Taylor Swift has been named Time’s Person of the Year for her achievements in music, touring, film, and even football throughout 2023.
“This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been,” the 33-year-old told the publication.
In an extensive profile for the magazine, charting Swift’s almost two-decade-long career, the Grammy winner recounts some of her biggest triumphs, including her internet-breaking Eras Tour this year and her eagerly embraced album re-releases. She also looks back on her public fallout with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in 2016, known as “Snake-gate.”
And the first time, she goes on the record about her highly publicized relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight ends Travis Kelce and the hysteria she’s created in the media. (She even pokes fun at the male football fans who are sick of seeing her at games.) Here are some of the cover story’s biggest takeaways.
She says her feud with Kim and Kanye was a “career death.”
“It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift says about her current global domination. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity. The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”
Swift doesn’t mince words about her 2016-2017 scandal involving Kanye West and, later, his now-ex-wife Kim Kardashian over his song “Famous.” Although, her claims that she was “canceled” over the incident are a bit dubious, if not easily disputable.
“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,” Swift tells Time. “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.”
