The news that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn had split up after six years together hit Swifties like an atom bomb in April, especially considering the breakup was reportedly due to his discomfort with her fame. But that was nothing compared to the most recent development in Swift’s love life, which is proving a much tougher pill to swallow.
Based on paparazzi shots of intimate dinners and mornings-after, the pop star appears to have moved on with Matty Healy, lead singer of The 1975, and this has brought deep distress to many Swift fans.
Healy—known for his strange performance antics, including spitting wine at crowds, sucking a fan’s thumb, and penning lyrics such as, “We’re fucking in a car/Shooting heroin/Saying controversial things just for the hell of it”—has stirred up several troubling controversies that make him a noticeable outlier among Swift’s previous clean-cut paramours. (Except maybe John Mayer.)
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Let’s begin with this year. While onstage in January at a 1975 show and singing the words “thank you Kanye, very cool,” Healy appeared to perform a Nazi salute. Kanye West, of course, had unleashed a flood of highly public antisemitic remarks in the fall of 2022 that had gotten him dropped from every high-profile partnership he had and made him persona non grata to most sensible people (except, it seems, Healy).
The following month, Healy made an appearance on The Adam Friedland Show, a podcast widely associated with the dirtbag left, and mentioned that he’d once sent a DM to the rapper Ice Spice on Instagram.
Podcasts cohosts Friedland and Nick Mullen immediately called the rapper an “Inuit Spice Girl” before mocking Hawaiian and Chinese accents and adding, “This chubby Chinese lady. ‘Yeah, I rap and [make] music.’ Do they talk like that? Do Inuits talk like that?”
Healy didn’t push back at all against Friedland and Mullen, laughing right along with them, though he later apologized for the incident after it had drummed up considerable backlash.
In the same podcast interview, Friedland discussed Healy being found masturbating to Ghetto Gaggers pornography; the website, which is riddled with racist language, advertises “extreme hardcore face fucking, ebony hoodrats, ghetto double penetration, yellow discipline and interracial throat banging.”
In the episode, Friedland talks about leaving a party at Healy’s place with a group of people, one of whom returned to retrieve her water bottle and found Healy already masturbating to Ghetto Gaggers porn.
“You’re not exaggerating—it was 30 seconds, like, you guys were still waiting outside,” Healy told Friedland. “She came back in, I was already flustered. I was dressed as ‘guy who is jacking off,’ so I had, like, an untucked shirt, and I think it literally was Ghetto Gaggers on the TV—somebody just getting, like, brutalized.”
“Let’s say, best case scenario is Matty was totally joking in that interview,” Swift fan Maddie Ambrose told The Daily Beast. “It’s still disgusting to joke about that. To think that those websites are a joke makes it so clear how ignorant he is to the privileges he has, and to the ways that that content perpetuates so much racism. So even in the best case scenario, he’s ignorant and uneducated, and that’s who [Swift] is wanting to spend her time with.”
Similarly, when Swift fan Phoebe M. first heard Swift and Healy were dating, “I was definitely confused and at first was hoping it was fake,” they told The Daily Beast. “I had heard a lot about stuff he’s done recently, specifically doing the Nazi salute onstage and saying racist stuff about Chinese people, so I was initially pretty horrified once I started seeing pics of them together.”
Unfortunately, those controversies were just the tip of the iceberg. Back in 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protests, Healy drew criticism when he tweeted, “If you truly believe that ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones,” alongside a link to his band’s song “Love It If We Made It,” which led many to accuse him of co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement to promote The 1975.
Healy apologized, deleted the tweet, and reposted the message and the music video for the song separately—and then ultimately deactivated his account when that choice drew even more ire.
“I was genuinely shocked that Taylor would even think to be in a relationship with him considering her past activism for Black Lives Matter,” Swift fan Jack Mythen told The Daily Beast. “[Healy] admitting to watching Ghetto Gaggers, which is a racist porn site, is just disgusting.”
“I think if she acknowledges [Healy’s behavior] publicly it should be if she is openly saying they are not in a relationship, or it is cut off, because of his actions,” Mythen added. “I’ll be very disappointed if she acknowledges his past actions and defends them, as they were not that long ago.”
Also not that long ago? In 2016, Healy said, “If I had gone out with Taylor Swift I would’ve been, ‘Fucking hell! I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’ You know, ‘FUCK. THAT.’ That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.”
“I wouldn’t say Matty disappointed me—I’m not a fan of him, never have been,” a Swift fan who wished to remain anonymous told The Daily Beast. “But I was disgusted to learn about the things he said on the podcast a couple of months ago, both the racist comments about Ice Spice and of course what has come out about him getting off to what is literally racist torture porn of young Black women (who were, for that website, more than likely coerced and manipulated into even being in those videos). As a POC that is completely abhorrent and disgusting to me.
“I’m not naive enough to think that [Swift’s] activism push in 2018-2019 wasn’t PR, of course it was,” the anonymous fan continued. “But I did also think these were things she cared about, or at least that she cared enough to do the bare minimum and not date an open racist.”
