John Legend Clarifies Comments About the End of His Friendship With Kanye West
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Remember back in August (so…literally last month) when John Legend revealed why he and Kanye West are no longer friends? While he was pretty candid in his remarks to CNN’s The Axe Files host David Axelrod, he just clarified them in a new interview with the New Yorker.
“Yeah, what it got described as was we stopped being friends because he supported Trump, which was a mischaracterization of what I said,” John explained. “That was kind of the Rupert Murdoch version of the story—it was all over the New York Post and Fox News. What I was saying was that he was very upset with me that I didn’t support him running for president, and that was the real impetus for us having a strain in our friendship. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but he was very upset with me that I didn’t support him and I supported Joe Biden. It’s up to him whether he can get past that.”
He added of Kanye sharing their texts on Twitter, “Everyone saw how I talked to him about it. I talked to him with love and with empathy and tried to help him see another way of looking at things. And obviously, he went the way he went with it. The most frustrating thing about his run for the presidency for me was how much it was an operation run by the Trump campaign. I don’t know how aware he was of the fact that there was so much Trump personnel throughout his campaign, raising money for him, getting petitions signed for him, getting him on the ballot. I saw their work on his behalf as a clear scam and an operation to try to siphon Black votes away from Biden, so there was no way I was going to support it. Kanye was upset with that, and we haven’t been friends since, really.”
John had previously told Axelrod, “We aren’t friends as much as we used to be because—I honestly think because we publicly disagreed on his running for office, his supporting Trump. I think it became, uh, too much for us to sustain our friendship, honestly.”
He added at the time that Kanye was “upset I didn’t support his run for presidency of the United States of America for understandable reasons,” adding, “I wasn’t alone in that but, you know, he was not happy about that. And we really haven’t been close since then.”
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