“Hey, Taylor, I’m extremely happy for you, I’ll finish you off, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time,” Kanye (now known as “Ye”) famously said while Taylor was accepting her VMA for Best Female Video in 2009. Seeing photos of Taylor, Ye, and Kim Kardashian—then-new Ye’s wife—together at the 2015 Grammys, it appeared that the dispute had ended. When Taylor gave Ye the Vanguard Award at the VMAs later that year, their friendship appeared to be well established. Yet, things were far from stable: in 2016, Ye released “Famous,” a song that had the line “I feel like me and Taylor always could.” why do you still have sex?
I gave that b*tch notoriety. He stated that he had Taylor’s consent, but she rejected him and advised him against disseminating a song with such a potent misogynist message. Kim, however, jumped in to defend Ye, telling GQ that Taylor “absolutely approved of that,” and went a step further by uploading a video of a phone discussion between Taylor and Ye, which you can hear here, during which they discuss the disputed song. According to the call, Taylor agreed with the explicit line, going against what she had previously said.
Nevertheless, it was later discovered in 2020 that Ye Taylor never actually played the song or made any reference to its offensive lyrics, and the video Kim posted was modified. Taylor later broke her silence over the footage in an Instagram Story, sparingly following Kim and claiming that she was “speaking the truth the entire time” and that they had been “edited and manipulated” to be put in the frame. She then requested donations from her followers for charitable causes. The parties have not discussed this incident since that time.