Taylor Swift Calls Kanye West ‘Two-Faced’ in No-Holds-Barred Interview
Taylor Swift spoke candidly about her history with Kanye West in the new issue of Rolling Stone.
Once the subject of West's infamous phone call — during which he recorded parts of his communication with Swift — came up in the topic of conversation, Swift didn't hold back.
"The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it," Swift shared. "Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a b---h. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things."
Swift and Kanye's tumultuous relationship began at the 2009 MTV VMAs, where West took the microphone from Swift during her acceptance speech for Best Female Video award and told the crowd that Beyoncé deserved the award instead of her. Swift said in the interview that all she ever wanted since that moment was for West to respect her.
"When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — 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 recalled. Swift then said that the time after the incident is when she began to forgive West.
The pop star shared that they went to dinners together and that she was happy when he said nice things about her music. "It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was nineteen," she explained on her decision to forgive him.
Swift revealed that the rapper called her up before the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards to ask her to present him with the Video Vanguard Award. "He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you," she quipped. She recalled that he said her presenting the award would mean so much to him.
Swift did present the award to him but during the acceptance speech he told the crowd, "You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?" Once he said that, Swift recalled that while she was standing in the audience with her arm around his wife, Kim Kardashian-West, "this chill ran through my body." The moment made Swift realize that he was "two-faced."
"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---," Swift shared. She was upset after the ordeal and refused West's request to talk to him after the show in his dressing room. The next day she received a large bouquet.
After Swift heard West's song, "Famous," on which he refers to her as a "b---h," she realized that she wanted to end her friendship with West.
Read the full interview in the current issue of Rolling Stone.