Taylor Swift slams Kanye West in Rolling Stone interview: 'He is so two-faced'
Taylor Swift is digging into one of the most fraught relationships of her career – not with one of her celebrity exes, but with Kanye West.
In her new Rolling Stone cover story, Swift describes in detail how she attempted to reconnect with Kanye in 2015, after his infamous onstage crashing of her Video Music Awards speech in 2009. As Swift fans know, she and West's issues would only snowball into disaster after she and him attempted a friendship – he would later name-check her on his "Famous" song, only for her to protest and his wife, Kim Kardashian, to claim that Swift had actually approved of the lyric all along.
"I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me – because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me," she said about West, describing how their ensuing friendship, including dinners out together, felt like "I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19."
"But the 2015 VMAs come around," she continued, referencing the awards show at which she presented West with the Video Vanguard Award, only to have him take the stage and declare his intentions for running for president in a bizarre speech.
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"He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand … 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!’ “
West's exact words that night were, “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”
Swift described "standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body," before refusing to go backstage to meet West after the show.
"I realized he is so two-faced," she said. "That 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 (expletive)."
Months later, she recounted how he called her about his "Famous" lyrics, only to release the song with the words "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that (expletive) famous" without her knowledge or consent.
"When I heard the song, I was like, ‘I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it,' ” she said, going on to compare her drama with West to his falling-out with Drake, which also involved his associate Pusha T revealing the paternity of Drake's child. "And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you … Go watch Drake talk about what happened."
More: Kanye West accuses Drake of threatening his family in dramatic Twitter rant
As for West and Drake's drama, West apologized in Sept. 2018 for Pusha T's highly publicized feud with Drake, sharing an image of Drake's stage setup and writing, "Sending good energy and love to Drake and family and crew. I haven’t seen the show in person but the images look incredible online. I understand where the confusion started."
Just three months later, West was taking a much different tone, accusing Drake in a strongly-worded tweetstorm of “(threatening) the safety of me and my family." The two rappers have yet to publicly reconcile since.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Taylor Swift slams 'two-faced' Kanye West, sympathizes with Drake
