Taylor Swift has hinted she still “can’t forgive” Kim Kardashian for their headline-grabbing feud.
The pop superstar suffered a career setback in 2016 after being branded a snake and a “liar” when a public dispute between Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West and her led to the reality TV star releasing a private telephone call between the pair. Swift appears to have brought the bad blood back to the surface by working Kardashian’s name into the title of a song on her new album, The Tortured Poets Department.
In the track, ‘thanK you aIMee’ certain letters have been capped up to spell out the name “Kim” and the lyrics suggest Swift’s describing the aftermath of the pair’s fallout.
“When I picture my hometown / There’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you / And a plaque underneath it / That threatens to push me down the stairs, at our school …,” Swift sings.
“All that time you were throwin’ punches, I was buildin’ somethin’ / And I can’t forgive the way you made me feel / Screamed ‘F**k you, Aimee” to the night sky, as the blood was gushin’ / But I can’t forget the way you made me heal,” she continues.
“And it wasn’t a fair fight, or a clean kill / Each time that Aimee stomped across my gravе / And then she wrote hеadlines/ In the local paper, laughing at each baby step I’d take,” Swift adds.
Swift concludes by confirming she’s changed the name of the woman she’s singing about, further fuelling speculation the track is about Kim.
“And so I changed your name, and any real defining clues / And one day, your kid comes home singin’ / A song that only us two is gonna know is about you,” Swift sings.
“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that ***** famous,” West raps on the track, “Famous,” about his infamously interrupting Swift’s acceptance speech at MTV’s 2009 VMAs.
Kanye claimed the singer had approved the words, but Swift insisted she didn’t. Kardashian later released a phone call between the pair which suggested the pop star had indeed given the rapper permission to use those lyrics.
Swift is believed to have subsequently decamped to London where she spent time with her then-boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn. In a recent interview with Time, she claimed the incident ruined her life.
“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 recalled.
“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,” she said.
“[It was] a career death. Make no mistake: my career was taken away from me … ” she added.
However, Swift returned a year later with her 2017 album, Reputation, which alluded to the previous year’s drama.
Four years after the initial phone call leak, a longer version of the audio appeared online in 2020, which made it seem like the first release had been edited down.
At the time of the 2020 release, Kardashian defended her decision to share the audio on social media.
“@taylorswift13 has chosen to reignite an old exchange … I didn’t feel the need to comment a few days ago, and I’m actually really embarrassed and mortified to be doing it right now, but because she continues to speak on it, I feel I’m left without a choice but to respond because she is actually lying,” she wrote in an online post.
