The saga involving Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West may feel like a distant memory, but fans of Swift know its significance in her lore. It all started in 2009, when Swift won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video and was interrupted on stage by West, who proclaimed that Beyoncé deserved the award instead.
That moment set off a chain of events: Swift’s track “Innocent,” West’s song “Famous,” a leaked video from Kardashian and an album by Swift that addressed her reputation. As Time magazine describes it in Swift’s Person of the Year cover story published this week, the moment went on to “shape the next decade of both artists’ lives.”
Swift, named by the magazine’s editors as the person who most influenced the world in 2023, reflected on the feud during a conversation with the cover story’s writer, journalist Sam Lansky.
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“I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” she said about her headspace at the time.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she added. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. 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.”
If you need a refresher on what, exactly, happened between Swift, West, and that leaked phone call from Kardashian, read on for a timeline of the key moments in their feud.
September 2009: Kanye West interrupts Taylor Swift at the VMAs
This is the moment that started it all. A 19-year-old Swift won the award for Best Female Video at the MTV VMAs for “You Belong With Me.” Just as she took the stage to secure her Moon Man, Kanye West approached and grabbed the mic.
“I’ma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” he said. Swift was left stunned on stage.
“I was really excited, because I’d just won the award, and then I was really excited because Kanye West was on stage … and then I wasn’t excited anymore after that,” she told reporters afterward.
September 2009: Taylor Swift says Kanye West apologized for VMAs incident
Two days after the VMAs, Swift appeared on ABC Radio to say West apologized for stealing her moment at the VMAs.
“Kanye did call me and he was very sincere in his apology, and I accepted that apology,” she shared.
September 2010: Taylor Swift performs a new song, ‘Innocent,’ at the VMAs
A year after West stole the mic from Swift, she took the same stage to perform a song called “Innocent” that would be on her album “Speak Now” coming in October. The lyrics include this line, which fans believe is Swift addressing West: “It’s OK, and life is a tough crowd / 32 and still growing up now / Who you are is not what you did / You’re still an innocent.”
August 2015: Taylor Swift addresses where she stands with Kanye West
Fast forward five years, and it seemed West and Swift had put their feud to rest. Swift said in the Sept. 2015 edition of Vanity Fair: “I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with him until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me — so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time.”
February 2016: Kanye West releases a song, ‘Famous,’ with a vulgar Taylor Swift lyric
West’s album “The Life of Pablo” came in early 2016. The record included a song called “Famous,” with a lyric referencing Taylor Swift: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, why? / I made that b— famous.”
February 2016: Taylor Swift seems to address Kanye West in Grammys speech
A few days after the release of “The Life of Pablo,” Swift was at the Grammys accepting her album of the year award for “1989.” In her speech, she seemed to address Kanye West.
“I want to say to all the young women out there, 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.”
June 2016: Kim Kardashian says Taylor Swift approved of ‘Famous’ lyric
In the summer of 2016, Kim Kardashian — who was married to Kanye West at the time — appeared in a GQ cover spread. In the interview, she told a reporter that Swift “totally approved” of the controversial lyric in West’s “Famous.”
“She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn’t. I swear, my husband gets so much shit for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved,” she said.
In response, a spokesperson for Swift issued a lengthy statement to GQ:
“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. Kanye West never told Taylor he was going to use the term ‘that bitch’ 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.”
June 2016: Kanye West’s ‘Famous’ music video includes sculpture of naked Taylor Swift
Kanye West released a music video for “Famous” that included sculptures of various stars in the nude or beneath a blanket, including Chris Brown, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift. The concept for the music video was inspired by Vincent Desiderio’s painting “Sleep.”
July 2016: Kim Kardashian leaks video footage of Kanye West’s phone call with Taylor Swift
In an effort to defend her then-husband, Kardashian uploaded to her Snapchat a video that she said was taken prior to the release of “The Life of Pablo.” It showed Kanye West on speaker phone with Taylor Swift, and she appeared to give approval of the lyrics to “Famous.”
“As a friend, I want things that make you feel good,” West says in the video.
“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,’” Swift also says.
The video quickly went viral on social media, with many siding with Kardashian and tweeting the hashtag "#KimExposedTaylorParty."
In response, Swift had said in a now-deleted Instagram post: “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 part of, since 2009.”
August 2017: Taylor Swift announces a new album, ‘Reputation,’ that seems to hint at Kanye West feud
Taylor Swift famously went off the grid after Kim Kardashian leaked her phone call with Kanye West and avoided the public eye for about a year. In August 2017, she deleted all content from her social media and surprise announced a new album called “Reputation."
November 2017: Swift releases a song 'This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,’ seemingly about Kanye West
When “Reputation” dropped in November 2017, a track called “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” appeared to address Kanye West and the leaked phone call.
The lyrics included the lines: “There I was giving you a second chance / If only you weren’t so shady / But you stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand / And therein lies the issue / Friends don’t try to trick you / Get you on the phone and mind-twist you.”
September 2019: Taylor Swift reflects on the Kanye feud in Rolling Stone
Years after the phone-call leak, Taylor Swift opened up about her public disagreement with Kanye West in a profile story for Rolling Stone.
“The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it,” Swift told the magazine. “Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a b___h.”
“That was not just a singular event,” she went on to say. “Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.”
March 2020: The full video of Taylor Swift and Kanye West’s phone call leaks
An unedited, 25-minute version of Taylor Swift and Kanye West’s phone call that Kim Kardashian posted years before was leaked online in early 2020. In the video, West shares a planned lyric along the lines of “I made her famous,” but neglects the “b—” reference that ended up in the final song. In fact, in unedited phone call, Swift even appears to be happy that West doesn’t use such language: “I thought it was going to be like, ‘That stupid, dumb bitch.’ But it’s not,” she is heard saying.
She does tell West that she’s glad the reference isn’t “mean” but would like to mull on it before giving her approval: “I need to think about it, because you know, when you hear something for the first time, you just need to think about it. Because it is absolutely crazy. I’m glad it’s not mean, though.”
Variety transcribed the full conversation and posted it in an article shortly after it leaked.
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