Revisiting Taylor Swift and Kanye West's MTV VMAs Feud 15 Years Later

The story of the 2009 MTV VMAs for Taylor Swift? Let’s just say, this ain’t a fairytale.

However, it began as an enchanting evening for the country-singer-turned-pop-star. Swift arrived at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in a Cinderella-esque coach Sept. 13, 2009, and you best believe she was still bejeweled when she walked in the room in a sequined gown before winning Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me.”

“Thank you so much,” the then-19-year-old said after accepting the award from presenters Shakira and ex Taylor Lautner. “I always dreamed about what it would be like to maybe win one of these someday, but I never actually thought that it would happen. I sing country music so thank you so much for giving me a chance to win a VMA award.”

But before she was given a chance to finish her speech, Kanye West interrupted to express how he felt the trophy should have gone to Beyoncé for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”

"Yo, Taylor,” the rapper said. “I’m really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”

While the audience booed West as he exited the stage, Swift thought their reaction was directed at her.

“It was so echoey in there,” the 34-year-old recalled in her 2020 documentary Miss Americana. “At the time, I didn’t know they were booing him doing that. I thought that they were booing me. For someone who’s built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for you, the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience.”

Shocked by what had happened, Beyoncé took the stage after winning Video of the Year at the end of the night and invited Swift to “have her moment.” Still, the impact of what West had done wasn’t something Swift could just shake off.

“That was like sort of a catalyst for a lot of psychological paths that I went down, and not all of them were beneficial,” she continued in the doc. “It was all fueled by not feeling like I belonged there.”

Nevertheless, Swift—who’d been a fan of West—made it clear she didn’t want any bad blood.

“I don’t know him,” she shared in footage captured by Entertainment Tonight, “and I don’t want to start anything.”

Of course, West’s interruption did start something that turned into one of the most-talked-about celebrity feuds. Although, it initially looked like the Grammy winners would put the whole thing behind them.

Days after the VMAs, Swift told ABC News Radio West called her and “was very sincere in his apology,” which she accepted. She even played “Innocent”—a song rumored to be about forgiving him—at the ceremony the following year.

As for West, he told Jay Leno shortly after the 2009 VMAs that his behavior was “wrong” and “rude period.” (Though, a year later, he described the moment to Ellen DeGeneres as one of "sincerity or alcohol” and that he considered himself a “soldier of culture.” He also told The New York Times in 2013 that he didn’t regret the onstage interruption and that he apologized out of peer pressure).

By 2015, Swift, West and his then-wife Kim Kardashian were spotted chatting it up at the Grammys.

“I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with him until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me—so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time,” the “Fearless” artist told Vanity Fair that year. “I became friends with Jay-Z, and I think it was important, for Jay-Z, for Kanye and I to get along.”

And she noted she liked West “as a person. And that’s a really good, nice first step, a nice place for us to be.”

So when Swift was asked to present him with the Video Vanguard Award at the 2015 VMAs in what was expected to be a full-circle moment, she agreed.

Playing off their “infamous encounter” from the night they met six years prior, Swift said, “I guess I have to say to the other winners tonight, ‘I’m really happy for you, and Imma let you finish. But Kanye West has had one of the greatest careers of all time.’”

But then in 2016, West released his song and music video for “Famous.” And fans watched the feud begin again.

To sum it up swiftly, Swift said West never told her about the lyric, “I made that b---h famous." However, he and Kardashian said he’d given Swift a heads-up about the song—with the reality star telling GQ at the time, “She totally approved that.”

That summer, Kardashian posted videos to Snapchat that appeared to show Swift and West discussing The Life of Pablo track. Swift responded by asking, “Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that b---h’ in his song? It doesn’t exist because it never happened.”

“Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination,” she later added in part of her social media post. “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”

Looking back on the incident during a 2023 interview with TIME, Swift said the scandal felt like “a career death.”

“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 continued. “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.”   

As Swift—who'd also addressed the song during her Album of the Year acceptance speech at the 2016 Grammys—has explained, the issue was bigger than the lyric and took into account her history with West.

In 2019, she told Rolling Stone that reconnecting with him after the 2009 VMAs incident “was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19" and that she’d just wanted West’s respect.

But then the 2015 VMAs happened. And while West called Swift “gracious” for presenting him with the award, he also said, “You know how many times they announced Taylor was gonna give me the award because it got them more ratings?” In that moment, Swift told the magazine, she felt a “chill” in her body.

“I realized he is so two-faced,” she continued. “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. 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 apologize. 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.’”

And she thought they had—until she heard “Famous.”

“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,” she added to the outlet. “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.'"

For Kardashian, she expressed how, at the time, she felt like she had to defend West (this was before their divorce and his antisemitic comments).

And while the SKIMS founder told Andy Cohen in 2019 that she was “over” the feud with Swift, it resurfaced again when what appeared to be extended footage from that phone call leaked online.

