Everything Taylor Swift Has Said About Kim Kardashian Feud: Quotes, Song Lyrics and More
Taylor Swift’s feud with Kim Kardashian dates back to 2016 when the reality star was still married to Kanye West. At the time, she publicly defended him following the release of his song “Famous,” which featured the lyric, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous.”
JUNE 2016
After Kim did an interview and claimed that Taylor “totally knew” about Ye’s “Famous” lyric and was aware that their phone call was being recorded, the singer hit back in a statement via her publicist. At this point, Taylor’s issue mostly still seemed to be with Ye and not his wife.
“Taylor does not hold anything against Kim Kardashian as she recognizes the pressure Kim must be under and that she is only repeating what she has been told by Kanye West,” the statement said. “Kim Kardashian’s claim that Taylor and her team were aware of being recorded is not true and Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone.”
2015 MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS – BACKSTAGE AND AUDIENCE
Kim released snippet videos of Taylor and Kanye’s phone call and branded her a “snake,” which led to the hashtag #KimExposedTaylorParty trending on Twitter (now X). The Grammy winner hit back with a statement on Instagram.
“Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ on his song?” she asked. “It doesn’t exist because it never happened. You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called ‘that bitch’ in front of the entire world. Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship. He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot ‘approve’ a song you haven’t heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”
AUGUST 2017
After months away from the public eye, Taylor returned with a new single called “Look What You Made Me Do.” The music video featured snakes as a reference to Kim’s 2016 tweet, along with various other Easter eggs that referenced the drama.
NOVEMBER 2017
Taylor released her album Reputation and songs like “I Did Something Bad” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” touched on her drama with Kimye. However, most of the lyrics at this point seemed to be directed at Ye, rather than Kim specifically.
The difficult year in general was a common theme on the album, though, as Taylor sang about finding love with Joe Alwyn after her reputation was tarnished. Songs like “Delicate” and “Call It What You Want” referenced how she blocked out the noise thanks to her new relationship.
MARCH 2019
Taylor referenced her issues with Kim in a piece for
magazine called “30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30.”
“I learned that disarming someone’s petty bullying can be as simple as learning to laugh,” she shared. “In my experience, I’ve come to see that bullies want to be feared and taken seriously. A few years ago, someone started an online hate campaign by calling me a snake on the internet. The fact that so many people jumped on board with it led me to feeling lower than I’ve ever felt in my life, but I can’t tell you how hard I had to keep from laughing every time my 63-foot inflatable cobra named Karyn appeared onstage in front of 60,000 screaming fans [on tour]. It’s the Stadium Tour equivalent of responding to a troll’s hateful Instagram comment with ‘lol.’ It would be nice if we could get an apology from the people who bully us, but maybe all I’ll ever get is the satisfaction of knowing I could survive it, and thrive in spite of it.”
JUNE 2019
After learning that Scott Borchetta, the head of her former label, had sold her masters to Scooter Braun, Taylor wrote a blog post on Tumblr and mentioned Kim while slamming the decision.
“I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world,” she shared. “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his 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 [Ye and Justin Bieber] together to bully me online about it.”
AUGUST 2019
In an interview with Vogue, Taylor said, “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience. I don’t think there are many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly. When you say someone is canceled, 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.’”
Taylor also released her album Lover this month and it kicked off with the track “I Forgot That You Existed.” While this was mostly a nod to Ye, it covered her 2016 experience as a whole with lyrics like, “I forgot that you existed and I thought that it would kill me but it didn’t, and it was so nice, so peaceful and quiet.”
SEPTEMBER 2019
Taylor briefly mentioned Kim while discussing the trajectory of her relationship with Ye in a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone.
While reflecting on presenting the rapper with the Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs in 2015, Taylor recalled, “He called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe an hour-long conversation. And he’s like, ‘I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me.’ And went into all the reasons why it means so much. Because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!’ And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced.”
Editor’s note: Ye’s exact quote was, “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award [because] it got them more ratings?”
