Inside Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian’s bitter eight year-long feud from stolen friends to savage diss tracks
IT is the showbiz feud that refuses to die.
And Kim Kardashian has stoked the coals of her almost decade-long war with Taylor Swift this week by posting a selfie with the singer’s former bestie, Karlie Kloss.
It comes one week after Taylor released what many saw as a diss track about Kim on her chart-topping album The Tortured Poets Department.
In the track, titled thanK you aIMee — spelling out KIM in strategically placed capital letters — Taylor, 34, sings about being unable to forgive a “spray-tanned” bully who threw punches at her.
Following the song’s release, Kim lost more than 100,000 Instagram followers — a huge dent to the audience on one her most lucrative platforms.
It comes as The Sun can exclusively reveal deep-seated speculation from Swifties that Kim, 43, had been targeting Taylor’s friends to appear in her Skims campaigns.
Last month, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor’s long-time pal and the main support act on her Eras world tour, starred in a campaign for the reality star’s lingerie line.
The sponsored posts, showing the up-and-coming star posing in Barbie pink underwear, saw Sabrina gain 30,000 followers on Instagram overnight.
It prompted an outcry from Taylor’s fans — known as Swifties — who flooded the comments section to tell Sabrina they were “disappointed” in her, with one saying: “It makes me question your friendship with Taylor.”
Go into hiding
The collaboration is the latest in a long line of Skims partnerships that fans think will have ruffled Taylor’s feathers.
In February, Kim recruited singer Lana Del Ray — another of Taylor’s closest pals and collaborators — to model her Valentine’s underwear range.
No expense was spared on the campaign, which received widespread media attention and launched just days before Taylor and Lana attended the 2024 Grammys together.
And in October 2023 — shortly after Taylor confirmed her romance with Kansas City Chiefs American football player Travis Kelce — Kim enlisted Taylor’s new Wag bestie Brittany Mahomes and her husband Patrick, who plays alongside tight end Travis, for a family pyjama campaign.
But it is her latest post with model Karlie that cuts the deepest, with Taylor’s former best friend and once-closest confidante defecting to the side of the Kardashian star.
Kendall was never part of Taylor’s squad.
Kim on the feud
This picture wasn’t a campaign image intended to drive underwear sales but an intimate photograph of the pair at a party with other friends.
Fans were quick to point out that the picture of Kim and Karlie was at least two years old and questioned why she would post it now — four days after Taylor’s album release — if it was not a pointed attack.
Karlie and Taylor — once inseparable, with Karlie a prominent member of Taylor’s infamous girl squad and even appearing on the cover of Vogue magazine with her — have never addressed their feud publicly.
But it is widely believed they fell out after Karlie maintained a working relationship with record label executive Scooter Braun when he sold the masters of Taylor’s first six albums for £240million in 2020.
It prompted the I Knew You Were trouble hitmaker to start re-recording her entire back catalogue and hit out at Braun for “bullying” her, which he vehemently denies.
While other stars distanced themselves from Braun in the aftermath, Karlie invited him to both of her weddings, where Taylor was notably absent.
In the cheap seats
Swifties also hit out at Karlie for never speaking out against Braun when Taylor publicly begged other stars under his management to help her. While her other best friends, model Gigi Hadid and singer Selena Gomez, both hit out at him, Karlie was slated for posting a stream of photos of herself amid the ongoing drama.
Last August, Karlie was seen in the cheap seats at the final show of the Eras tour in LA while the rest of Taylor’s world-famous friends enjoyed the show from a VIP tent, cementing the end of their friendship to the singer’s legion of loyal fans.
And now Karlie is friends with Kim, it seems there is no going back.
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 any more. I went down really, really hard.
Taylor on the feud
Kim launched her first attack on Taylor in 2016, when her then-husband Kanye West released Famous, a song which included the lyrics “I made that b***h famous” in reference to him storming Taylor’s VMAs acceptance speech in 2009, and claimed he could “still have sex” with her if he wanted.
Taylor branded the lyrics misogynistic, and Kim retaliated by posting a secret recording of a phone call taken some months before in which Kanye had read a selection of his lyrics out to Taylor which she seemingly agreed to. Kim’s fans then flooded Taylor’s Instagram account with snake emojis, calling her out as a liar. And Kim did nothing to calm the storm, posting a string of snake emojis on her own social media.
The hashtag #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty began trending, prompting Taylor to go into hiding for two years.
It was during this time she wrote her 2017 Reputation album in response to the drama.
Fans took the track Look What You Made Me Do to be an attack on Kim, with the lyrics: “I don’t like your little games/Don’t like your tilted stage/The role you made me play of the fool/No, I don’t like you.”
A clip of the full conversation between Kanye and Taylor resurfaced in 2020 and appeared to dispel any evidence that Taylor had agreed to the lyrics — and suggested the original clip had been manipulated.
But the damage was already done.
Taylor spoke openly in several magazine interviews about the impact the feud had on her, telling Time magazine: “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 any more. I went down really, really hard.”
In the years that followed, famous friends of the pair have been forced to choose between the two camps.
Kim’s sister Kendall Jenner, one of the A-listers who supported Taylor on stage in London in 2015, has not been seen with her since, with Kim saying in a 2017 interview: “Kendall was never part of Taylor’s squad.”
Meanwhile, Taylor’s long-term best friend, Selena Gomez, distanced herself from the Kardashians after the drama, despite having fledgling friendships with both Kylie and Kendall.
And while Kim had appeared to try to quash the feud in recent years, posting Taylor’s songs on her social media profiles and telling one chat show host that the war was over, it seems Taylor’s latest release has dispelled any peace between the pair.
In fact, this might just be the start of their biggest battle yet.