Fifteen years ago, a fresh-faced Taylor Swift wafted onto the stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall to accept her Video Music Award for Best Female Video. “I’ve always dreamed about what it would be like to win one of these one day, but I never thought it would actually happen,” said Swift, the music video for “You Belong with Me” playing on the screen behind her.
The camera cut to an applauding Pink, wearing an outrageously high mohawk, for just long enough to miss Kanye West barreling toward Swift. The following clip—of West grabbing the microphone from Swift’s hands and proclaiming that “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time”—has gone down in infamy, marking the genesis of a colossal feud between the scandal-ridden rapper and the reigning queen of pop.
Now TikTok has developed a new conspiracy theory about what happened that night.
It starts with another rapper, Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is reportedly sharing a room at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center with convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking, not to mention more than 100 sexual-assault, rape, and sexual-exploitation allegations Combs also faces. (It goes without saying that both Combs and Bankman-Fried say they are innocent.)
Ever since Combs’s Los Angeles home was raided by Homeland Security agents six months ago, rumors about who else was involved in his crimes have been rippling through the music industry and onto the Internet. Many have been quick to compare Combs to Harvey Weinstein and, as was the case with previous #MeToo scandals, speculate that other big names in the music industry who quietly enabled or partook in these crimes would be revealed.
In a press conference earlier this month, personal-injury attorney Tony Buzbee—who currently represents 120 people who allege that they were victimized by Combs—told reporters that “many powerful people will be exposed” and “many dirty secrets will be revealed,” though he did not specify who or what he was referring to.
Online conspiracy theorists perked up their ears as a result, and TikTokers have weighed in with downright wild conspiracy theories about Combs and the people who surrounded him, from outlandish interpretations of Justin Bieber songs to speculation about secret tunnels under Combs’s house leading to Michael Jackson’s Neverland.
One of these bizarre conspiracies concerns that night at the V.M.A.’s, and it stems from Combs’s decades-old friendship with Beyoncé and her husband, Jay-Z, which goes back to 90s New York, when both men were trying to break into the music industry. Jay-Z even collaborated on Combs’s 1997 debut studio album, No Way Out, and the trio have been photographed together at countless birthday, holiday, and awards-show parties.
Beyoncé, who has lost more than a million Instagram followers since Combs was arrested, still has a photo of him and Jay-Z on her profile, captioned “Happy Birthday Diddy!” The post, from 2019, is now flooded with comments demanding that she delete it, while her more recent posts are riddled with boycott calls. So far, neither Jay-Z nor Beyoncé has publicly addressed Combs’s arrest. (Representatives for Jay-Z and Beyoncé declined to answer AIR MAIL’s questions about their relationship with Combs or the conspiracy theories.)
This particular ludicrous conspiracy theory alleges that when other artists became a threat to Beyoncé, Combs would have them killed. The “proof,” or so the TikTok sleuths claim, lies in the lyrics of rapper J. Cole’s 2013 hit song “She Knows”:
She knows / Only bad thing ’bout a star is they burn up / Rest in peace to Aaliyah / Rest in peace to Left Eye / Michael Jackson, I’ll see ya / Just as soon as I die.
The lyrics refer to R&B singers Aaliyah Haughton and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who were gaining popularity in the music industry around the same time as Beyoncé when they both died in freak accidents—a 2001 plane crash in the Bahamas killed Haughton, while Lopes died the following year in a car accident in Honduras. (Jackson’s role in all of this, at least according to the TikTokers, is so complicated and far-fetched that it would require its own article.)
Meanwhile, TikTokers claim that “She knows”—the song’s title—is a combination of Jay-Z’s first name (Shawn) and Beyoncé’s last name (Knowles).
This isn’t the first time music fans took a conspiracy theory to the extreme. In the mid-60s, Beatles lovers became convinced that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and been replaced by a look-alike, turning to lyrics in tracks such as “Glass Onion” and “She’s Leaving Home” as evidence. And let’s not forget when, just a few months ago, certain G.O.P. members decided that Taylor Swift was a deep-state psyop and that the N.F.L. was in on it.
The 2021 Astroworld disaster, meanwhile, where eight people were killed in a crowd crush, proved just how quickly a conspiracy theory can rip across TikTok, with countless unfounded videos accusing Travis Scott, who hosted the concert, of organizing a massive satanic ritual.
Now the conspiratorial focus is on Combs, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé, with several recent TikTok videos—one with as many as 90 million views—set to the J. Cole song. The videos show photos of Haughton and Lopes, then flash to Beyoncé when the chorus hits: “And she knows / She knows / And I know she knows / And I know she knows.”
As the (baseless) theory goes, musicians in the industry have sought to cover for themselves by bowing down to Beyoncé.
One comment on TikTok—“The fact everyone who won a grammy dedicated it to Beyoncé every time?”—received 75,000 likes. And in a crop of new videos, “She Knows” plays over clips of other female artists—Adele, Britney Spears, Lizzo—beating out Beyoncé for awards but using their acceptance speeches to thank her.
“They always mention Beyoncé. I didn’t know why til now this is scaryyy,” one user commented. “I won employee of the month, and I mentioned Beyoncé just in case,” another joked. One comment—“Never understood why everyone is so obsessed with Beyoncé”—received nearly 100,000 likes.
To fuel the conspiracy even more, YouTube temporarily took down J. Cole’s song. Though the company attributed this to a new deal with SESAC Music Group, TikTok conspiracists aren’t buying it.
But back to Taylor Swift and Kanye West. Because Swift was a relative newcomer to the music world in 2009, the year she won that V.M.A., the TikTok theory is that she would not yet have known to be deferential to Beyoncé in her acceptance speech, and so West, out of the goodness of his heart, jumped onto the stage to protect her from Combs.
Maybe West is just a Swiftie after all.
Clara Molot is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
