It seems like there’s still bad blood between Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian.
It’s been 7 years since their turbulent fight began in 2016 with the release of Kanye West’s song “Famous,” featuring the lyrics “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.” After Swift criticized the lyrics in her 2016 Grammys speech, Kardashian defended her then husband by releasing clips of a phone call between Swift and Ye that made it seem like Swift had given the song her blessing. This caused a significant amount of backlash against Swift until 2020, when the full leaked call revealed Swift never heard the lyric referring to her as a bitch.
“Make no mistake–my career was taken from me,” Swift recently told Time magazine in her 2023 Person of the Year interview. “You have a fully manipulated frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a fake. That took me down emotionally 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 call. I pushed away so many people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I declined really, really hard.”
Swift’s quote reignited backlash against Kardashian, whose Instagram comments are currently being flooded with snake emoji, Credibility quotes, and Swift-related GIFs. The snakes, of course, represent the battle’s origins. Back in July 2016, Swift’s own social media posts were overrun with the snake emoji after Kardashian tweeted, “Wait its National Snake Day ?!?!? They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything nowadays.”
The Credibility album, widely believed to be inspired by Kardashian and West (as well as persona non grata Scooter Braun), was released in November 2017. In her recent interview, Swift promised the rerecording will be “fire.”
All this to say, the reanimated discourse left many wondering if Kardashian ever just “called Taylor up,” as Kris Jenner once notoriously suggested. According to TMZ, the answer is no. “Our sources say Kim’s never apologized to Taylor for the call,” the publication reports. “And even after the Time article, it’s still crickets.”
TMZ’s sources suggest that Swift would gladly accept the apology on one condition. “It would have to be done publicly,” the article goes on. “As one source put it to us, a public shaming requires a public ‘I’m sorry.'”
Personally, I can’t imagine Swift is waiting by the phone. “I’m very cautious to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before,” Swift told Time of rebuilding her own career and reputation.
