“I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, ‘This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.’ But that’s where I was,” she told Rolling Stone. “And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19.”
But their friendship ended for good in 2016 when Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a recording of a phone call between him and Swift.
Kanye had called her about a song that included the lyric: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b—- famous / I made that b—- famous.” Swift expressed anger over the lyrics publicly, saying she never gave him permission. But she was quickly forced to backtrack when Kardashian released a recording of the phone call where Swift told Kanye the lyric was “a compliment.”
Swift said another double-cross happened prior to the 2015 VMA. West, 42, asked her to present him with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.
“I was so stoked that he asked me that,” she said. “And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!’
“And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife (Kardashian), and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk s—. And I was so upset.”
