John Legend has clarified the reason why he is no longer close friends with Kanye West.
During an interview last month, Legend – who has collaborated with West on numerous occasions in the past – explained that the pair’s political divisions proved to be too much to maintain their friendship.
He told The Axe Files podcast: “[Kanye and I] aren’t friends as much as we used to be. I honestly think because we publicly disagreed on his running for office, his supporting Trump, I think it became too much for us to sustain our friendship, honestly.”
Speaking to the New Yorker, Legend has now talked about how many media outlets had “mischaracterised” his comments by focussing on former POTUS Trump as the main reason for their fallout.
“Yeah, what it got described as was, we stopped being friends because he supported Trump, which was a mischaracterisation of what I said,” he told the NY. “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.”
Legend continued: “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.”
While the musician doesn’t believe that holding similar political views “should be everything” within friendships, he does think “certain things you believe in are indicators of your character, and obviously that will affect your friendship”.
Legend then opened up about the time West shared texts the pair had exchanged about Donald Trump on Twitter. “Everyone saw how I talked to him about it,” he said. “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.”
Despite West and Legend drifting apart in recent years, the latter previously said that he still respects the rapper for being “very open with who he is and his struggles with mental health”.
“And he’s very real, honestly. So I think there’s not a lot about him that people don’t get…,” Legend explained. “Like he’s been pretty upfront with his opinions, his struggles, all the things that he’s dealing with.”
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