“To be clear, the only issue I ever had around the situation was that Taylor lied through her publicist who stated that ‘Kanye never called to ask for permission…'" Kardashian tweeted. “They clearly spoke so I let you all see that. Nobody ever denied the word ‘b---h’ was used without her permission.”

So yes, you could say there have been different eras of the feud, which have occasionally popped up in Swift’s music. Take her 2017 reputation album or 2024 track “thanK you aIMee”—more recently called “thank You aimEe.” And while fans have their own theories on the songs (pointing to how the capitalized letters spell out “Kim” as well as West’s new name “Ye”), Swift hasn’t been as cryptic about her feelings toward the song.

"It really makes me think about how every time someone talks s--t, it just makes me work even harder and it makes me even tougher,” she said during one of her June Eras Tour concerts in London, per Parade. “So, it also makes me incredibly thankful for those people.”

Fans will just have to stay tuned to see what the 2024 MTV VMAs will bring…ready for it? The event will take place Sept. 11 at UBS Arena in Elmont, New York.

For now, keep reading to look back at more memorable VMA moments from over the years.

Who could forget when Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford expressed his displeasure at the band losing an award to Limp Bizkit by storming the stage and scaling a display tower? Although his moment was short-lived on television—since the network cut to a commercial—in reality, Tim's night was not since he was arrested and sentenced to a night in jail.

Believe or not, the Kanye West-Taylor Swift incident was not the only impromptu onstage moment to happen during the 2009 show. After the now-infamous interruption, Lil Mama decided to unexpectedly join fellow New Yorkers Jay-Z and Alicia Keys during their duet of "Empire State of Mind."​

The "Material Girl" famously sang "Like a Virgin" while rolling around the stage in a white wedding dress. 

The Shock Jock lived up to his raunchy reputation when he was lowered onto the stage as a superhero named Fartman.

The two were involved in one of the most famous rock feuds. At the 1992 VMAs, tensions ran high backstage, where Cobain's wife Courtney Love, who also brought along then-newborn daughter Frances Bean, taunted Rose, prompting the Guns N' Roses frontman to threaten to beat up Cobain if he didn't shut his "bitch" up. Kurt then told Love, sarcastically, "Shut up, bitch!"

After he performed with his band Nirvana, the group's drummer Dave Grohl kept saying "Hi, Axl!" into his mic.

Shortly after their wedding, the couple walked on stage holding hands as the audience cheered. After Jackson declared, "I'm very happy to be here and just think, nobody thought this would last," the King of Pop and Elvis Presley's daughter shared a kiss and walked off. 

The songstress won the award for Best New Artist in a Video, but used her acceptance speech as an opportunity to speak out against Hollywood, telling viewers, "This world is bulls--t."

While presenting Best Hip-Hop Video, the legendary singer unexpectedly tapped Lil' Kim's exposed left breast.

The pop princess unforgettably took the stage for her performance of "I'm a Slave 4 U" with a snake draped over her shoulders.

Amid an ongoing feud between Eminem and Moby, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog poked fun at their beef while roasting the latter artist to his face in the VMAs audience. Triumph then attempted to do the same to Eminem, who was not in the mood.

Eminem later took to the stage to accept the award for Best Male Video and said mid-speech, "That little Moby girl threw me out of my zone for a minute."

To open the show, Britney, Madonna and Christina Aguilera joined together for a rendition of "Like a Virgin" and "Hollywood," sealed with a headline-making kiss between the women. 

The pop princess made her highly anticipated return to the VMA stage, though her performance of "Gimme More" was panned. 

The rapper crashed the stage when Taylor Swift won Best Female Video because he thought Beyoncé "had one of the best videos of all time." When Bey later won for Video of the Year, she asked T.Swift to join her on stage to have her moment.

Gaga made headlines when she sported the now-unforgettable meat dress by Franc Fernandez as the most awarded star of the night. 

The pop star announced she and Jay-Z were expecting their first child together when she cradled her baby bump on the red carpet and literally dropped her mic and rubbed her baby bump at the end of her performance of "Love On Top."

 

The Biebs had his own snake moment when he brought a baby boa constrictor named Johnson to the show.

Hannah Montana who? The former Disney star twerked her way into MTV history with her performance of "We Can't Stop" and a duet of "Blurred Lines" with Robin Thicke.

While accepting the award for Best Hip-Hop Video for "Anaconda," Nicki confronted Miley, who was hosting, over negative comments she had made about the rapper in a New York Times interview. She called the pop star a "bitch" and asked her, "What's good?"

At the end of his lengthy Video Vanguard acceptance speech, the rapper unforgettably announced his plan to run for president in 2020. 

The rapper sparked headlines when he declared his love for the songstress while presenting her with the 2016 Video Vanguard Award, telling the audience, "She's someone I've been in love with since I was 22-years-old."

On the heels of Camila Cabello's exit, the girl group shocked the world when they opened their performance with the image of a fifth member falling off the stage. 

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