The sun hasn't yet risen in Paris, and I'm waiting outside the Palais de Justice to watch Kim Kardashian testify against the so-called grandpa robbers -- a gang of career criminals, many of whom were in their fifties and sixties, who bound and gagged her in her penthouse suite, during Paris Fashion Week in October, 2016, and stole millions of dollars' worth of jewelry. At the time, Kardashian was still in the midst of proving that she was the kind of figure who even belonged at Fashion Week; back then, the culture still differentiated between social-media stars and real stars. The heist announced Kardashian's graduation into something greater than a glorified Instagram influencer, earning her right to the city's fashion scene through trauma and eliciting public sympathy from the mayor of Paris. The event also provoked a stream of news headlines and social-media conversations about whether the attack had been a publicity stunt, whether her conspicuous consumption had made her an inevitable target, and whether we should allow the robbery to humanize her at all. This media cycle was ultimately eclipsed, less than a month later, by the election of Donald Trump as President -- another figure who was known for his savvy use of social media, and who, like Kardashian, was seen as famous for being famous.
Most of the journalists I spoke with in Paris anticipated mayhem on the day of Kardashian's testimony. "They're preparing for superfans camping overnight," one told me. Another suggested that I arrive at 5 A.M., three and a half hours before the doors would open, to guarantee myself a spot in the courtroom. As it turned out, the hype would be contained to the press entrance down the block, where ABC and CNN had been waiting since my predawn arrival, and where the line behind them grew longer minute by minute. It would be hours until anyone else arrived in the public-access line. Eventually, I'm joined by a young superfan named Vincent, who has come prepared with a stack of photos of Kardashian's Met Gala looks over the years, including her most recent, a rather uncontroversial leather ode to rocker Lenny Kravitz -- a far cry from what some might have expected her to wear a decade ago for a Black-dandyism theme.
Vincent says that he hopes to meet Kardashian and that he'll give her a choice of which photo to sign. Then he pulls up a trailer on his phone of the upcoming television series that she's starring in, "All's Fair," created by Ryan Murphy. In it, Kardashian -- who began pursuing a legal career in 2018 -- plays a high-powered divorce attorney. The trailer had been released online around the time of her court appearance in Paris. This fusion of an on-theme product drop with a personal milestone is unsurprising at this point, accustomed as we are to the synchronous rhythms of the Kardashians' media machinations. Soon enough, Kardashian could actualize from courtroom witness to TV lawyer to legitimate lawyer, just as she evolved from fashion victim to Paris Fashion Week robbery survivor to runway muse for Balenciaga and Dolce & Gabbana.
When the courtroom doors open, Vincent and I -- along with a handful of fans who have come to see Kardashian IRL -- make it inside, and find ourselves amid a frenzy of camera crews setting up in the space outside of Voltaire Hall, where the trial has been under way since April 28th. We spend the morning session watching the testimony of Kardashian's stylist Simone Harouche, who was in the penthouse when the robbery took place and, upon hearing Kardashian's screams, had locked herself in a bathroom. Before a panel of skeptical-looking French judges, we watched Harouche describe the lasting emotional damage of believing that her best friend was being raped, and fearing that she would be next.
Harouche is an effective opener -- she draws a much harder retributive line than Kardashian later will, stating that she would like "justice to be served." When asked by one judge whether Kardashian's shameless opulence had invited trouble, Harouche replies with reasoning that was once radical but is now resonant in mainstream discourse: "Just because a woman wears jewelry, that doesn't make her a target. That's like saying that because a woman wears a short skirt that she deserves to be raped."
At the start of the afternoon session, the courtroom is buzzing with the anticipation of Kardashian's arrival. We make up an élite few who will observe the star in a space where cameras are not permitted -- not even her own. A hush sweeps the room. "She's here," someone says, and, to the left of the galleries, there she is, standing with an austere, suited Kris Jenner and a sombre entourage of lawyers and security guards, dripping, as most headlines would later dutifully report, in diamonds. She makes her way to her seat, casting a vague and pleasant gaze toward members of the press and the public. Then, once she's seated, everyone in the courtroom sharply inhales: the robe of one of the French lawyers standing behind Kardashian has latched onto her perfect bun, yanking Kardashian's head backward, and there's a struggle to remove it.
