Taylor Swift isn’t the only one haunted by the 2009 Video Music Awards. Swift’s ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner remembers the fateful September night vividly.
In a new episode of his podcast The Squeeze, which the Twilight star hosts with his wife, Taylor Lautner (she goes by Tay to avoid confusion), Tay asked her husband about one moment in his life he’d go back to if he had the option. Without missing a beat, Lautner responds, “Probably the 2009 VMAs when I presented the award to Taylor and was unaware that the Kanye thing was not a skit.”
As his wife points out, the pair had just recently gone public with their relationship when Lautner was tasked with presenting Swift with the award for best video by a female artist. During her acceptance speech, Kanye West famously stormed the stage, took her mic, and proclaimed, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!”
In 2019, Taylor Swift released a diary entry about the controversy, which read, “If you had told me that one of the biggest stars in music was going to jump up onstage and announce that he thought I shouldn’t have won on live television, I would’ve said, ‘That stuff doesn’t really happen in real life.’ Well…apparently…. It does.”
Lautner couldn’t believe it either, though he also admits he couldn’t actually hear what was happening “five feet” in front of him. “I can barely hear it. I can’t see them. I’m just assuming that this whole thing was a practice and rehearse skit,” he said on the podcast. “Because why else would Kanye West be jumping up on the stage interrupting Taylor Swift? Just didn’t make sense.”
He continued, “If you look back at it, I’m actually caught, like, laughing and like giggling out. I’m like, Oh, I can’t hear them, but this is probably really funny right now. He jumped off; she finished. The second she turned back around and I saw her face for the first time. I was like, Oh…that wasn’t good.”
Though the relationship lasted only a few months, Lautner was the inspiration behind Swift’s 2010 hit song “Back to December.” As one TikTok user replied to the podcast clip, “She goes back to December all the time but he goes back to the 2009 VMAS all the time.”
This article first appeared on Glamour.com
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