Taylor Swift Appears To Drag Karlie Kloss And Scott Borchetta On Her New Bonus Song And The Lyrics Are Savage
"She's a crook who was caught."
Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss have been plagued by rumours of a feud for the last four years.
But fans are now beginning to wonder whether the reports are true after Taylor released a brand new Evermore bonus track earlier this week which seems to be about her former BFF.
I'm sure you remember that back in 2014/15, Taylor and Karlie were virtually inseparable. They took road trips together, walked the Victoria's Secret runway together, marked birthdays in special ways, and described each other as "best, best friends."
However, reports of a feud between the pair began to emerge after Taylor failed to include Karlie's name on the Junior Jewels shirt in the 2017 video for "Look What You Made Me Do."
While Taylor included literally every name of all of her other best friends — both famous and non-famous — Karlie's name was notably absent.
Taylor then stopped interacting publicly with Karlie, failed to like any of her Instagram posts — including birthday tributes and Karlie's engagement announcement — and also didn't attend either of her two weddings to Josh Kushner in 2018.
And while Karlie attempted to quell the rumours of a feud by repeatedly claiming that she and Taylor were still close, the singer dropped numerous hints that their friendship was indeed over.
In a 2016 essay for Elle, Taylor revealed that she'd "learned the difference between lifelong friendships and situationships" which many people took as a nod to Karlie.
At another point in the essay, Taylor described feeling betrayed by friends who had "disappeared from [her] life in [her] darkest hour" in 2016 during the Kim Kardashian/Kanye West drama. Again, fans began speculating that perhaps Karlie was one of the friends Taylor was referring to, especially after recalling that she described Kim Kardashian as "a lovely person" at the height of their feud.
But later that year things got really messy. In June 2019, Taylor expressed devastation over the news that her former record label boss, Scott Borchetta, had sold the label — and with it, the master recordings of her first six albums — to Scooter Braun for $300 million.
Taylor claimed that Scooter had "incessantly bullied" and "manipulated" her for years, and encouraged his clients — including nemesis Kanye West — to do the same.
"Now Scooter has stripped me of my life's work, that I wasn't given an opportunity to buy," she wrote in an essay posted to Tumblr. "Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it."
All of this was made complicated by the fact that Karlie is both good friends with and managed by Scooter Braun. And, less than two months after Taylor publicly denounced him, Karlie posted a series of photos of them vacationing together.
And as if things couldn't get any messier, Perez Hilton then got involved and reported that Taylor and Karlie's feud was down to Karlie leaking ~personal information~ about the singer to Scooter.
This could've been dismissed as fabricated nonsense until not one but two of Taylor's oldest and closest friends — Ashley Avignone and Claire Winter — appeared to validate the claims by liking Perez's tweet.
Ashley even liked the tweet after spending the day with Taylor ahead of a concert in New York!
All of which leads us to the present day, where Taylor has released a brand new bonus track, "It's Time To Go," which contains some extremely choice lyrics and appears to confirm the feud with Karlie.
The song opens with these lyrics about a "sister" not being "what she seemed".
The lyrics appear to point to Karlie for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the pair regularly described each other as "sisters," "family" and "twins" throughout their friendship.
In 2014, Taylor posted a photo of herself with her brother Austin and Karlie alongside the caption: "Having family that feels like your best friend and best friends who feel like family."
And in her 2016 birthday tribute to Taylor, Karlie wrote: "I feel blessed to count you as my friend, sister and partner in crime."
The pair were also often compared physically during their friendship, with hundreds of articles drawing attention to their height, blonde hair and light eyes and literally describing them as "twins". But Karlie and Taylor also spoke at length about how they "twinned" emotionally, too.
"People had been telling us for years we needed to meet," Taylor told Vogue in 2015. "I remember makeup artists and hair people going, 'Doesn't she remind you of Karlie? God, she and Karlie would be best friends. They're the same.'"
In the same article, Karlie revealed that she and Taylor had even started dressing alike. "The other night I came over and we were both going someplace from here, and we were both wearing black crop tops and high-waisted skirts. It's kind of getting weird," she said.
And Taylor goes on to hint at some major betrayal, by describing the woman in question as anything but a sister, and in fact a "crook who was caught."
It's unclear what the betrayal was, but the lyrics could lend credence to the reports that Karlie and Taylor's feud was connected to her masters drama, because later in the song she goes on to drag Scott Borchetta too.
The "fifteen years" here is clearly a reference to the length of time Taylor was signed to Scott's label, and "begging 'til my knees bled" likely refers to her pleading with him for ownership of her masters, which she mentioned in her original Tumblr essay, as well as "fighting" him on multiple creative decisions.
The latter half of the verse — Scott "praying to his greed" and her "past frozen behind glass" — probably refers to the sale of her masters, and her literal past — i.e. the songs she wrote from the age of 15 — being kept from her.
In fact, Taylor touched on the betrayal she felt at being used by Scott for profit during a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone. "I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me," she said. "To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of 'Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.'"
And of course, it didn't take long before people began commenting on the song and theorising that the lyrics were about Karlie and Scott.
It's time to go definitely seems like a reflection song about the breakdown of her friendships with Karlie Kloss & Scott Borchetta #TaylorSwift
Did you guys hear the 1st and 3rd vers of "it's time to go" from #evermorealbum ? I think it's about karlie kloss and Scott Borchetta😐
she said karlie kloss smack cam on its time to go
we all agreee she comes at Karlie verse 1 of its time to go right?
*Acting like I haven't been listening to rwylm and ittg the past two weeks* OMG BOTH OF THESE TRACKS ARE AMAZING. TAYLOR DID THAT. ENDED KARLIE AND SCOTT 😌😌😌