Taylor Swift is opening up about one of the darkest moments in her life.
In a new interview for Time‘s Person of the Year edition — her first print interview in four years — the “Anti-Hero” singer gets candid about the leaked video which showed Kanye West asking Taylor for her permission to name-drop her in his 2016 song, “Famous.”
After the song’s release, Taylor claimed she never consented to Kanye’s lyric in reference to her — “I made that b**ch famous” — though the rapper and then-wife Kim Kardashian insisted the singer signed off on the line.
Kim even went so far as to release an edited video of a phone call between Taylor and Kanye that seemed to show the moment Taylor OK’d the line. However, when the full clip of the call was later dug up by Swifties, it became evident that Taylor had only been told about a different lyric.
In the unedited video, after Kanye tells Taylor to “brace herself” to hear his proposed line, Taylor asks, “Is it gonna be mean?”
“No, I don’t think it’s mean,” Kanye replies.
He then shares the lyric, rapping, “I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex,” with Swift laughing in response and saying, “That’s not mean.”
At no point in the video is the line “I made that b**ch famous” discussed, and in fact, Taylor expresses her worry that Kanye was going to call her a “b**ch” in the song.
“It doesn’t feel mean,” she says again of the line, “but like, oh my god, the build-up you gave it. I thought it was gonna be like, ‘That stupid, dumb b**ch,’ like, but it’s not.”
These days, Taylor told Time, she thinks of the incident as a “fully manufactured frame job.”
“[It was] an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she recalled. “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.”
In a Twitter thread after the full video was released, Kim defended her position, saying she felt “forced to defend” Kanye amid the fallout.
But, from Taylor’s point of view, the damage was done.
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” Taylor she said of the public feud. “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.”
In the years since, the singer has shaken off the negativity and is currently embracing the spotlight again amid the success of her worldwide Eras Tour and high-profile romance with NFL star Travis Kelce.
“This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been,” she marveled to Time. “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question.”
Adopting what the interviewer described as a “booming voice,” Taylor continued: “Are you not entertained?”
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