Inside the Paris courtroom as Kim Kardashian relives the brutal assault that changed her life for ever
Nearly a decade after she was bound, gagged and robbed at gunpoint, the reality star has given harrowing testimony in the trial of the ‘grandpa robbers’ accused of the attack. But being publicly dismissed, dehumanised and victim-blamed since has also taken its toll, writes Zoë Beaty from Paris
“Hi, I’m Kim Kardashian,” she says.
The voice is instantly recognisable, of course – from endless hours of reality TV consumed by millions, from thousands of social media posts and parodies. She is, as ever, impeccably dressed: a sharp black suit, sparkling jewellery; poised, perfectly made up.
But this is no ordinary public appearance for the woman famous for being famous. On Tuesday, at the Palais de Justice – which houses France’s highest court – Kardashian has come to give crucial evidence in a case that revisits the harrowing crime she endured nearly a decade ago; the night she was bound and gagged, her hands zip-tied, her mouth taped shut, as she feared she would be raped, shot, and left for dead.
Kardashian’s highly anticipated appearance, she tells the packed courtroom, is to “tell my truth”. She is to testify against 10 men – most of them elderly, all with long criminal records – accused of kidnapping and robbing her on the night of 3 October 2016.
Twelve suspects were originally charged. One has since died, and another was excused due to illness. The French press dubbed them les papys braqueurs – “the grandpa robbers” – but prosecutors insist they are anything but harmless retirees. All deny the allegations. More than $10m (£7.5m) worth of jewellery was stolen during what would be dubbed “the heist of the century” – a brazen and violent attack that took place inside Kardashian’s luxury hotel room just before 3am, during her visit to Paris for Fashion Week.
The crime – along with its aftermath – was brutal. Kardashian tells the court she was held at gunpoint and, fearing sexual assault, began “saying a prayer”.
The Parisian court is still as she describes in detail the horrors that she says changed her life almost a decade ago: after demanding her $4m, 18.88-carat engagement ring and locating her jewellery box, they tied her “first with zip ties, then duct tape”, she told the court, while she became “hysterical”. She was naked under her robe as one man pulled her legs towards him on the bed, she said; she began “saying a prayer” to prepare herself to be raped.
"The robe opens up and everything is exposed on my bottom half," she says. "I was certain that was the moment he was going to rape me. I was on the bed and the other one had the gun up to me, and at that point I was certain that was when they were going to shoot me and it was over.”
She turned to the concierge – the only person she knew spoke English in the room – and begged him, “Please translate for them. Tell them I have babies, I have to get home.” The men fled as quickly as they arrived after dumping Kardashian in the bathroom of her suite, and “scooted over to the sink,” she told the court, which was made from marble with an iron leg. “I went to try and get the tape off by rubbing it on the metal,” she said.
Yet, once the ordeal was over, another began: in the days after the robbery, Kardashian found herself in the firing line – this time from the public. After police claimed that her frequent social media updates, posted in real time, aided the accused in carrying out their plan, the influencer found herself publicly dismissed and victim-blamed for creating a “blueprint by her own broadcast”.
In the days after the break-in even the likes of Karl Lagerfeld suggested she had been “too public” – yet, as Kardashian told the court on Tuesday afternoon, “I never thought in my wildest dreams that me posting something would be an invitation for someone to come and take something.” Others accused her of staging the entire thing as a stunt for her reality TV show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians (or KUWTK) – something which, again, she was forced to address in court yesterday.
At the time, the consensus was as cold as it was harsh: the court of public opinion appeared to deem that anyone as wealthy as Kim Kardashian had no right to complain about being robbed of jewellery; that anyone as willing to put their life up for public consumption should expect as much. People like Kardashian – deemed too vacuous for sympathy, too sexual for seriousness – signed up for this swathes of the public declared, as the news stories broke. It speaks volumes that one of her attackers, Yunice Abbass, sought to capitalise on the obvious lack of sympathy elicited initially by writing a book, crudely titled “I kidnapped Kim Kardashian” in 2021.
Nine years later she faced Abbass, along with the other nine defendants, for the first time, sitting just feet away from them in court yesterday. Of course, it was always going to be a hearing unlike most others: the mere image of it – of Skims founder Kardashian clasping her hands at a lectern under impossibly high ceilings and giant, gilded Neoclassical paintings inside Paris’ historic Cour D’Appel – is nothing but surreal.
The media circus that rolled into town for a taste – more than one hundred journalists queued outside the court from as early as 6am, all camera-clad and clutching lanyards – could see it a mile off. The fans queued in grand corridors near to where the hearing was being held, equally transfixed. But it wasn’t the celebrity expected to appear that made this would-be show-trial feel remarkable – it was the woman behind that.
You will undoubtedly already have an opinion on Kim Kardashian, as everybody does – even if that opinion is that you’re not interested in having an opinion on Kim Kardashian. Since 2007, when KUWTK – a series chronicling the lives of Kardashian and her sisters Kourtney and Khloe, along with their half-sisters Kendal and Kylie Jenner – she has been all but public property and, more to the point, completely unavoidable.
