Taylor Swift’s Team Issued a Defamation Threat Against a Website With 76 Twitter Followers
In September, a blog called PopFront published a post headlined “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor Swift subtly gets the lower case “kkk” in formation with ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’” The writer, Meghan Herning, criticized the Swift’s lead Reputation single, asserting that its lyrics speak to “white anger and [affirm] white supremacy.” Herning also pointed out that Swift has fans in the alt-right movement, and argued that she had not done enough to distance herself from them.
PopFront, which aims to cover culture from a leftist perspective, is a decidedly independent operation, with an extremely small audience. The site’s Twitter account has 76 followers at the time of this writing, and its Facebook page has just over 1,000 likes. It seems likely that very few people read the alt-right post when it was published. It would be easy for Swift to ignore the criticism, but instead, her lawyer responded with a strongly-worded demand that PopFront retract the post, with a threat to pursue litigation if it were to remain online.
The Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is working on Herning’s behalf, published the letter this afternoon. It is addressed to Herning from William J. Briggs, II, an attorney at the law firm Venable LLP. “The story is replete with demonstrable and offensive falsehoods which bear no relation to reality or the truth about Ms. Swift,” it reads in part. “It appears to be a malicious attack against Ms. Swift that goes to great lengths to portray Ms. Swift as some sort of white supremacist figurehead…As further shown below, PopFront is substantially liable to Ms. Swift for defamation.”
PopFront’s criticism of “Look What You Made Me Do” focuses largely on just a few lyrics, as well as an image from the music video of Swift behind a podium, which Herning interprets as being visually similar to a Nazi rally given by Adolf Hitler. She spends several paragraphs with the line “I don’t like your kingdom keys / They once belonged to me,” which, she claims, “is another way of saying, I will not be replaced and anger over white dispossession of power.”