Breaking : man who smashed a ‘signed’ Taylor Swift guitar with a hammer after buying it at auction has spoken out about the gesture…

A video went viral this week which showed Gary Estes collecting the guitar after he’d just spent $3,200 (£2,390) on the instrument at a charity auction in Texas.

The guitar was covered in images of Swift from her Eras Tour, but when the man got his hands on the guitar, he proceeded to take a hammer to it, with the audience cheering as he smashed it up.

The video was shared on TikTok, and unsurprisingly sparked anger amongst Swifties.

Now, Estes has spoken out the incident, saying there was “nothing malicious” about the stunt and that it was intended as a “joke.”

He told NBC News: “It was just a joke at an auction that we had to raise money for kids, right?

“And that’s all it was. There was nothing mean about it, nothing bad about it. It was just a joke that they were making up on the stage, and we just followed through with a joke.”

Auctioneer and spokesperson for the event, Craig Meier, initially supported Estes’s words, agreeing that it was simply a “funny, light-hearted thing.”

However, he later said that, after speaking with the 67-year-old, it was clearly intended as a political statement.

Taylor Swift, it became a political thing, and that was kind of the gist of it, just a light-hearted bit of a dig at Taylor for coming out politically and entertainers using their influence to influence politics,” he said.