49 unanswered questions about Kim Kardashian's leaked Taylor Swift call
LatestI look forward to bouncing my grandkids on my knee one day and telling them how Kim Kardashian’s Snapchat story felled Taylor Swift, the most gloriously messy instance of celebrity drama since Watergate.
After last night’s episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian West kept the show going in her Snapchat story. Kim, you see, has the receipts: specifically, she has previously unseen footage of an infamous phone call that her husband Kanye West placed to Taylor Swift. In his single “Famous,” Kanye raps, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” When the Life of Pablo track dropped in February, the pop star expressed her public outrage at this reference, but Kanye insisted that he had gotten Swift’s approval in advance—on this very phone call.
Simply put, this is not a good look for Taylor, whose increasingly fragile public image is constructed around her the-lady-doth-protest-too-much brand of niceness and authenticity.
You can watch the footage from Kim’s Snapchat story, an act of Khaleesi-level digital vengeance, here. But there’s so much more that I need to know. In fact, off the top of my head, there are at least 49 things that I need to know.
1. Did Kanye specifically tell Taylor that he was going to refer to her as “that bitch” in “Famous?” Since Kim leaked footage of the call, this has emerged as Team Swift’s sticking point, the shooter on the grassy knoll of their Snapchat feud.
2. Is it possible that Kim’s Snapchat story—which is not continuous footage, but a montage of clips from what Kanye has described as an hour-long conversation—was edited in a profoundly misleading way?
3. Okay, but like, reeeeeeeally, though?
4. If Kanye has previously used “bitch” in his lyrics to describe his wife (as in 2012’s “Perfect Bitch“), should that context change how the word is interpreted when he uses it to refer to Taylor?
5. If we give Taylor the benefit of the doubt and assume that she wasn’t told about the b-word, then did she express any misgivings about the n-word, which appears in the previous line, which Kanye read aloud to her on the phone? (To review: “For all my Southside n*ggas who know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.”)
6. “Bitch” aside, if Taylor meant it when she said she was totally fine with Kanye rapping that he “made [her] famous,” because that is “the way that [he] experienced it,” then why oh why did she make an excoriating reference to “the people who try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame” in her February Grammys acceptance speech?
7. Did Taylor really call out Kanye for the song’s “strong misogynistic message” at some point during this phone call, as her publicist said she did back in February?
8. If that’s how she feels, then why did she repeatedly praise Kanye for calling her and tell him that the lyric is “kind of like a compliment?”
9. Does producer Rick Rubin, pictured chilling next to Kanye in the studio, know all the secrets of the universe?
10. Can we stop saying “I wish I could be a fly on the wall in that room” and start saying “I wish I could be a Rick Rubin on the couch in that room?”
11. Is this even legal? Was Kanye calling from New York, which requires just one-party consent for recording, or from California, which is a two-party state?
12. Is Taylor going to sue—or even press criminal charges against—Kim and Kanye?
13. How long has Kim been planning this? It’s clear that by time she was interviewed for GQ’s June cover story, in which she called Taylor a liar, her plan was already in motion.
14. And how long has Taylor known this retribution was coming?
15. Could this have anything to do with the timing of Swift’s paparazzi thirst trap of a supposed romance with Tom Hiddleston?
16. How has Hollywood not made a music-industry adaptation of Wag the Dog yet?
17. Is Taylor Swift’s little bro going to buy another pair of Yeezys so he can throw them out again?
18. Will Katy “Bad Blood” Perry never not find a way to make it about her?
19. What terrifying text message did Taylor Swift send to her most loyal soldiers to immediately rally them to tweet in her defense?
20. Speaking of, what the fuck was Khloé with a K thinking with this NSFW tweet to Chloë with a C?
21. Is Kim’s now the most-viewed Snapchat story in history? If not, then what the hell is?
22. Also, remember that time it was rumored that Taylor Swift and Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel were dating for a minute? Neither do they, probably.
23. At one point will Taylor’s response outpace the flowers Kanye sent her as her most-liked photo on Instagram?
24. Does anyone use the Notes app besides celebrities tweeting screenshots of their long-winded public responses?
25. Was Taylor Swift intentionally referencing Hamilton with “excluded from this narrative” (cf. “I’m erasing myself from the narrative“) and “character assassination?”
26. Is she aware that Aaron Burr did not in fact kill Alexander Hamilton using Snapchat?
27. Is Ryan Adams working on a softboy, spoken-word cover of the Taylor Swift parts of the phone call at this very moment?
28. Is it a coincidence that we’ve learned that recent Taylor Swift ex Calvin Harris is now dating Tinashe only as of this morning?
29. Has Taylor ever called anyone she’s written a song about to get their approval in advance?
30. What does Camilla “Better Known For the Things That She Does On the Mattress” Belle think about this?
31. What do Tina “There’s a Special Place in Hell” Fey and Amy “For Women Who Don’t Help Other Women” Poehler think about this?
32. What does Nicki “Pit Women Against Each Other” Minaj think about this? (Just kidding: Nicki never thinks about Taylor.)
33. What does Beck “Respect Artistry” Hansen think about this?
34. Has Kim (Al Pacino) officially surpassed Kris (Marlon Brando) as the Kardashian family Godfather?
35. Does this make Kanye Diane Keaton or Apollonia? (Different Apollonia, but still.) And is Taylor more of a Jack Woltz or a Moe Greene?
36. We can all agree that Rob is Fredo, right?
37. Is Tom Hiddleston trying to enroll in the Witness Protection Program—or whatever the British equivalent thereof is called—right now?
38. What does Beyoncé think?
39. If Beyoncé and not Taylor Swift had won the 2009 VMA for Best Female Video, would any of this have happened?
40. What does that alternate timeline look like? Is Bizarro Taylor’s hair still curly?
41. Can we talk about how Beyoncé ultimately won the better VMA that night, for Video of the Year?
42. Is Taylor going to write another “Innocent” about this?
43. If so, will she perform it at the 2016 VMAs?
44. Can we move the 2016 VMAs up from August 28 to literally right now?
45. If Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had not been murdered by, uh, ~someone~, would O.J. Simpson’s best friend Robert Kardashian not have been thrust into the spotlight, not giving his children a taste of fame, meaning Kim might have pursued another path in life and we would have never gotten to know neither her nor her siblings, let alone the ins and outs of this (then-nonexistent) feud?
46. Sterling K. Brown is going to win the Emmy over John Travolta and David Schwimmer, though, right?
47. Is Pokémon Go related to this? Feels like it could be.
48. What does Taylor Swift’s unlikely white supremacist fanbase think of this? I could Google that, but I’m not going to.
49. What if Taylor is in on this? Is this her The Prestige?
Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion’s Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.