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In a rare interview, Taylor Swift says she believed that the fallout from her very public clash with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian amounted to “a career death.”
Swift, who has been on a wildly successful and ongoing international tour, was chosen as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. In an accompanying interview, she spoke frankly about the highs and lows of her career, including how her dispute with West and Kardashian affected her career and her mental health.
A recap of the messy feud: In 2009, West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards to say, essentially, that she didn’t deserve the Best Female Video award. Seven years later, West released the song “Famous,” which included the lines “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b---- famous,” and he said Swift OK’d it beforehand. Swift denied that she did, and months later, Kardashian (who was then married to West) leaked excerpts from a recording of a phone call between the artists that West’s team claimed vindicated him. However, a longer recording that surfaced later disproved that Swift had completely signed off.
Swift told Time that the initial leak affected her deeply, calling it a “fully manufactured frame job” that was released “to say to everyone that I was a liar.” (Kardashian claimed in 2020 that Swift had “forced me to defend him.”)
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” Swift said. “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.”
Swift is arguably the biggest pop star in the world right now. Fairly or not, she has often been accused of playing the victim in her narratives about her past relationships and in public quarrels with other celebrities (including West, who now goes by Ye, and Kardashian).
In her interview with Time, she frames herself as something of an underdog in two of the most significant feuds in her career and credits them as galvanizing forces for her success today: the drama with West and Kardashian and her dispute with music executive Scooter Braun over ownership of her master tapes. (Braun has denied Swift’s claims.)
“It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift told the magazine. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity. The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”