In 2015, when Apple Music first launched their streaming platform, Taylor wrote an open letter chastising the company for not planning to pay artists during the free three-month trial. “I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company,” she wrote on Tumblr. “Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”

In 2019, ahead of her 30th birthday, Taylor shut down a reporter asking her if she was going to settle down and have kids. “I really do not think men are asked that question when they turn 30. So I’m not going to answer that question now,” she said.

Also in 2019, when CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith asked Taylor, “Why sing to the haters?” Taylor had the PERFECT response: “Well, when they stop coming for me, I will stop singing to them. You know, people go on and on about, like you have to forgive and forget to move past something. No, you don’t. You don’t have to forgive and you don’t have to forget to move on. You can move on without any of those things happening. You just become indifferent, and then you move on.”

“[A]s the first woman to win album of the year at the Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. If you just focus on the work, and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you who put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world.”

“Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ in his song?” she wrote on Instagram. “It doesn’t exist because it never happened. You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called ‘that bitch’ in front of the entire world.”

“Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship. He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot ‘approve’ a song you haven’t heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination.”

“I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”

Eventually, a longer cut of Kim’s Snapchat video was leaked, showing Taylor had been telling the truth all along. “Instead of answering those who are asking how I feel about the video footage that leaked, proving that I was telling the truth the whole time about *that call* (you know, the one that was illegally recorded, that somebody edited and manipulated in order to frame me and put me, my family and fans through hell for 4 years)…SWIPE UP to see what really matters,” Taylor wrote in an Instagram story, linking out to the World Health Organization and Feeding America.

(For additional context, Taylor had been vying to buy back her own masters for some time.) “Some fun facts about today’s news: I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world, All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years,” she wrote.