JANUARY 2020
Taylor’s Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, was heavily focused on her comeback after being “canceled” in 2016. Referring to the “Taylor Swift is a snake” social media trend, which went viral after Kim called her a “snake” on Twitter (now X), the pop star said, “Do you know how many people have to be tweeting that they hate you for that to happen?”
She also added, “When people decided I was wicked and evil and conniving and not a good person, that was the one I couldn’t really bounce back from, because my whole life was centered around it.”
MARCH 2020
A full video of the phone call between Taylor and Ye was leaked online and fans immediately noted that it never showed Ye informing Taylor of the “bitch” lyric.
Taylor responded to the leak on her Instagram Story amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “Instead of answering those who are asking how I feel about the video footage that was leaked, proving that I was telling the truth the whole time about *that call* (you know, the one that was illegally recorded, that somebody edited and manipulated in order to frame me and put me, my family, and my fans through hell for 4 years)… SWIPE UP to see what really matters.”
Kim responded and accused Taylor of “lying” about the situation. “The only issue I ever had around the situation was that Taylor lied through her publicist who stated that ‘Kanye never called to ask permission…’ They clearly spoke so I let you all see that. Nobody ever denied that the word bitch was used without her permission. At the time they spoke the song had not been fully written yet, but as everyone can see in the video, she manipulated the truth of their actual conversation in her statement when her team said she ‘declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message.’ The lie was never about the word bitch, it was always whether there was a call or not and the tone of the conversation. I never edited the footage (another lie) – I only posted a few clips on Snapchat to make my point and the full video that recently leaked doesn’t change the narrative.”
Taylor’s publicist, Tree Paine, then reposted her original statement about the situation to clap back at Kim’s message. She pointed out that Kim edited the original PR statement in her above response and did not include the full context of what Tree said about Ye.
For clarity, Tree’s original full statement said, “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his song “Famous” on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.’” As many fans pointed out, Tree never said that Ye didn’t call Taylor at all. Rather, she just clarified the context of what he said on that phone call.
DECEMBER 2020
Taylor dropped her second pandemic album, Evermore. While most of the tracks were fictional, there were some autobiographical elements to the album, including the song “Long Story Short,” which referenced her 2016 drama with Kim.
“‘Cause I fell from the pedestal, right down the rabbit hole, long story short it was a bad time,” she sings on the track. “Pushed from the precipice, clung to the nearest lips.”
OCTOBER 2022
On her album Midnights, Taylor included the song “Karma,” which seemed to be a nod to all of those who scorned her. That, of course, includes Kim.
The hit song has lyrics like, “I keep my side of the street clean, you wouldn’t know what I mean,” and, “Karma’s a relaxing thought, aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?”
DECEMBER 2023
“[It was] a career death,” Taylor told Time magazine in her Person of the Year profile. “Make no mistake, my career was taken away from me. 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. 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 anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
APRIL 2024
Taylor’s 11th album The Tortured Poets Department featured the song “thanK you aIMee,” which told a story of being bullied. While the bully in the song was named Aimee, the capitalization of KIM in the song title seemed to reveal who the track was really about.
The chorus of the song features Taylor singing, “All that time you were throwing punches, I was building something, and I couldn’t wait to show you it was real. Screamed, ‘F–k you, Aimee,’ to the night sky as the blood was gushing, but I can’t forget the way you made me heal.”
She also said, “I wrote a thousand songs that you find uncool. I built a legacy that you can’t undo. But when I count the scars, there’s a moment of truth, that there wouldn’t be this if there hadn’t been you. And maybe you reframed it and in your mind you never beat my spirit black and blue. I don’t think you’ve changed much and so I changed your name and any real defining clues. And one day your kid comes home singing a song that only us two is gonna know is about you.”
By the end of the song, she changed the “f–k you, Aimee” lyric to “thank you, Aimee,” adding, “the stars are stunning ‘cause I can’t forget the way you made me heal.”
