Taylor Swift vs. Kim Karadshian
Taylor has also been embroiled in a major feud with Kim for years. It all started when the “I Knew You Were Trouble” singer won the award for Best Music Video at the 2009 Video Music Awards. But when Kanye West jumped on stage and interrupted her acceptance speech, everyone was shook.
“Imma let you finish, but Beyonce had the best music video of all time,” he told the starlet.
What Kanye did was not cool at all, but Taylor, being the forgiving queen that she is, let it go. After that, everything seemed all good between her and Kanye, who married the reality star in 2015.
That was, until Kanye released a song that talked about Taylor, in a not-so-nice way. In Kanye’s song “Famous,” he called the singer a “b—h” and claimed that he was the reason she was famous.
After receiving a ton of backlash for the line, Kanye took to Twitter to explain that Taylor was OK with it.
“I called Taylor and had a hour long convo with her about the line, and she thought it was funny and gave her blessings,” he wrote in a now deleted tweet.
But Taylor claimed she never gave her approval. A spokesperson for the singer told PEOPLE, “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that b—h famous.’”
And when Taylor won a Grammy award a few weeks later, she low-key included a dig at Kanye in her acceptance speech.
“There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame,” she said. “If you just focus on the work, and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you who put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world. Thank you for this moment.”
And that’s when Kim got involved. Speaking to GQ, she stuck up for her husband.
“She totally approved that,” she said of the song. “She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn’t. I don’t know why she just, you know, flipped all of a sudden. It was funny because [on the call with Kanye] she said, ‘When I get on the Grammy red carpet, all the media is going to think that I’m so against this, and I’ll just laugh and say, ‘The joke’s on you, guys. I was in on it the whole time.’ And I’m like, wait, but [in] your Grammy speech, you completely dissed my husband just to play the victim again.”
Kim also seemingly called Taylor a snake on Twitter, when she wrote, “Wait it’s legit National Snake Day?!?!? They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days!”
Wow, the shade is so real. Taylor’s team released another statement, writing, “Taylor does not hold anything against Kim Kardashian, as she recognizes the pressure Kim must be under and that she is only repeating what she has been told by Kanye West. However, that does not change the fact that much of what Kim is saying is incorrect. Kanye West and Taylor only spoke once on the phone while she was on vacation with her family in January of 2016, and they have never spoken since. Taylor has never denied that conversation took place. It was on that phone call that Kanye West also asked her to release the song on her Twitter account, which she declined to do.”
The statement continued: “Kanye West never told Taylor he was going to use the term ‘that b—h’ in referencing her. A song cannot be approved if it was never heard. Kanye West never played the song for Taylor Swift. Taylor heard it for the first time when everyone else did and was humiliated. Kim Kardashian’s claim that Taylor and her team were aware of being recorded is not true, and Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone.”
But Kim came through with the receipts, and shocked us all when she shared a video to her Snapchat story. She claimed that it was a clip of Taylor and Kanye’s phone call about the song before it came out.
“It’s like a compliment,” Taylor could be heard saying in the video, referring to the line in the song.
“I never would’ve expected you to like tell me about a line in your song,” she continued. “I mean, I don’t think anybody would listen to that and be like, ‘Oh, that’s a real diss.’ You gotta tell the story that way that it happened to you and the way you experienced it.”
She went on to add, “If people ask me about it, look, I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘He called me and told me before it came out — Joke’s on you, guys. We’re fine.”
OK, so if you’re #TeamTaylor, it definitely doesn’t look good. But Taylor wasn’t about to sit back and watch all this go down and she quickly responded to the videos with a post on Instagram.
“Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that b—h’ in his song? It doesn’t exist because it never happened. You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called ‘that b—h’ in front of the entire world,” she wrote in the now deleted note.
“Of course I wanted to like the song,” she continued. “I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship. He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot ‘approve’ a song you haven’t heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”
She captioned the post, “That moment when Kanye West secretly records your phone call, then Kim posts it on the Internet.”
Wow, we honestly don’t know what to believe. After that, things were quiet between the ladies for a while, but in Taylor’s 2019 Elle Magazine cover, she totally shaded Kim.
“In my experience, I’ve come to see that bullies want to be feared and taken seriously. A few years ago, someone started an online hate campaign by calling me a snake on the internet,” she wrote, clearly referencing Kim’s infamous “National Snake Day” tweet. “The fact that so many people jumped on board with it led me to feeling lower than I’ve ever felt in my life, but I can’t tell you how hard I had to keep from laughing every time my 63-foot inflatable cobra named Karyn appeared onstage in front of 60,000 screaming fans. It’s the Stadium Tour equivalent of responding to a troll’s hateful Instagram comment with ‘lol.’ It would be nice if we could get an apology from people who bully us, but maybe all I’ll ever get is the satisfaction of knowing I could survive it, and thrive in spite of it.”
As fans know, Taylor not only had a giant, inflatable snake at her Reputation Tour, but she also included a ton of snakes in her music video for “Look What You Made Me Do.” We honestly love how she handled the whole situation.