Their rivalry is the millennial response to Hollywood's ancestral hatreds: they have shared hit lists, fans and a boyfriend. But it is not likely that they will share a table again.
Between 2009 and 2011 Katy Perry and Taylor Swift were friends. There is evidence of this in photos from awards ceremonies of the time and on Twitter, where they even congratulated each other on their birthdays.
Taylor Swift tweeted “Watching the 'Waking up in Vegas' video. I love Katy Perry. I think I'm going to hang the poster of her on my wall right now.”
Katy Perry replied that they should record a song together for what was going to be her second album.
In 2012 Katy Perry began dating singer John Mayer, with whom she had an on-and-off relationship for several years. The problem is that John Mayer had previously been Taylor Swift's boyfriend. After her breakup, Taylor dedicated a song to him called 'Dear John' with lyrics full of resentment. But the feud between Katy Perry and Taylor Swift did not officially begin over a man, but over work. Taylor was on tour between 2012 and 2013 presenting her album Red de ella. On her tour she brought three dancers, Lockhart Brownlie, Scott Myrick and Leah Adler, who had previously danced on Katy Perry's California dreams tour. . The latter contacted them to see if they could work on the tour for her next album, Prism. They were interested, but they would have to abandon Taylor's tour before it was over. When speaking to Taylor Swift's team about the situation, they were suddenly fired and, what's worse, Taylor unfollowed them on Twitter.
One of the dancers in the controversy explained it like this: “I was with Taylor for the first six months. It was a great experience and she is a great person to work with, but then Katy contacted us. We were with Katy for two and a half years, she is like family to us. We were hardly dancing on Taylor's tour anyway, I was getting a little bored, Taylor is untouchable.”
In the summer of 2013 Katy Perry released Roar as a new single, which ended up becoming a huge success. The song was accused of being a plagiarism of a much less popular song, Brave by Sara Bareilles. A week after the premiere of Roar, Taylor Swift invited Sara during a concert on her tour to sing 'Brave' together.
In September 2014, Taylor Swift spoke for the first time about the drama of her dancers, but without ever giving the name of her former friend, Katy Perry. She did it in an interview with Rolling Stone talking about Bad Blood, one of the songs from her 1989 disco, which at that time no one had heard yet. The magazine said it was “a song about another female artist that Swift refuses to name” and Taylor Swift told her story like this: “For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not. She would come up to me at award ceremonies and say something to me and leave, and I would think: 'Are we friends or has she just insulted me the most cruelly of my entire life?' She did something terrible to me. I thought 'oh, we are enemies'. And it wasn't even because of a guy! It had to do with work. He basically tried to sabotage my entire tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people on my team without me knowing. And surprisingly I am not a confrontational person, you wouldn't believe how much I hate disputes. So now I have to avoid her. It's uncomfortable, and I don't like it." Taylor admitted in the interview that there may also have been a personal element to the conflict, “but I don't think there would be any personal problem if she wasn't competitive.”
