Amber Rose Admits She May Have Inadvertently Fueled Infamous Kanye West and Taylor Swift VMAs Incident

Daniela AvilaThu, May 7, 2026 at 11:35 PM UTC

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Amber Rose revealed she encouraged Kanye West to drink Hennessy before the 2009 VMAs, which she says backfired

The infamous interruption sparked a years-long feud between Kanye West and Taylor Swift that reignited after his 2016 song “Famous”

Taylor Swift previously called the fallout a “career death” and said it caused her significant distress and isolation

Years after Kanye Westinfamously interruptedTaylor Swift's acceptance speech in 2009, Amber Rose has come forward and said she may have had something to do with it.

Rose, who was dating West, now 48, at the time, appeared on the latest episode of Ball in the Family podcast and revealed that ahead of the show, she encouraged him to grab a bottle of cognac.

"I'm like, 'Babe, you got that bottle of Hennessy upstairs, like, you a superstar. You need to get the Henny… We need to be, you know, just taking shots of Henny on the carpet," Rose, now 42, said. "I'm hyping him up. He like, 'Yeah, yeah, let me go get the Henny.'"

After they drank some, she added, "It kind of backfired."

Kanye West, Amber Rose and Taylor Swift
Credit: Gotham/GC Images; Paul Archuleta/Getty; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

At the time, Swift was accepting her first VMA for Best Female Video for "You Belong with Me" when West jumped on stage to declare that the award should have gone to Beyoncé.

"Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'ma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!" he said into the mic.

Recalling the moment, Rose said she didn't have much time to react.

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"I'm just sitting there and then he's on stage and I’m like, 'Oh s---,'" she recalled. "I was not expecting that… Do I agree with how he did it? No. But was he right? Yes."

The incident resulted in a years-long feud between West and Swift, now 36. They briefly mended their feud in 2015 when the "Cruel Summer" singer presented West with MTV’s Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs. However, the following year, things took a turn when the rapper released his song “Famous,” which included a dig at Swift.

Rose and West split in 2010 after two years together. After the release of "Famous," West's then-wife Kim Kardashianinserted herself into the drama as she came to his defense by sharing a phone call between West and Swift that seemingly showed the rapper and the singer discussing the track ahead of its release.

Kanye West and Taylor Swift in New York City in September 2009
Credit: Christopher Polk/Getty

In an interview with TIME in 2023, Swift called he incident a "career death" of sorts.

"Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me," she told the outlet. “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."

Swift continued: "That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. 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. I went down really, really hard.”

on People

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”