Kanye West on Kim Kardashian’s Paris Robbers: ‘I Wouldn’t Have Stopped Until They Were Dead’
On the latest episode of E!’s ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians,’ Kim tearfully recounted her robbery at gunpoint in Paris, while her husband Kanye West delivered a warning to the culprits.
Calling Kim Kardashian a control freak is an understatement, akin to saying that Kanye West likes Balmain. Kardashian is as publicly composed as her husband is predictably unhinged. From her unprecedented rise to fame to the myriad of hyphens she’s managed to quickly accrue, the closet organizer turned reality TV star-spokeswoman-video girl-Silicon Valley mogul-emoji entrepreneur has always been about her business. It’s this meticulous work ethic that allowed Kim to avenge her husband in the face of Taylor Swift’s slander, launching a carefully considered counter-campaign across Twitter, Snapchat, reality TV, and print magazines. Cementing her status as the Sun Tzu of social media, Kardashian managed to simultaneously draw eyeballs to her family’s reality TV show, satiate her voracious Twitter and Snapchat followings, stand by her man and out her pop culture nemesis on “National Snake Day.”
Anyone can get petty on Snapchat, but a true strategist consults with her almanac first.
Whether she’s getting married, launching a business, getting divorced, starring in a photoshoot or getting married again, Kardashian owns her own narrative like none other. So when the face of Keeping Up with the Kardashians was attacked and robbed during Paris Fashion Week last October, it was quite possibly the first instance of Kim Kardashian being out of the loop on a Kim Kardashian story.
On this week’s episode—the second of KUWTK’s thirteenth season—Kardashian opened up about the sense of helplessness she felt on that fateful night at the Hôtel de Pourtalès—from thinking that the robbers were about to rape her to contemplating making a run for it, before being paralyzed by the fear that they would shoot her in the back before she could make it down the hotel stairs.
While Kim’s very public trauma clearly had lasting effects on the star, including but not limited to a very unnerving social media blackout, this week’s episode is the first time she’s spoken out extensively about the incident. So while the events of October third may have caught Mrs. West completely unawares, the March 19 episode of KUWTK served to take back Kim’s story. Keeping Up With the Kardashians, a show that largely consists of Kardashians FaceTiming one another from different Calabasas mansions, is rarely this riveting. Piecing together footage from Paris Fashion Week, Kanye West’s headline-making Meadows walk-off, and the aftermath in NYC, Sunday night’s episode covered the crime from every possible angle (excluding, of course, footage of the robbery itself). The great minds over at E! leaned all the way into this special true crime episode, with all the accoutrements (flashing newspaper headlines, timestamps, etc.) of a producer who’s spent a little too much time binge-watching How to Get Away with Murder.
The episode opens on Kim and Kanye being swarmed by paparazzi in New York, post Paris. In the elevator to reunite with her kids, Kim tells Kanye that she doesn’t want to scare them by bringing up the robbery. For explication, we pull back one week to when Kim and Kourtney were naively discussing what they should pack for Paris. Throughout the episode, there’s an unusual emphasis on the claustrophobia of international celebrity. So while Kim clearly had no idea she was about to be attacked, there is a sinister undertone to the way the paparazzi constantly storm and harass her. At a Givenchy fitting, Kim opens up about being “pranked” by Vitalii Sediuk earlier in her trip, noting, “It’s a stupid prank but it really does get into your personal space…it’s not funny.” Meanwhile, in the background, Kanye is pulling looks for his wife—he felt the need to fly to Paris for 24 hours because he wasn’t satisfied with the outfits Kim had been showing him and “you can’t see everything through the FaceTime.” Watching…