Taylor Swift Calls Kanye West ‘Two-Faced’, Reflects on Their Rocky History and the Infamous Phone Call

Things haven’t always been so peaceful between Taylor Swift and Kanye West — they had a minute where their relationship seemed on solid ground, but things turned pretty toxic again. In a new interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Swift calls West “two-faced” and explains the “context” of that infamous recorded phone call.

West’s VMAs interruption set the tone

When West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 VMAs, she was left speechless, as was the audience and everyone watching at home. For those needing a refresher, West hopped on stage and said, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you. I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!”

Fast forward to West apologizing and Swift believing that things were good between them. Swift reflected on their feud, telling Rolling Stone: “I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me.”

She continued: “When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, ‘This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.’ But that’s where I was.”

Things were good between them, she noted, saying, “And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19.”

“I realized he is two-faced”

Then there was a shift, as they planned to end their feud onstage at the 2015 VMAs. She recalled: “But the 2015 VMAs come around. He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand -— I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hour-long conversation, and he’s like, ‘I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,’ and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that.”

It didn’t go as she expected, as Swift shared that she wrote a speech, but at the event, “he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!’” She noted, “And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body.”

She shared, “I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk s**t. And I was so upset.”

The phone call

Then there was the phone call between Swift and West that his wife, Kim Kardashian West, later released. West claimed that Swift approved a lyric in his song “Famous” (“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b**ch famous.”), but she denied that she approved it.

“So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song. And I was like, ‘OK, good. We’re back on good terms,’” she explained.

It turns out that the song wasn’t what she thought, as she shared: “And then when I heard the song, I was like, ‘I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.’”

There was a “chain reaction of things”

Swift said that people taking sides in the matter didn’t have the big picture, noting, “The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it.” The singer continued: “Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when [West] called me a b**ch.”

She shared: “That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song —- it was kind of a chain reaction of things.”