Taylor Swift has said that a 2016 feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian felt like “a career death,” adding it “took me down psychologically.”
Swift was speaking to Time magazine after being named the publication’s 2023 “Person of the Year.”
In the interview, published Wednesday, the singer recalled an incident in which West, also known as Ye, wrote a song featuring lyrics about Swift. Following a backlash, West claimed she had agreed to the lyrics in advance, which Swift disputed.
West’s then-wife Kardashian went on to release a video of what she said was a conversation between Swift and West which proved the rapper’s claim.
Swift told Time that she felt the incident was “a career death.”
“Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me,” she said.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” said Swift.
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls,” said the singer.
“I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard,” she added.
That was not the first time the singers had had a run-in. In 2009, West infamously hijacked the microphone from Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Since then, Swift’s career has gone from strength to strength, whereas West lost partnerships with fashion brands including Gap, Balenciaga and Adidas following antisemitic comments in 2022.
Swift beat out Barbie and King Charles III to win Time’s “Person of the Year” award, with the magazine hailing her growing impact.
“While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force,” the magazine said.
Time said Swift was selected because she found a way to give people around the world hope in some seriously dark times.
“No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well,” Time said in its profile. “Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.”
