Taylor Swift has reflected on 'being cancelled' amid her highly-publicised 2016 feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
In an interview, after being named as TIME's 2023 Person of the Year, Swift spoke candidly about the incident in which the rapper released the song 'Famous' featuring a vulgar lyric about her, which she denied approving. Kardashian then released an edited, recorded phone call between them that led to Swift being 'cancelled' and called a 'snake' by fans.
Swift explained to the outlet that the moment itself and the public’s reaction felt like 'a career death.'
'That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,' the Grammy winner said. '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.'
'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 recalled.
Swift, who is now in a relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce, shared how she's learned to deal with the attention that surrounds her.
'There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.'
'But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies,' she said. 'Trash takes itself out every single time.'
The last time Swift publicly spoke about the 'humiliating' incident between Kardashian and West was in an interview with Vogue in 2019.
'A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote cancelled is a very isolating experience,' she told the magazine. 'I don't think there are that many people who can actually understand what it's like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.
'When you say someone is cancelled, it's not a TV show. It's a human being. You're sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as 'Kill yourself.'
Swift said the take-down was the catalyst for 'restructuring' her life, which included making new music about her experience.
'I knew it was the only way I could survive it,' she said. 'It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it's like to go through something so humiliating.'
A few months after the fallout, the 2016 US presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took place and Swift was criticised again for not coming out of hibernation from the public eye to make her political position clear.
'Unfortunately, in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponising the idea of the celebrity endorsement... I just knew I wasn't going to help,' she explains of her decision to not publicly endorse the Democrat candidate Clinton.
'Also the summer before that election, all people were saying was "She's calculated, she's manipulative, she's not what she seems, she's a snake, she's a liar." These are the exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement of or would I be a liability. "Look snakes of a feather flock together, look, the two lying women," The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared.'
Swift spoke about how she feels now, given that she's made two albums since 2016: Reputation and Lover, the latter of which has seen songs released like 'Me!' and 'You Need To Calm Down' - both singles promoting positivity, acceptance and happiness.
'When you're going through loss, embarrassment or shame, it's a grieving process with so many micro emotions,' she explained of 2016. 'One of the reasons why I didn't do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn't figure out how I felt hour to hour.'