Her rise and rise to fame was meteoric and unflappable, yet one of the most Googled things about her remains, “what is Kim Kardashian famous for?”. Those who adore her say accusations that she is shallow miss the point of her genius – that commodifying her life and selling it as assets is simply good business acumen. Her marriages, first to Damon Thomas, then Kris Humphries and, finally, most famously, to Kanye West in 2014, only seemed to fortify the flashy public narrative that has followed her around ever since. Her image has continually complicated her narrative – press material was reportedly issued during the trial that praised her Samer Halimeh diamond necklace, for example – Kardashian has repeatedly appeared to acknowledge the obvious contradictions head on.
In fact, over the years she’s embraced it, often calling herself an “underdog”, appearing to playfully enjoy others’ trivialisation of her. After the robbery, Kardashian declared her interest in the law, following in the footsteps of her father, Robert Kardashian, who famously defended OJ Simpson. Much to her critics’ surprise, she passed the California state bar exam. On Tuesday, she told a roomful of barristers that she too now works in justice system reform, explaining that she regularly “fights for victims who have been through horrific crimes and who just want to be heard and understood”.
It’s true: in recent years she’s advocated for and helped secure the release of multiple people from prison. On Tuesday she even found empathy for the alleged ringleader of the gang who orchestrated the attack on her, who had written her a letter expressing his regret. “I appreciate the letter, for sure, I forgive you,” she said, looking at 68-year-old Aomar Aït Khedache. “But it doesn’t change the feelings and the trauma and the fact that my life was forever changed. But I do appreciate the letter, thank you.”
It was another surreal moment in a series of them at the Palais de Justice. At 8.45am, the only female defendant, Christiane ‘Cathy’ Glotin, 78, casually strolls past me at security; during an afternoon break another, Marc Boyer, dressed in Nike trainers and a beaded necklace, who is accused of supplying the weapon used to threaten Kardashian, jumps the line at an overworked coffee vending machine by court Voltaire. Most of the accused wore surgical masks to try and conceal their identity to roam about the court building, but their presence was keenly (and bizarrely) felt – it seemed unfathomable that a group of men charged with such serious, violent crime had been free to roam about – free to write books – while awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, Kardashian told the court, for her freedom is something of the past.
“Paris was always a place I loved so much,” she said yesterday, “I used to walk around the city when I woke up in the middle of the night, or early in the morning I’d take walks around the city, and always felt really safe.” Now, it only harbours trauma. Since the robbery took place she "can’t sleep at night" without "multiple security". "I need between four and six night security for me to feel safe," she explained; she no longer trusts drivers, her jewellery taken off before she arrives home and stored in a separate location; when staying in hotels, she has guards staying outside her door.
“I think that that moment changed her life forever,” Simone Harouche, Kardashian’s lifelong friend and stylist, who was staying downstairs from her in the same hotel when the robbery occurred, testified a few hours earlier. “I think that it changed for both of us, but I think particularly for her, her loss of freedom … She now has a completely different lifestyle.
“In terms of security, she can’t go – she doesn’t go – alone to places any more. To lose your sense of freedom is horrible.” The robbery was a reckoning not just for Kardashian but for digital security as a whole. Across the board managers began advising their clients to delay posts on social media, concealing their real time location, and questions about visibility, blame and the price of celebrity began to surface. Kardashian’s victimhood became not a given, but a point of debate.
There was no doubt of it in Paris Tuesday. Kardashian wore a power-shouldered John Galliano skirt suit according to Vogue, and her hair neatly tied back – not too formal, but not too feminine either; a balancing act that most female victims will recognise from afar. For the most part, save for the occasions when she wiped away tears, she was controlled in how she spoke – “I don’t want to answer because I’m not absolutely certain”, she says a couple of times – but there’s also no hiding the horror of her account of the night in question. “[It] changed my life and it changed my family’s life,” Kardashian told the captivated court. She looked straight ahead, at the president judge when she said, “I absolutely did think I was going to die.”
After four hours on the stand, Kardashian left court yesterday having told her “truth” and, finally, she said drawing a line under the incident. “This is my closure,” she told the court. “This is me putting this, hopefully, to rest.” In the decade since the robbery, a lot has changed – #MeToo reframed how we talk about violence against women, more recently, in another French court, Giselle Pelicot redefined victimhood. Yesterday, Kardashian appeared in Paris not as a celebrity, but as a woman wanting to be heard, who deserves praise for facing down her attackers this week.
The trial will continue in Paris – it’s expected to go on until May 28 – when a verdict will decide the fate of the ten men accused of robbery and kidnapping the star. Whatever the outcome may be at the Palais de Justice, perhaps her testimony might provide a lesson for the court of public opinion: not to underestimate Kim Kardashian and certainly never to dismiss her.