Emily Ratajkowski has opened up about defending Taylor Swift over resurfaced 2012 interview with Ellen DeGeneres.
In January this year, the 31-year-old model spoke against the viral clip on TikTok, which features Swift sitting on a chair opposite DeGeneres, while the host shows images of celebrities such as Taylor Lautner, Justin Bieber, Joe Jonas, and Justin Timberlake on the screen behind them.
In the video, DeGeneres asks Swift to ring a bell every time she came across a picture of a man that she dated. Swift then pleads with the show host to stop.
“I don’t want to [do it]. They’ll send me angry emails, and I don’t want to get them,” she says.
“Stop it, stop it, stop! This makes me feel so bad about myself,” she continues. “Every time I come up here, you put a different dude up there on the screen, and it just makes me really question what I stand for as a human being.”
At the time, Ratajkowski was one of many people who commented on the viral clip, writing: “This is so f***ed up.”
In a new interview with Elle, the model spoke about how she felt when she watched the clip.
“I recently became a Swiftie. I loved her last album and I’ve seen her documentary, but I wasn’t following her career in the same way the last 10-plus years,” she said. “Watching that [interview], I was so struck by how clear she’s being about what is making her uncomfortable.
“I think the lens that I would’ve viewed that interview from 10 years ago versus now has evolved so much, which is why it struck me. I was in bed falling asleep and commented on it, not because I thought it was going to make headlines at all.”
Ratajkowski added: “[Swift] is another example of a woman who has been faced with such blatant misogyny and sexism, and yet we don’t want to admit that, because she’s powerful and successful, and also she’s white.
“There’s a bunch of reasons, which I think are fair and important to also bring up in the conversation, but that clip in particular was just so striking to me because she was communicating very clearly about why she didn’t feel comfortable with what was happening,” model said.
“And it was making everyone laugh. It actually upset me. And I think that just even that speaks to a larger thing I’ve noticed, where people don’t listen to femme-presenting people.”
