Back in 2016 Taylor Swift's reputation was left in tatters amid a vicious row with Kim Kardashian and her husband Kanye West over his song, Famous.
In it, he took credit for Taylor's fame, called her a 'b*tch' and rapped about how they might 'have sex'.
And when Taylor objected to being called a 'b*tch' and being depicted naked in the accompanying video, Kim insisted she had approved the whole thing and leaked snippets of a phone call between Taylor and Kanye to prove it.
However, the full recording of the call mysteriously appeared online this weekend, confirming that at no point did Taylor give her consent to the 'b*tch' lyric.
But instead of defending herself at the time, Taylor, 30, went to ground, only breaking cover with her furious album Reputation and the venomous Look What You Made Me Do the following year.
She then dropped completely out of the public eye, retreating to London to live anonymously with her British boyfriend Joe Alwyn.
And in 2019 she opened up about the devastating toll the fall-out took on her mental health, telling Vogue: “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote cancelled, is a very isolating experience.
"I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly," she added.
“When you say someone is cancelled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, 'kill yourself'.
"Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses."
That year had already been a testing one for Taylor. After public spats with Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, her brief romance with Tom Hiddleston was branded a publicity stunt.
Then came the the reignition of her historic feud with Kanye, first formed when he stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2008 and announced that Beyonce should have won Taylor's award.
“Every domino fell,” Taylor previously told the Guardian of her annus horribilus.
“It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music."
So why didn't she exonerate herself?
With her haters in full flow, the star worryingly feared any kind of denial would only give her bullies more cause to deride her - and thought no-one would believe her anyway.
"When people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery," she explained.
Realising she was up against something 'more powerful' than herself, she continued: “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you.
"Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”
