I like a good revenge story just as much as the next person and despite my previous distaste for Taylor Swift’s very identifiable heartbreak references, her musical prowess has forced me to come around. But when Swift re-released “All Too Well,” what was once a knock at her previous lover, Jake Gyllenhaal, turned into a full on, burn-the-house-down 10-minute retelling of the actor’s poor behavior, including a very cutting line that would inevitably serve to direct attention to his current flame (see below).
“And I was never good at telling jokes, but the punch line goes/ I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age.”
Jake’s current girlfriend — Jeanne Cadieu — is 26 years old while Jake is 41. One can only anticipate what happened next. Social media venom was directed not only at Jake for decade-old behavior, but to Jeanne, and Swift refused to call off the troops. To be fair, it can be argued that these trolls are not true Taylor fans, but Taylor had the power to stop it with a simple message on Twitter, and she did nothing. Now, Jake is speaking up for the first time to Esquire and he has a very good point. Though he takes no issue with Taylor expressing her heartbreak in song, the actor said:
“At some point, I think it’s important when supporters get unruly that we feel a responsibility to have them be civil and not allow for cyberbullying in one’s name. That begs for a deeper philosophical question. Not about any individual, per se, but a conversation that allows us to examine how we can—or should, even—take responsibility for what we put into the world, our contributions into the world. How do we provoke a conversation? We see that in politics. There’s anger and divisiveness, and it’s literally life-threatening in the extreme.
I’m not here to tell another woman what to do, but it’s certainly troubling that she never spoke up, fully knowing the consequences.