Taylor Swift Reflects on Rumors of Her Sexuality & Defends Her Squad in ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ Prologue

Taylor Swift is addressing speculation around her sexuality and her “squad” of female friends. In the prologue for Swift’s re-recorded 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which dropped Friday (Oct. 27), the musician recalled becoming the “target of slut shaming” in the years leading up to the original album’s 2014 release.

“The jokes about my amount of boyfriends,” she wrote. “The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.”

“I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior,” Swift added. “I swore off dating and decided to focus only on myself, my music, my growth, and my female friendships.”

One of the most memorable of those female friendships was Karlie Kloss, although rumors have swirled in recent years that Swift and the former Victoria’s Secret supermodel had a falling out. But even though it’s been many moons since the two were photographed together, an often intrusive subsect of the Swiftie fandom has speculated on Swift’s sexuality for years and has maintained that Swift and Kloss are in a secret romantic relationship that dates back to 2014.

Swift calls out those and others who speculated about her love life in her next sentence: “If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”

Further on in the prologue, Swift also thanked her fans for recognizing that her famous “Squad” of famous female friends — which included Kloss, as well as pretty much everyone in the “Bad Blood” music video — was never intended to be mean-spirited, in spite of criticism at the time that said otherwise. “You, who knew that maybe a girl who surrounds herself with female friends in adulthood is making up for a lack of them in childhood (not starting a tyrannical hot girl cult),” she wrote.

The pop superstar is this year’s leading Billboard Music Awards finalist. You can watch the BBMAs on Nov. 19 on Billboard and the BBMA’s social media channels, as well as here.

Read the full 1989 (Taylor’s Version) prologue below: