Pop star Taylor Swift revealed in a new interview the depths to which she was affected by the controversy around Ye West’s 2016 song, “Famous,” where she is infamously name-checked with the jarring line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that b—- famous.”
In an interview as TIME‘s 2023 Person of the Year, Swift details how Kim Kardashian’s leak of a phone call between Taylor and West regarding the song sent her into a tailspin.
“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,” Swift asserted. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before.”
“I moved to a foreign country,” she continued. “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.”
After the song’s release in 2016, controversy ensued with both sides making contradictory claims as to whether West had spoken to Swift about the specific line before releasing the song.
Contrary to claims from Swift’s camp that she was never given a heads up on the line, on the leaked audio West can be heard telling Swift that the song contained a “controversial line” about her that he hoped she’d be OK with and that she would even post the song to her fans on social media.
Kardashian used social media to immediately respond to Swift’s telling of the story in a couple of posts via X, formerly Twitter.
“@TaylorSwift13 has chosen to reignite an old exchange — at this point feels very self-serving,” Kardashian wrote. “I feel like I’m left without a choice to respond because she is actually lying.”
“To be clear, the only issue I had around the situation was that Taylor lied through her publicist,” Kardashian added. “They clearly spoke so I let you all see that. Nobody ever denied that the word ‘b—-’ was used without her permission.”
Swift would be out of the public eye for a year and a half before returning to the spotlight in November 2017 with the release of her worldwide multiplatinum album, Reputation.
