Taylor Swift gets groveling apology from Billboard for using controversial ‘naked’ Kanye West clip in career highlights

Taylor Swift received an apology from the music publication Billboard after it included footage of an infamous nude wax figure in her image in a video meant to celebrate her career

The shocking display originally came to light when her longtime nemesis Kanye West, 47, used it and nude figures of other celebrities in his Famous music video.

Billboard was quickly beset by a wave of angry fan complaints over using the nude was figure.

‘’We are deeply sorry to Taylor Swift and all of our readers and viewers that in a video celebrating Swift’s achievements, we included a clip that falsely depicted her,’ the publication wrote in an apology post shared on X (formerly Twitter) just after midnight on November 28. ‘We have removed the clip from our video and sincerely regret the harm we caused with this error.’

Notably, the shot has now been removed from the video tribute.

So far, it’s unclear how the inappropriate image made its way into Billboard’s career highlights reel.
On Thursday, a corrective community note was appended to Billboard’s apology after being vote up by X users.

It noted the wax figure’s origins in West’s Famous video, then went on to claim that ‘the music video was revenge porn,’ which is ‘illegal in most U.S. states.’

However, because of the fact that the figure was created by an artist and was apparently not intended to be for explicitly sexual purposes, it’s unlikely that it could be classified as revenge porn for the sake of prosecution.

However, in a Forbes post published after the video was originally released, Nicholas Rozansky argued that Swift, 34, might have been able to sue West for copyright infringement if the sculpture was based on an existing copyrighted photo or other image.

She may have also had the option to sue for defamation or libel due to the sexual nature of the sculpture, or possibly using California’s Right to Publicity law, which allows individuals to ‘control the commercial use of his or her name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal aspects of one’s identity.’

Ahead of the release of the groveling apology, Swift’s fans lambasted Billboard on social media for the video, which named her the second-greatest pop star of the 21st century.

The figure came from the 2016 music video of Kanye West’s controversial song Famous, which features the lyric: ‘I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b**** famous.’