Demi Lovato is getting in the middle of Taylor Swift’s war of words with talent manager Scooter Braun after he bought Swift’s old record label, Big Machine Label, and acquired her music catalog.
Lovato defended Braun, her manager, after Swift wrote a letter accusing him of “incessant, manipulative bullying” and said the idea of Braun owning her old music was her “worst case scenario.”
Lovato posted her own response to the public feud on her Instagram story Sunday.
“I have dealt with bad people in the industry and Scooter is not one of them. He’s a good man,” the “Sorry Not Sorry” singer wrote. “Personally, I’m grateful he came into my life when he did. Please stop ‘dragging’ people or bullying them. There’s enough hate in this world as it is.”
Knowing that Swifties would likely take issue with her defense of Braun, Lovato told her followers that “y’all can come after me all you want but I’m always going to stay loyal to my team.”
Justin Bieber also stood up for his manager, who discovered him on YouTube in 2008, and criticized Swift for publicly putting Braun on blast. He addressed her on Instagram with a “Hey Taylor” and a photo of the two from many years ago.
“As the years have passed we haven’t crossed paths and gotten to communicate our differences, hurts or frustrations. So for you to take it to social media and get people to hate on scooter isn’t fair,” Bieber wrote. “What were you trying to accomplish by posting that blog? seems to me like it was to get sympathy u also knew that in posting that your fans would go and bully scooter.”
Bieber asked Swift to communicate things offline and said that normally, he wouldn’t get involved in something this public.
“I usually don’t rebuttal things like this but when you try and deface someone i loves character thats crossing a line,” he said.
On Sunday, Swift said she’d found out from the news that Braun’s Ithaca Holdings had acquired Big Machine Label Group and her back catalog of music. She is now with Universal Music Group.
“Some fun facts about today’s news: I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world,” Swift wrote in a lengthy post on Tumblr, saying that she was “sad and grossed out.” “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years.”
“This is my worst case scenario,” Swift added.
Scott Borchetta of Big Machine Label denied that Swift had learned about the deal from the news, saying he texted her about it as a courtesy. He also denied that Swift wasn’t given the chance to take back her catalog.
“Taylor had every chance in the world to own not just her master recordings, but every video, photograph, everything associated to her career. She chose to leave,” Borchetta wrote in response to Swift’s post.
“As to her comments about ‘being in tears or close to it’ anytime my new partner Scooter Braun’s name was brought up, I certainly never experienced that,” he wrote. “Was I aware of some prior issues between Taylor and Justin Bieber? Yes.”
But Borchetta maintained that “Scooter was never anything but positive about Taylor.”
Read Swift’s full statement below: