Taylor Swift, overcome with emotion, glided up the Staples Center steps to accept her Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It would be her second such honor—more than Beyoncé and Jay Z combined—and the newly-minted pop star came armed with a lengthy acceptance speech aimed at, in her eyes, her own personal Brutus: Kanye West.
“As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I wanna say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success, or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you’ll know that it was you and the people who love you that put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world,” proclaimed Swift.
She was, of course, addressing West’s recent song “Famous” off his album The Life of Pablo, wherein the demonstrative artist references their infamous VMAs run-in, rapping, “For all my Southside niggas that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous / God damn / I made that bitch famous.”
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West claimed he’d run the lyrics by Swift beforehand, and later unleashed a backstage rant at SNL calling her a “fake-ass” for feigning outrage over them. Swift denied this via her rep, who stated, “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account,” Swift’s publicist said in a statement following the song’s release. “She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message.”Kim Kardashian West claimed it was all BS in an interview with GQ, alleging that Swift “totally gave the okay” on the lyrics, and that “Rick Rubin was there… I don’t know why [Swift] just, you know, flipped all of a sudden… It was funny because [on the call with Kanye, Taylor] said, ‘When I get on the Grammy red carpet, all the media is going to think that I’m so against this, and I’ll just laugh and say, ‘The joke’s on you, guys. I was in on it the whole time.’ And I’m like, wait, but [in] your Grammy speech, you completely dissed my husband just to play the victim again.”She further alleged that since West films most of his life they had evidence of the call on video, and when Swift became aware of this her legal team sent them a cease-and-desist over it.
Well today, Kardashian West has released the receipts via Snapchat and, while the video is edited, it does appear to show West going over the lyrics to “Famous” with Swift on speakerphone—with Rubin in the room, as his wife claimed—and giving her approval, saying, “It’s like a compliment, kind of... I really appreciate you telling me about this… that’s really nice.”
And now Swift has issued the following response, via Instagram:
