The Leaked Phone Call That Made Taylor Swift Untouchable

When people decided I was wicked and evil and conniving and not a good person that was the one that I couldn't really bounce back from because my whole life was centered around it. By the summer of 2016 Taylor Swift was the most hated woman on the Internet. There was a video going around that seemed to catch her in a lie over Kanye's song famous. All of a sudden there were snake emojis all over everything she posted. Hashtag Taylor Swift is over party is trending worldwide. And the story everybody agreed on was pretty simple. She got caught. She played the victim. She lied about it. And now there was proof. Except the people typing snake under her posts. They were going off of three minutes of a 25 minute video. So how does Taylor go from almost being canceled on the Internet to the biggest pop star of the last decade? Well we got to look at what happened after the full video leaked. And the question we have to ask is was Taylor actually the victim? Or was this her plan the whole time? To understand 2016 you got to go back to the night it all started. September of 2009. The MTV Video Music Awards. Taylor Swift is 19 years old and she just won her first VMA. Best Female Video for You Belong With Me. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to win a VMA award. Taylor, I'm really happy for you. I'm going to let you finish. But Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time. Best videos of all time. Live in front of the whole industry and the world. The mic just gets taken from her and she gets embarrassed by the number one hip hop artist at the time. What went through your mind when he came up and then they cut off the. Well, I was standing on stage and I was really excited because I had just won the award. And then I was really excited because Kanye West was on the stage. And then I then I wasn't so excited anymore. Kanye became the villain and Taylor became the newcomer that needed sympathy. And she used it to her advantage. She went on a seven year run winning multiple Grammys, shifted her sound from country to pop and became the all American girl next door. This was the peak of the good girl image. She had the Grammys, the squad, the sold out stadiums. For years she could do no wrong. Now, fast forward to the 2015 VMAs. Taylor comes out and actually presents Kanye with an award. And she even flips his old line back on. So I guess I have to say to all the other winners tonight, I'm really happy for you and I'm gonna let you finish. Kanye West has had one of the greatest careers of all time. So it looked like Kanye and Taylor finally made up. But see, Kanye had an album coming out. He needed a hit single, but not just a good song. He needed a controversy. A few months later, Taylor's on vacation and Kanye calls her up. He's working on a new song with a line about her in it. And he wants to read some of it over the phone. Now, Kanye had people recording him in the studio around the clock for his own archive and potential documentary. So there's a camera running the whole time. And a couple of weeks later, the song drops. And the main line that caused the controversy was where Kanye says, I made that bitch famous. Then a couple of days later, she's up at the Grammys winning album of the year. And she ends her speech with a shot at Kanye. There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. She never says his name, but she didn't have to. So for a few months, that was a standoff. He says she knew. She says she didn't. And nobody can prove either way. But then in July, Kim Kardashian ends the debate. Or at least that's what it looked like. She legitimately, quote, says, as soon as I get on that Grammy red carpet, I'm going to tell all the press. Like, I was in on it. And then she just didn't like the reaction. Yeah. And, you know, just another way to play the victim. Definitely got her a lot of attention the first time. Kim Kardashian goes on Snapchat and posts clips from the recorded phone call. And in them, you got Kanye on the phone and Taylor sounding like she's totally fine with everything. Oh, yeah. I just had a responsibility to you as a friend, you know. And I mean, thanks. I mean, thanks for being so cool about it. And that was all it took. The party's over hashtag is trending worldwide. Her comments turn into nothing but snake emojis. And just like that, she's a liar to the whole Internet. Hashtag Taylor Swift is over party was the number one trend on Twitter worldwide. Do you know how many people have to be tweeting that they hate you for that to happen? Taylor puts out a note saying that she was never played the actual line. That you can't approve a song that you haven't heard. And the part everybody remembers is I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative. Nobody's buying it because the video said otherwise. At least at the moment, Taylor Swift, her brand is finished. And when the whole Internet's turned on you like this, there's basically two ways you can go. You can fight it or you can say sorry. But Taylor didn't do either one of those things. Now, the 27-year-old singer posted this video to her social media platforms on Monday. It appears to show a snake's tail recoiling. Yes, last Friday, Swift took down all content from her social media accounts and website. She comes back as the snake. She puts out reputation. And the whole thing is her leaning into her dark and edgier side. The exact thing that they use to cut her down. Now, she takes the insult, slaps it on merch, builds the stage around it, sells it back to everybody. Now, any entertainment business, when there's a story running against you, you don't win by arguing against it. You take it, you make it yours, and you make a little money off of it. I guess the snakes, I wanted to send a message to you guys that if someone's someone uses name calling to bully you on social media, I think a lot of people jump on board with it. That doesn't have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead. It's