There’s more backstory to the feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West than most people knew. That’s according to Taylor, who gave Rolling Stone an in-depth interview about what went down between them from 2009, when Kanye interrupted her MTV VMA acceptance speech, through the phone call Kim Kardashian West would later make public that seemed to show Taylor was OK with a nasty line about her in Kanye’s song “Famous.” As she recalled to Rolling Stone, Kanye apologized for the 2009 VMA move but that seemingly kind treatment didn’t last. “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 explained. She said they occasionally dined together after that and when he “would say really nice things about my music … it just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19.” Fast forward to the 2015 MTV VMAs: “… He called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over 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 …,” she said. “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. 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 s— And I was so upset.” Finally, there was the “Famous” incident. The way Taylor recalled the story, she never approved Kanye using a line that said, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b—- famous.” She told Rolling Stone Kanye sent flowers after the 2015 VMAs to apologize. Because she didn’t “want to be on bad terms again,” she decided to “move past” what he’d done. “So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song. And I was like, ‘OK, good. We’re back on good terms.'” Then she heard the song and she “was done,” she said. “The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it … Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a b—- … Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I,” she said. “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.”
