Taylor Swift Shared A Heartbreaking Admission About Her Mother

Since the start of her career, Taylor's family has supported her dream of becoming a star. So when she had her big break at 14 years old, the family moved to Nashville so Taylor could focus on her music. Her parents — Scott and Andrea — truly went above and beyond to help launch her career, too.

Before the family moved, while Taylor was just out of elementary school, the future star recorded herself singing several popular songs. "My mom waited in the car with my little brother while I knocked on doors up and down Music Row," she told Entertainment Weekly in 2008. "I would say, 'Hi, I'm Taylor. I'm 11; I want a record deal. Call me.'" But her mom did give Taylor one bad piece of advice... sort of.

"She came back from that trip to Nashville and realized she needed to be different, and part of that would be to learn the guitar," Andrea said to EW. "Now, at 12, she saw a 12-string guitar and thought it was the coolest thing. And of course, we immediately said, 'Oh no, absolutely not, your fingers are too small — not till you're much older will you be able to play the 12-string guitar.'" Yet Taylor didn't like that idea.

"Well, that was all it took," Andrea recalled. "Don't ever say never or can't do to Taylor. She started playing it four hours a day — six on the weekends. She would get calluses on her fingers and they would crack and bleed, and we would tape them up and she'd just keep on playing." The hard work paid off, of course.

Andrea didn't care about the fame for her daughter, though. "For her, the happiest I ever see her is just after she's written a killer song," Andrea said. "As a parent, I felt really good about that. If that's where she draws happiness from, she'll have that the rest of her life. She's not always gonna have the awards, or the attention, or the celebrity, but she will always have the ability to write a song." She'll always have her mother, too.

And Andrea became tied to Taylor's career, not just as a mother, but as a manager of sorts, and, more importantly, a support system. "She raised me to be logical and practical," Taylor said. "I was brought up with such a strong woman in my life, and I think that had a lot to do with me not wanting to do anything halfway."

"For me, she’s really the guiding force," Taylor told Variety in 2020. "Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first." So, while Taylor became famous for her music and her high-profile boyfriends, one element in her life stayed consistent as she rose to superstardom: good ol' mom. Andrea attended Taylor's concerts, went along to meet-and-greets, and started becoming a beloved celebrity in her own right.

This is why the public was shocked in 2015 when they read Taylor's letter to her fans. It began innocently enough: "I’m writing to you with an update I wish I weren’t giving you," she wrote. "But it’s important, and I’m used to sharing important events in my life with you [...] This is something my family and I thought you should know about now."

"For Christmas this year," Taylor continued, "I asked my mom that one of her gifts to me be her going to the doctor to get screened for any health issues, just to ease some worries of mine. She agreed and went in to get checked." For the most part, Andrea was presenting healthy and well — but Taylor wanted peace of mind.

So, Andrea granted her daughter's Christmas wish. But the results were beyond unpleasant. "She wanted you to know why she may not be at as many shows this tour," Taylor wrote. "She’s got an important battle to fight. I hope and pray that you never get news like this." Then Taylor shared the results from the check-up.

"The results came in," Taylor wrote. "And I’m saddened to tell you that my mom has been diagnosed with cancer." Taylor was devastated, and so were her fans. But Taylor didn't give any more details. She wanted specifics and treatment plans to stay in-house. However, that was impossible once the Swifts received a second diagnosis a few years later.

Andrea fought cancer and continued to make appearances alongside her daughter. And in the documentary Miss Americana, mom stole the show despite being in the middle of a cancer battle. Taylor, meanwhile, was dealing with her grief in a way fans didn't expect. News on her mother's condition was given only sporadically, with the Swifts seemingly content to deal with everything behind closed doors.

After Taylor morphed from a country singer to a pop-infused country singer to a top pop voice in the world, fans noticed her music lost a bit of playfulness and gained a sharpened edge. Lyrics about dreamy guys faded away, replaced by cutting criticism of politics and social issues. Tough subjects — but the singer-songwriter was undoubtedly going through a tough time.