Taylor's turn to be the villain now. But the problem is some people thought that this made her look even more guilty. Conspiracy theories started going around that this was all some initiation ritual to increase her fame. Now, it sounds silly and some people connected to the Illuminati. But this is a strategy a lot of artists use. The good girl gone bad narrative. Rihanna went through it. Beyonce did it with her Sasha Fierce era. Katy Perry literally gave up her gospel career. And we're not even going to talk about the post Disney Miley Cyrus. But theories are still being thrown around about this whole thing to this day. Now, with everything that came to light about Diddy, there's a big debate about whether what Kanye did was to bully Taylor or was it to save her from Diddy and from Beyonce, who was supposedly jealous. The music industry can be dark, so I guess nothing is impossible. But these theories are pretty far fetched. So, no, I don't think Taylor joined some secret society to sell records. She was just capitalizing on a bad situation. And it worked. Look what you made me do broke the record for the biggest music video debut in YouTube history. Reputation ended up the best selling album of the year. She took the worst moment of her career and she turned it into one of her biggest paydays. Doing her edgy bad girl revenge thing was working for her. But then something even better happened. In 2020, everybody's online more than ever because of the covid pandemic. And then the full video of the call gets leaked. It went viral on Twitter after being reposted by Taylor Swift fan account. But to this day, nobody knows how it got out of Kanye's camp. It has a very controversial line at the beginning of the song about you. What does it say? OK, so it says and the song is so, so dope. And I've literally sat with my wife and try to rework this line. I've thought about this line for eight months. Is it going to be mean? No, I don't think it's mean. OK, then let me hear it. OK, it says to all my south side niggas that know me best. I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex. OK, the truth was Kanye hit the full line that started the whole fallout. I made that bitch famous. She okayed a version of it, but she never okayed that part. Taylor posted that the footage proved that she'd been telling the truth the whole time about a call that was, in her words, illegally recorded, edited and used to frame her and put her family through years of hell. Now, on the legal side, recording someone's phone call without consent is a crime in the state of California. But nobody was ever charged and nobody was sued. But being proven right was only half of it, because now not is she only even more famous. Now she's about to gain power. The first version of it was a reputation error. Her taking the story back and making it hers. Then in 2019, the rights to her music catalog gets bought and sold by people that she didn't want to own her work. Scooter Braun, who's had a fallout with quite a few artists. He buys her old record label for around 300 million dollars and he wouldn't let her buy her masters. Instead, he sold them to Shamrock Holdings, who let Scooter Braun keep a percentage of Taylor's music. Now, the 2009 to 2015 version of Taylor probably would have made peace with that, but not this version. This version of Taylor decides to re-record all of her music herself and make her own masters. Good morning, America. It's Taylor. I just wanted to say, first of all, you guys have been so supportive of Good Morning America since day one of this entire process of me re-recording my music. And I am so ecstatic that my album Fearless, Taylor's version, will be out tonight. Fans started to stream her version of the songs instead of the original songs. Folklore and Evermore got the critics who spent years writing her off to take her seriously again. And just last year in 2025, she buys her original music back. So now she owns everything. All of a sudden, she's the first musician to become a billionaire strictly through her music and her performances. So the video that was supposed to be the end of her is a big part of how she got to the top. It gave her the grit to take on the biggest players in the business and beat them. But being at the top doesn't come without criticism. Some people say Taylor's songs are starting to blend together and she's at a point in her career where she's playing it safe. And some people say that she inserts herself where she shouldn't be, like during the Super Bowl in 2024. Some fans complained that the camera kept cutting to her while she was cheering on Travis Kelce. And some of the media was making it all about her instead of the game. It even got to a point where she was getting booed in the stadium. Then earlier this month, the wedding, Madison Square Garden, a thousand guests. A congresswoman even demanded the couple pay the city back for all the police that it took to lock the place down. But a big question a lot of people still have is whether the video and the whole Kanye controversy was orchestrated. Now, honestly, there's no way to know for sure. But in the music business, there's PR and image people who handle things like this all the time. And I've seen it firsthand in my own experience with the industry. Celebrities working with tabloid and news outlets just to get a story out. But I can't help but wonder because Kanye didn't actually make her famous. She was already on her way. But would she be as big as she is now if the VMAs and the video, the phone call never happened? The good thing about Taylor, though, is she was able to play the good girl and embrace her dark side and be successful at both. But that's not the case for everybody. Artists like Katy Perry actually was the good girl for her childhood and her teenage years until she realized it was never going to get her where she wanted to be. But now she feels like she lost herself altogether. Check out this video if you want to hear more about her story.