Amber Rose Admits She Fueled Kanye’s Taylor Swift VMAs Ambush

Amber Rose is finally coming clean about the night that changed pop culture forever. Sixteen years after Kanye West stormed the stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to snatch the mic from a 19-year-old Taylor Swift, his ex-girlfriend is admitting she played a role in setting the whole chaotic chain of events in motion — with a bottle of Hennessy and a whole lot of ego-stroking.

“It’s partially my fault,” Rose, 42, told Lonzo and LiAngelo Ball on Tuesday’s episode of the Ball in the Family podcast. It’s the first time she says she’s ever spoken publicly about the incident.

Rose, who dated West from 2008 to 2010, recalled the moments before they left for the awards show with vivid detail. “We get in the car, we about to go to the VMAs, and I’m like, ‘Babe, you got that bottle of Hennessy upstairs, like you a superstar, you need to get the Henny, we need to be on the red carpet taking shots of Henny,’” she said. “You the biggest thing in the whole world. I’m hyping him up.”

West, now 48, apparently didn’t need much convincing. He grabbed the bottle, agreed with every word, and the two took swigs all the way through the red carpet and into the venue. Rose says that’s just who she was as a girlfriend — someone who made her partner feel ten feet tall. She just didn’t account for what that particular partner might do with all that energy.

“It kind of backfired because all of a sudden I’m just sitting there and then he’s on stage,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh s–t. I was not expecting that.’”

What Happened on That Stage

The moment itself needs little introduction. As Swift accepted the award for Best Female Video — beating out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” — West appeared beside her out of nowhere, took the microphone, and delivered what became one of the most quoted lines in awards show history: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you. I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” He handed the mic back and walked off. Swift stood there, stunned. Reports at the time said she was in tears backstage, though she held it together and performed later that same night.

Rose doesn’t fully regret what happened — she just wishes it had gone differently. “That’s naturally Kanye’s personality,” she said. “Do I agree with how he did it? No. But was he right? Yes. That’s how I feel.”

The Feud That Followed — and What Rose Says Now

That one drunken stage crash lit a fuse that burned for years. West and Swift’s back-and-forth became one of the defining celebrity feuds of the 2010s. In 2016, West rapped on “Famous” that he “made that b—h famous” — a line he claimed Swift had approved beforehand. Swift called it “misogynistic” and took a pointed swipe at him during her Grammy acceptance speech. Then his then-wife Kim Kardashian released footage of a phone call between West and Swift that she said proved Swift had signed off on the lyric. Swift fired back eight years later with the 2024 diss track “thanK you aIMee,” aimed squarely at Kardashian, in which she sings about a “bronze, spray-tanned” enemy whose downfall she’d watched with satisfaction.

And through all of it, Rose had never said a word publicly about her role in the night it all began. Until now.

What makes her podcast appearance even more surprising is what she revealed about her relationship with Swift since then. Rose told the Ball brothers that she has actually spoken with Swift after the incident, and there’s no bad blood between them. More than that — when Swift found out that Rose’s son is a massive Swiftie, she sent him merch and concert tickets.

“We were just young and f—ing winging it,” Rose said, summing up the chaos of that night with the kind of clarity only hindsight can give you.

West, for his part, has continued to be a headline unto himself — his antisemitic social media posts in 2022 cost him major partnerships, and he initially blamed Hennessy consumption for his messaging before later insisting in a 2025 post that his words were not the ramblings of a drunkard. The same bottle of Hennessy, it turns out, has a long history in the Kanye West story.

Rose, meanwhile, has carved out a very different kind of public identity since her days on West’s arm. She spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and campaigned for Donald Trump, a move that drew its own share of controversy. But on Tuesday, she wasn’t talking politics. She was talking about a night in 2009 when she told a man he was the biggest thing in the world — and he believed her a little too completely.

“I was not expecting that,” she said again. Sixteen years later, neither was anyone else.