When Taylor Swift sang "Soon You'll Get Better" in 2020 at the virtual fundraising concert "One World: Together At Home," the audience at home thought the song was about the 2020 global pandemic. But in actual fact, Taylor revealed that the song was about her mother's cancer diagnosis.

"In doctor's-office-lighting, I didn't tell you I was scared," the song goes. "That was the first time we were there / Holy orange bottles, each night I pray to you / Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus too / And I say to you/ Ooh-ah, soon you'll get better." And towards the end, the song got even more personal.

"And I hate to make this all about me," Taylor sings, "But who am I supposed to talk to? What am I supposed to do if there's no you? This won't go back to normal if it ever was / It's been years of hoping, and I keep saying it because 'cause I have to." Fans were missing an even sadder undercurrent to the song, though.

Andrea's battle with cancer wasn't going well, it seemed. Taylor revealed in her documentary, "She was going through chemo, and that’s a hard-enough thing for a person to go through. While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor." She also said, “Obviously it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness.”

"The symptoms of what a person goes through when they have a brain tumor is nothing like what we’ve ever been through with her cancer before. So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family,” she shared. Moving forward, Taylor continued to keep more of the finer details private. But there was a brief update in September 2022.

Andrea still made public appearances, of course, but those were reduced because of COVID-19 and other reasons. In September, though, Taylor wrote TikTok user Ashely Leechin a message. It read, “My mom just saw this [post] and said ‘she looks like you.'” So it seems that Andrea is still going strong and enjoying life. She will no doubt enjoy the success of Midnights, too. Taylor's mom also played a pivotal rule in the court case the singer fought in 2019.

Taylor Swift isn’t generally thought of as a political artist. Over the years, however, her songs have signaled her evolution from an uncertain teen to a champion of the sisterhood. After facing a backlash that all her tunes were about boys and breakups, she used songs like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space” to bite back at her critics. “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane,” she commented, tongue-in-cheek, on the latter track.

Even before she released those songs, though, the singer-songwriter was aware that some people considered her promiscuous. Every time she was even seen with a man, it seemed to make headlines. Plus, Twitter trolls and misguided people who thought they had a point to prove would go after her using nasty and misogynist language. And even retailer Abercrombie & Fitch got in on the act in 2013, releasing a T-shirt that read “more boyfriends than t.s.” — although this was eventually dropped after a storm of complaints.

In April 2016, meanwhile, Swift gave an interview with Vogue in which she described herself as “a national lightning rod for slut-shaming.” And it didn’t take long for her to be proven right. When she broke up with her boyfriend Calvin Harris and moved on with actor Tom Hiddleston, for example, a barrage of abuse was sent her way on Twitter. Teen Vogue, however, pointed out a double standard. “When a male celeb dates someone new immediately after a breakup, literally no one blinks an eye,” they noted in June of that year.

Still, Taylor was able to stand up for herself through her songwriting, in which many people saw references to her exes, and her award speeches, which were more often than not aimed at her haters. “I want to say to all the young women out there: there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame,” she told the audience when she was handed her Grammy for Album of the Year in 2016.

“But if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you who put you there. And that will be the greatest feeling in the world,” she concluded. Her point was clear. But she didn’t just want to stand up for herself: she wanted to help other women as well.

At the beginning of that same year, pop star Kesha was in the middle of a very painful and public trial, where she had accused her record producer, Dr. Luke, of raping and assaulting her. The charges were eventually thrown out, with the judge ruling there was not enough evidence to prove a decade of abuse. She also asserted that one of the incidents Kesha described fell outside of the statute of limitations. But in solidarity with the singer, Taylor Swift sent $250,000 to Kesha in order to assist her with her finances.

The Kesha case got plenty of people talking about sexual violence in the music industry. But the next year they started talking about it again: this time, because of Swift. In 2017 an equally high-profile case — if not more so —involving Taylor herself came to trial. Specifically, she alleged that radio host David Mueller had groped her butt when the pair had met for a photo in June 2013.

