Taylor Swift has spoken about the “isolating experience” that followed her infamous feud with Kim Kardashian in 2016.
The pair had a high-profile falling out over Kanye West’s song Famous, in which he declared he and Taylor “might still have sex” and that he “made that bitch famous”.
When the singer insisted she’d not been consulted over the song’s lyrical content, Kim shared video evidence of a phone conversation with Taylor approving certain lyrics but not the line referring to her as a “bitch”, leading to a social media pile-on and the reality star famously branding Taylor a “snake” – a nickname which quickly caught on.
What followed was – in Taylor’s words – a “mass public shaming”, in which “millions of people” told her she was “cancelled”.
“I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly,” she told Vogue. “When you say someone is cancelled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being.
“You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, ‘kill yourself’.”
Until recently, Taylor retained a silence on her feud with Kim and Kanye, although she did allude to it in several songs on her 2017 album Reputation.
However, more recently, she did speak out when it was discovered that Kanye’s former manager Scooter Braun, who had the rapper on his roster at the time Famous was released, had bought the masters of her first five albums.
She wrote in a Tumblr post: “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at [Scooter’s] hands for years.
“Like when Kim Kardashian orchestrated an illegally recorded snippet of a phone call to be leaked and then Scooter got his two clients together to bully me online about it…. or when his client, Kanye West, organised a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked.”
In the Kanye West video in question, Taylor is one of several famous figures who are depicted, in wax form, as naked and asleep in bed with Kanye and his wife Kim Kardashian, alongside the likes of Rihanna, Chris Brown, Donald Trump and Bill Cosby.
Read Taylor’s full interview in the September issue of American Vogue, from 20 August.
CORRECTION: This article has been edited to point out that Taylor Swift only approved certain lyrics of Kanye West’s Famous.