Taylor Swift launched an online tirade at manager-to-the-stars Scooter Braun on Sunday, saying she was ”grossed out” that he is acquiring the rights to her old music.
The pop star wrote on Tumblr that she is devastated that her master recordings had been sold off to Braun — whose clients include Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Kanye West — when he purchased Swift’s former label, Big Machine Label Group, in a $300 million deal reported by Billboard.
“Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,” Swift wrote in the lengthy post. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.
“For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” Swift wrote. “Instead, I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in.
“I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, [former Big Machine owner] Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future.
“I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past,” continued Swift. “Music I wrote on my bedroom floor and videos I dreamed up and paid for from the money I earned playing in bars, then clubs, then arenas, then stadiums.”
The 29-year-old singer said Braun acquiring her catalog — from her 2006 self-titled debut album through 2017’s “Reputation” — was a “worst case scenario.”
When she learned of the deal, “all I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years,” she wrote.
“Like when Kim Kardashian orchestrated an illegally recorded snippet of a phone call to be leaked and then Scooter got his two clients together to bully me online about it. (See photo),” she wrote.
“Or when his client, Kanye West, organized a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked,” she added about West’s music video for 2016’s “Famous,” which featured nude wax figures of various celebrities, including Swift, sleeping in a bed together.
Swift also attached a screenshot of a 2016 Instagram post by Justin Bieber that shows him FaceTiming Braun and West with the caption “Taylor swift what up.”
“This is Scooter Braun, bullying me on social media when I was at my lowest point,” Swift wrote on her screenshot. “He’s about to own all the music I’ve ever made.”
Swift then blasted Borchetta, writing: “This is what happens when you sign a deal at 15 to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept. And when that man says, ‘Music has value,’ he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it.
“When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter,” she wrote. “Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever.”
Swift left Big Machine Music in November and signed a new deal with Universal Music Group.
“Thankfully, I am now signed to a label that believes I should own anything I create,” she wrote. “Thankfully, I left my past in Scott’s hands and not my future.”
She signed off with a message to budding musicians.
“Hopefully, young artists or kids with musical dreams will read this and learn about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation,” Swift wrote. “You deserve to own the art you make.”
Reps for Swift and Braun did not immediately respond to a request for comment.