Straight after the incident took place, Swift informed her mother Andrea. Andrea in turn told her daughter’s security team and manager, who addressed Mueller about the claims. And while Mueller asserted that he had never touched Swift, he was nevertheless fired from his position as a radio host. So, in September 2015 he opted to sue the singer for $3 million in damages. In his lawsuit, moreover, he claimed that she had made up the whole story and lost him his $150,000-a-year job.

Taylor Swift quickly filed a countersuit, but she wasn’t interested in the huge sums of money Mueller was talking about. Instead, she asked for a single dollar – a symbol of the fact that she was after justice, not money. Then after the trial got underway in August 2017, her lawyer J. Douglas Baldridge explained Swift’s motives to the court. “She’s just trying to tell people out there that you can say no when someone puts their hand on you,” he said. “Grabbing a woman’s rear end is an assault, and it’s always wrong.”

The first piece of evidence to be shown to the court was the photo that had been taken of Swift, Mueller, and Mueller’s then-girlfriend. It showed the DJ’s hand reaching behind Swift, at the level of her butt. The pop star’s lawyers also ordered the photo be kept unpublished; it was later leaked onto the internet, however.

But Mueller’s lawyer, Gabriel McFarland, insisted that the photo proved nothing about what his client had done. “If you look at that photograph,” he told the court, “his hand is not underneath Miss Swift’s skirt, and her skirt is not rumpled in any fashion.” Mueller himself also continued to deny ever touching Swift in a sexual fashion. He said instead that he could have touched her rib cage and accidentally skimmed her skirt.

Then when Swift’s mother Andrea took the stand, she told the court that the star had gone to her immediately after the incident. The singer had been especially upset that she’d automatically thanked Mueller after the photo. "She couldn’t believe that after he grabbed her, she thanked them for being there,” she said. “It was just destroying her that she said that... as a parent it made me question why I taught her to be so polite in that moment,” she said.

The protective mom ended up sobbing as she spoke. She also explained why neither she nor her daughter had immediately gone to the police about Mueller. “I did not want [Taylor] to have to live through the endless memes and GIFs and anything else that tabloid media or trolls would be able to come up with... making her relive this awful moment over and over again,” Andrea said. They had decided at the time to just tell Mueller’s employers.

And when it was time for Taylor herself to speak, she was clear and calm and angry. “I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine,” she said. Then she went on to explain that she believed Mueller had been inebriated when he had groped her. “He had a handful of my ass. It happened to me. I know it was him,” she told everybody. “I didn’t need a picture. I could have picked him out of a line of a thousand.”

Gabriel McFarland questioned why she hadn’t spoken up straight away and confronted him right at the scene. Swift said she had pretty much gone on autopilot as soon as she realized she’d been groped. She had thanked Mueller in a “monotonous voice” and moved on to the rest of her guests. McFarland then asked her what she might have done if the situation were to occur again. “Your client could have taken a normal photo with me,” she snapped back.

Perhaps the most damning evidence of all, though, came from the woman who had actually taken the photograph, Stephanie Simbeck. She claimed that she had taken tens of thousands of photographs of the songwriter with fans but had never once seen the same response from Swift that Mueller had provoked. She had instantly flinched away from him, Simbeck said, making it obvious that something had happened.

And as the trial progressed, there was a huge outpouring of support for Swift. Celebrities like Shonda Rhimes, Jaime King, and George Takei praised her for her bravery. But one of the loudest voices was Kesha, who tweeted, “I support you always, and especially right now, and admire your strength and fearlessness. Truth is always the answer.”

Then on August 14, the court ruled in Taylor Swift’s favor. Mueller had groped Swift, she was the innocent party, and she would also be given her token $1 from him. And though the whole case had obviously never been about the money for her, she also mentioned in a statement that day that she would be donating some of her own fortune to help less privileged sexual assault victims.

Swift’s attorney, Doug Baldridge, spoke to the press after the verdict was delivered. “It takes people like Taylor, wonderful people like Taylor, who we all know, to stand up and draw these lines,” he said. “As I said in the closing [argument], that dollar, that single dollar, is of immeasurable value in this ever-going fight to figure out where the lines are, what’s right and what’s wrong.”