Taylor Swift Said She Desperately Wanted Respect From Kanye West After He Interrupted Her VMAs Speech

In 2009, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, interrupted Taylor Swift at the VMAs. The moment has gone down in pop culture infamy. While Swift and Ye have been on bad terms for years, she said that in the aftermath of this interruption, she wanted his approval. For a while, she thought they could be friends.

Taylor Swift wanted Kanye West to respect her after their infamous VMAs moment

Swift received a VMA for Best Female Video for “You Belong with Me” in 2009. When she got on stage to accept the award, Ye interrupted her.

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

While the moment was embarrassing for Swift, she said it made her crave his respect. 

“I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, ‘This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.’”

When she established a more friendly relationship with him, she felt like she had healed some trauma from her past.

“That’s where I was,” she said. “And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19.”

They remained on good terms until the drama over Ye’s song, “Famous.”