Over the past week Taylor has been involved in a lot of drama.
It began with ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris calling her and "her team" out on Twitter after she revealed she'd written his latest smash-hit single under a pseudonym.
Hurtful to me at this point that her and her team would go so far out of their way to try and make ME look bad at this stage though 🤔
I know you're off tour and you need someone new to try and bury like Katy ETC but I'm not that guy, sorry. I won't allow it
And then came an entire episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians devoted to taking her down.
After the show, Kim posted the footage on Snapchat.
And since then, people seem to have turned against Taylor. 😔 Not only was her Instagram flooded with the snake emoji, but many people have revealed that their opinion of her has changed over the past couple of weeks.
My opinion of Taylor Swift has completely changed over the course of two weeks lol. JUST OWN UP TO WHAT YOU DID
Still like her songs but I don't think I can like Taylor swift as a human anymore. She's basically Regina George of pop culture 🐍
I don't understand how people like Taylor swift even a little bit anymore.
And considering how hard she worked to change the public perception of her back in 2013, when she was being constantly criticised for being a "serial dater", and become a universally loved pop star, this past week has probably been a bit of a nightmare for Taylor.
And these old interviews, dug out from the glory days of 2014–15, reveal just how much her public image and people's perception of her means to Taylor.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, she voiced the concern that people would deliberately try to sabotage her career:
There's someone whose entire job it is to figure out things that I don't want the world to see. They look at your career, they look at what you prioritise, and they try to figure out what would be the most revealing or hurtful.
Ironically, she went on to reveal that she's terrified of wiretaps – a method by which people can listen in on, or record telephone conversations.
Don't even get me started on wiretaps. It's not a good thing for me to talk about socially. I freak out. I have to stop myself from talking about how many aspects of technology I don't understand. Like speakers – they put sound out...so they can take sound in?
But it's this interview from October 2015 that reveals just how much Taylor feared a public backlash.
Speaking to NME, she said:
I'm in the news every single day for multiple different reasons. And it can feel, at times, if you let your anxiety get the better of you, like everybody's waiting for you to really mess up – and then you'll be done. If you do something that defines your character to be not what the public thought you were, that's the biggest risk.
There's only one thing for it, Tay.
