Taylor Swift has branded Kanye West "two-faced".
The pair fell out in 2009 when the ‘Stronger’ rapper interrupted the ‘London Boy’ singer’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) to claim Beyonce should have won the Best Female Video honour instead, but they later reconcile their differences.
Taylor admitted she "felt great" when she and Kanye "reconnected" because she wanted his "respect" and they regularly had dinner together.
She said: "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.
"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 antagonising me, I just want his approval.’ But that’s where I was.
"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."
However, things turned sour again after Kanye "sweetly" asked Taylor to present an award to him at the 2015 VMAs – only to tell a very different story on stage.
She told Rolling Stone magazine: "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.
"And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!’ And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body.
"I realised 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."
According to the ‘Me!’ singer, Kanye quickly apologised and they then had their notorious phone call about his song ‘Famous’ – in which he raps "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b**ch famous" – and she felt like their friendship was back on track.
However, after the song was released and Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, subsequently insisted Taylor had approved the lyric, the 29-year-old singer decided she was "done".
She said: "He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologise. And I was like, ‘You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.’
"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.’
"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.’
"The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch.
"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."
Taylor Swift slams ‘two-faced’ Kanye West
