Someone Just Leaked a Full Video of Kanye West and Taylor Swift's 2016 Phone Call
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The drama between Kanye West and Taylor Swift continues. Four years after the #PhoneGate incident between Taylor, Kanye, and Kim Kardashian, a new video that appears to back up everything Taylor's been claiming since 2016 has surfaced. A YouTube account leaked a supposedly unedited version of the call between the artists — although it's unclear where the video originated. Kanye runs certain lyrics by Taylor over the phone, but notably does not ask for her approval of the now-infamous line, "I made that b*tch famous."
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In 2016, Kanye released "Famous," a song in which he raps, "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that b*tch famous." Taylor slammed the track upon its release and argued she was approached to share the song on Twitter but never saw its final lyrics. Kim came to her husband's defense and shared a video of a phone conversation between Taylor and Kanye. In that short clip, Taylor appears to give the track her blessing. In response, Taylor stood her ground. "I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009," she wrote on Instagram.
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On March 20, an alleged extended version of the 2016 video surfaced on Twitter. In the clips, Kanye does ask Taylor to share the track on Twitter and she responds hesitantly. "I guess it would just be, people would be like, 'Why is this happening?' And I had something to do with it, probably," she says.
"The reason why it would happen is because it has a very controversial line at the beginning of the song about you," Kanye responds.
Taylor asks, "Will it be mean?"
He reassures her that he doesn't think it's mean, and tells her the lyric: "So it says, 'To all my Southside n— that know me best / I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex.'"
She acknowledges that the line is "not mean" and she would consider tweeting it. "I need to think about it because you hear something for the first time, you need to think about it because it is absolutely crazy. It doesn't feel mean, but like, oh my God, the build-up you gave it. I thought it was gonna be like 'that stupid dumb b*tch,' like, but it's not."
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Later in the call, Kanye runs another lyric idea by Taylor. "What if I said I made you famous?" he asks.
She doesn't sound comfortable with this line. "Did you say that? Oh God, well, what am I going to do about it at this point?" she says. "It's just kind of, like, whatever at this point, but I mean, you gotta tell the story the way it happened to you and the way that you experienced it."
She continues: "You honestly didn't know who I was before that. It doesn't matter if I sold 7 million of that album before you did that, which is what happened. You didn't know who I was before that and that's fine. Yeah, I can't wait to hear it."
Nowhere in the video does she approve the line that would eventually make the final track. Also, where did this video come from? Why did it release so many years later? In 2020, we're still left with more questions than answers.