On the Today show Thursday, Kathie Lee Gifford came to her stepdaughter’s defense, backing Victoria Gifford Kennedy’s account of Taylor Swift’s weekend wedding crash — despite Swift’s publicist claim that it was not true.
Victoria Gifford Kennedy, once married to Robert Kennedy’s son Michael, hosted the nuptials of her daughter Kyle Kennedy to one Liam Kerr in Boston on Saturday, where she says Swift attended despite requests to stay away.
Kathie Lee explained that she knew Swift did in fact crash her wedding because she was in attendance. (The bride, Kyle is Kathie Lee’s granddaughter by marriage.)
Getty image - Taylor Swift and Connor Kennedy - after being asked to leave wedding
“The truth is, because I was there, Vicki’s … account of what happened is accurate,” Gifford said during a discussion with her co host Hoda Kotb.
The Boston Herald quoted the bride’s mother, Victoria Gifford Kennedy, who is the daughter of Kathie Lee’s husband Frank Gifford, as saying that she asked Conor and Taylor not to come via text, but they showed up anyway.
When she saw them, “I personally went up to Ms. Swift, whose entrance distracted the entire event, politely introduced myself to her, and asked her as nicely as I could to leave,” Victoria told the Boston Herald Wednesday. “It was like talking to a ghost. She seemed to look right past me.”
Swift’s rep told the paper at the time that “there is no truth to that,” adding that “Taylor was invited to the wedding and the bride thanked her profusely for being there.”
But according to Kathie Lee, “all the invitations went out a long time ago, before they started dating,” as she relayed on “Today.” Victoria added to the Boston Herald that Conor had been invited, but he didn’t RSVP, which Kathie Lee reiterated Thursday.
“The truth is, because I was there, Vicki, Frank’s daughter’s account of what happened in Boston, is accurate,” she said. “Because she said to me as it was happening, ‘I’m really not happy about this.’ … She told me that Conor had emailed her or texted or something like that an hour before. He had not RSVP’d, so she didn’t even know if he was coming or not. She heard that he might be, but he got in touch with her an hour earlier, and said, basically, ‘Can I bring my girlfriend?’”
Kathie Lee continued that Victoria “said very nicely, please do not come, but they came anyway. They asked her to leave twice. I thought she did …. I didn’t know there was any drama going on at the time. I’m not sure she didn’t know that she wasn’t invited.”
The issue, she concluded, was that “It’s the bride’s day, and that was Vicki’s other concern.” And then, perhaps thinking of Conor, Kathie Lee added, “If you’d done the right thing and RSVP’d, and then had called weeks before and said ‘May I,’ then I think Vicki would have graciously said yes you may.”
