Kanye West and Taylor Swift’s leaked phone call surrounding the rapper’s controversial song “Famous” caused the pop star to spiral, she’s revealed in a new interview.
Swift has been named TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year, and in her interview with the publication, she touched on how Kim Kardashian leaking part of her conversation with West “took her down psychologically” and forced her to move to a “foreign country” for a year.
“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,” she said. “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. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Kanye West famously namedropped Taylor Swift on “Famous,” from his 2016 album The Life of Pablo, rapping: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.”
As for the phone call, Ye informed Swift that the song had a very “controversial line” about her, and hoped she would approve of it and even tweet out a link to “Famous” for him.
Clips from the conversation were posted to Snapchat by West’s then-wife Kim Kardashian, but Swift’s reps insisted she was never made aware of Kanye’s “made that bitch famous” line.
A full version of the conversation was leaked in 2020 and Kardashian, who was married to Ye until their 2021 split, called out Swift for lying and backed her ex.
“@TaylorSwift13 has chosen to reignite an old exchange – at this point feels very self serving,” she wrote in a series of tweets. “I feel like I’m left without a choice to respond because she is actually lying.
“To be clear, the only issue I had around the situation was that Taylor lied through her publicist… They clearly spoke so I let you all see that. Nobody ever denied that the word ‘bitch’ was used without her permission.”
Taylor Swift would eventually return to the public eye in 2017 with her acclaimed Reputation album.
