Not that there’s any question at this point over who won the battle of words and public opinion between Taylor Swift, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, following their feud after the release of West’s crude song about Swift, but Swift got her mic-drop moment anyway during an interview with Time magazine.

The interview thoroughly profiled Swift after she was chosen for the short list of finalists for Time’s 2023 Person of the Year. That should show her current standing compared to Kardashian and West in itself, but Swift still made it painfully clear where things stand for the trio now.

Swift remembers back to 2014, when her first full-on foray into pop music resulted in the game changing album, 1989, and all the publicity that came with it. “I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” Swift explained.

That included West pouring salt on the wound of him infamously embarrassing Swift at the 2009 VMAs by putting out a cringe song about her as well. West then added insult to injury by claiming Swift had consented to the song’s release, which Swift denied.

This was followed up by Kim Kardashian, who was West’s wife at the time, releasing a video of a conversation between West and Swift in which Swift appeared to be okay with the song’s release, thus making Swift look like a liar.

Swift laments that she felt at the time like it was “a career death.” She continued, “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me.”

And Swift wasn’t done there. She elaborated that, “You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar.”

“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” Swift admitted.

“I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore,” she explained. “I went down really, really hard.”

Kardashian re-addressed the scandal herself in 2020 in a social media post, saying that the situation “forced me to defend him.”

Swift, meanwhile, shook off the haters who called her a snake and owned the image instead, featuring snakes galore in the video for 2017’s Reputation single “Look What You Made Me Do.”

Though Swift felt at the time like she still couldn’t escape some of the criticism and worried “that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life.”

Clearly, it did not. Swift is on top of the pop cultural and musical world at the moment. And Kanye West? Not so much. (Kim Kardashian is still doing her reality star thing but could hardly be considered in the same stratosphere as Swift).

Swift takes the downfall of her detractors in stride. “My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.”

She then added, “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies. Trash takes itself out every single time.”

Sounds like Taylor Swift has used the years since her incident with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian to find some serious perspective, and is enjoying her rise back to the top of the pop culture mountain.