The public's scrutiny of Kardashian throughout her decades of social climbing has been a tango with Schadenfreude -- an endless tension-and-release dynamic of awaiting her stumbles and coping with her wins. This assault on Kardashian's perfect hairdo would be our take-home story -- witnessing her in an all too human moment of vulnerability right before yet another publicity cycle that she'd dominate, an odd little echo of what had happened to her in 2016.
After disentangling herself from the lawyer, Kardashian walks to the podium at the center of the room, and she begins by introducing herself, thanking the court for their time. Then she recounts her experience of being manhandled and robbed, in the exact same way that she relayed it on her TV show in 2016 and in subsequent talk-show interviews, though she must do so now in simplistic chunks of information for the sake of the court's translator. She says that the event changed her life forever: "We never thought that we were ever not safe before this."
In the aftermath of the robbery, Kardashian took her first real retreat from the public eye, reappearing on Instagram three months later to post lo-fi family photos with her then husband, Kanye West, and their kids milling about a middle-class-looking home. She went on Ellen DeGeneres's show and renounced her materialism: "I'm such a different person. . . . I just don't care about that stuff anymore." She also launched entrepreneurial ventures that were not purely based on her physical likeness, such as Kimoji, an app with Kardashian-themed pictograms -- perhaps in part to establish further distance from a public that had become accustomed to viewing her entire personhood as commodity. Most successful of all was the Skims shapewear brand, which emphasized "body positivity," featured diverse-looking models in its early ads, and reportedly sold out of nearly every product on its first day online.
On various occasions, she visited President Trump in the Oval Office to promote different criminal-justice-reform initiatives, offering the public a double whammy in the spectacle of the ongoing collapse between politics and entertainment. Trump and Kardashian were both reality stars who perhaps rivalled only each other in their ability to outrage the public. For Trump, who had been shunned by other celebrities both during and after the election, the visits were an opportunity to reaffirm his pop-culture clout. For Kardashian, these visits lent her a sense of legitimacy, and they also represented a broadening of the Overton window, or the range of policies and premises that the public considers acceptable. She was conditioning the public to view her in roles that expanded the bounds of celebrity norms, walking the halls of power just days after posting a bikini selfie on the internet. Arguably, she was taking a page out of Trump's playbook. After Trump won the 2016 election, the normalization researchers Adam Bear and Joshua Knobe wrote for the Times about how repetition can erode our resistances: "As President Trump continues to do things that once would have been regarded as outlandish, these actions are not simply coming to be regarded as more typical; they are coming to be seen as more normal."
Questioned on the stand about her gratuitous social-media posting, Kardashian explains the mechanics of what Harouche had referred to earlier as "the business of entertaining" in America. "Social media is a great business tool for my family," she says. "The more followers you have, the more product you sell. Having these mini reality shows on your social media where people can watch your every move is part of the culture in the U.S.A." She assures the court that, since the robbery, she has adjusted her social strategy so that she is posting less personal content, and never in real time. The judges' most pointed questions are not coming off as epic undercuts to the Kardashian empire but, instead, as meagre and outdated. Ten years ago, the Kardashians' floods of content bewildered us. Today, like it or not, we all know the gist of the influencer economy.
When asked about her reasons for testifying, Kardashian re-states her most persistent narrative: her stake in criminal-justice reform and law. "It's the first time I could hear from everyone," she says, referring to the grandpa robbers, who at one point took turns standing up to tell her they were sorry. "I do want to become a lawyer, and this is my closure." She turns to one of the men, Aomar Aït Khedache, who had written her a letter of apology, and says, "I forgive you." She elegantly rebuffs a silly question about whether she resents Harouche for not intervening during the attack. She suggests that she experiences financial burden from being forced to travel with private security and staff wherever she goes. She acknowledges the therapy that she needed to cope with her memories of the event. Throughout all of this, though, she emphasizes her resilience: "Other than that . . . I try to be strong."