Taylor Swift performs on stage during The Eras Tour at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Friday, July 28, 2023. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Even as Taylor Swift celebrates being named Time’s Person of the Year Wednesday, she seems to be in the mood to settle some old scores.
In her interview with Time, Swift addressed some of her foes, saying “Trash takes itself out every single time.” According to the article, those foes include Kim Kardashian and Kardashian’s ex-husband Kanye West, as well as Swift’s former music producer Scooter Braun, an ally of West’s, who acquired the rights to Swift’s first six albums in a 2019 sale.
Regarding Kardashian, Swift talked about how she still doesn’t appreciate the reality TV star for her actions in collaboration with West in 2016. That’s when Kardashian labeled Swift “a snake” and accused the singer of lying when she said she didn’t allow the rapper to write vulgar lyrics about her.
Kardashian’s accusations whipped up an online fury against Swift, full of snake memes and emojis. At the time, Kardashian tried to bolster her claims against Swift, the woman West publicly regarded as a nemesis, by releasing a video of a conversation between her then-husband and the singer. The conversation seemed to indicate that Swift was on board with West’s song, “Famous,” in which the controversial rapper called her a vulgar name and declared that he made her famous.
The ensuing scandal felt like “a career death,” Swift told Time. “Make no mistake— my career was taken away from me.”
At the time, Swift was coming off the success of her 2014 album, “1989,” which put her at the “top of the world,” Time said. But in the cyclical world of celebrity and fame, a public reassessment of Swift’s talent and persona was almost inevitable. In Swift’s case, this reassessment involved “all the hyenas” climbing out to “take their shots,” she told Time.
Presumably, Kardashian was one of those hyenas. Swift told Time that the shapewear entrepreneur engaged in “a fully manufactured frame job” with West, who would soon become more famous for his highly erratic public behavior than for his music. Swift said Kardashian took “an illegally recorded phone call,” edited it and released it to the public “to say to everyone that I was a liar.”
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” Swift continued. She retreated from the public eye, moved overseas, reportedly to the U.K., and didn’t leave her rental house for a year.
“I was afraid to get on phone calls,” Swift said. “I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Kardashian has since divorced West, and he’s effectively been canceled in mainstream culture for his series of antisemitic rants in late 2022, including his praise of Adolf Hitler. In the aftermath, he also subjected Kardashian to a series of online attacks, including about her ability to parent their four children.
Whether Kardashian regrets her part in West’s public bullying of Swift, she hasn’t said. In 2020, when she was still married to West, she in fact rebutted the idea that she “edited” that phone conversation, Variety reported. On social media, she also expressed annoyance that Swift had chosen to “reignite” an old dispute. She again accused Swift of lying and said she was “forced to defend” her husband.
In the meantime, Swift returned to the spotlight with her 2017 album “Reputation,” in which she embraced the snake imagery as if to subvert its power. Her video for “Look What You Made Me Do” also saw her killing off younger versions of herself. Now, Swift is back “on top of the world” — and so much more, as Time points out.
“As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell,” Time said. “As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion.”
With Swift’s statement to Time, it’s possible that she’ll again reignite the feud between her and Kardashian and West. The feud, at least between Swift and West, goes back to at least 2009, when the singer, then 19, got up on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to accept the Best Female Video award for “You Belong with Me.”
Suddenly, in the middle of her acceptance speech, West jumped on the stage, grabbed the microphone out of her hands and bellowed: “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you and (I’ll) let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!”
These days, Kardashian and West no longer present a united front.
Her career has plugged along nicely. She and her reality TV family remain powerful forces in pop culture and she, too, is said to be a billionaire. West, on the other, hand lost a number of lucrative endorsement deals because of his antisemitic rants. He mostly makes news these days with his bizarre public appearances in Italy, Germany and elsewhere with a woman named Bianca Censori, who may or may not be his wife.
Originally published at Martha Ross