internet Swifties as it were) came to the “Bad Blood” artist’s rescue with the unedited phone call recording, which proved that she, indeed, had been misled about the lyric in question. But Swift said that by that time the damage had already been done.

“Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me… I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,” she said.

“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” Swift said of the public reaction, which, again, swayed heavily in Ye’s favor. “I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

Obviously, it wasn’t long before Swift bounced back and developed into the pop sensation and 12-time Grammy winner that she is today. And instead of holding a grudge against Ye or Kardashian, she said she “learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies” because the “trash takes itself out every single time.”

Ima let you finish, Ye, but Taylor might have been on to something.

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