How the 2009 MTV VMAs Kickstarted Taylor Swift & Kanye West’s Feud

2025 MTV VMA Nominations: Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Kendrick Lamar Lead

But before she could finish her speech, West took the mic and claimed Beyoncé should have won for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” instead.

“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.”

The audience booed West as he left the stage, but Swift thought they were booing her.

“For someone who’s built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for you,” she recalled in her 2020 documentary Miss Americana, “the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience.”

Later that evening, Beyoncé won Video of the Year and invited Swift back on stage to “have her moment.” Still, the “Fearless” artist couldn’t shake off what West had done.

“That was 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.”

Of course, West’s interruption did start something that turned into one of the most-talked-about feuds in pop culture history. But at one point, it looked like the Grammy winners were going to 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 award show the following year.

But when West released his song “Famous” in 2016, fans watched it begin again.

To sum it up, uh, swiftly, the “All Too Well” singer said West never told her about the lyric, “I made that b—h famous, but he and Kardashian claimed he’d given Swift a heads-up about the song.

That summer, Kardashian posted videos to Snapchat that appeared to show Swift and West discussing The Life of Pablo track, leading #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty and snake emojis to spread online. However, Swift maintained West never told her he was going to call her “that b—h” in the song.

“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 wrote in a 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 at the scandal in a 2023 interview for TIME, Swift said it 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.”

For Swift, the issue was bigger than the lyric and encompassed her history with West.

Ever since the 2009 VMAs, she told Rolling Stone in 2019, she wanted West’s respect. And when they reconnected, she continued, she felt like she was “healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19.”

But old wounds opened at the 2015 VMAs after Swift presented West with the award and he said, “You know how many times they announced Taylor was gonna give me the award because it got them more ratings?”

“I realized he is so two-faced,” she added. “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.”

For Kardashian’s part, she’s expressed how she felt like she had to defend West at the time (this was before their divorce and his antisemitic comments). And while the reality star told Andy Cohen in 2019 that she was “over” the feud with Swift, it resurfaced again in 2020 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 popped up in Swift’s music. Take her 2017 reputation album or 2024 track “thanK you aIMee“—a.k.a. “thank You aimEe.” And while fans have their theories about the song (pointing to how the capitalized letters spell out “Kim” as well as West’s new name “Ye”), Swift hasn’t exactly been cryptic about her feelings toward the track.

“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 a 2024 Eras Tour stop in London, per Parade. “So, it also makes me incredibly thankful for those people.”

As fans wait to see what will go down at the 2025 VMAs—where Swift is nominated for Artist of the Year—keep reading to look back at more memorable VMA moments from over the years.