Taylor Swift Kanye West [CBS]
As the web was buzzing over this week’s “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” in which the renewed beef between Taylor Swift and Kanye West received ample focus, Kim Kardashian took to Snapchat to release video footage of a phone conversation between Kanye West and Taylor Swift.
Allegedly recorded when Kanye West was developing his controversial song “Famous,” the video finds West sharing the infamous lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” The voice on the other line, which indeed sounds like Swift, says the line is like a compliment.
West also claims he shared the lyric because he cares about Swift as a person and as a friend. Swift expresses appreciation for the head’s up, while also vowing to publicly confirm that West called her about the song.
Shortly after the footage emerged, Swift posted an official statement on her social media accounts.
While the statement implicitly confirms the legitimacy of the call (“when Kanye West secretly records your phone call”), it stresses that West did not share the other controversial lyric — “I still made that bitch famous” — with Swift.
“Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ in his song,” writes Swift. “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.”
Swift adds that while she wanted to like the song and support West, she never actually heard the song. “You cannot ‘approve’ a song you never heard.”
The “1989” artist criticizes West for falsely painting her as a liar — which she calls “character assassination” — and asks to be excluded from this narrative, “one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”
This past February, Swift’s publicist Tree Paine issued a statement vehemently denying that Swift gave approval to the song.
“Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account,” said Paine. “She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message.” Like Swift’s latest statement, Paine’s comments deny that Swift had ever heard the “bitch” lyric.
What neither the released video footage nor Swift’s new statement directly addresses, however, is the claim that she “cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message.”