PARIS (AP):
Kim Kardashian said a silent prayer – for her sister, her best friend, her family – as a masked man pulled her toward him in a Paris hotel room during the 2016 jewellery heist that changed her life. She wore a bathrobe. Her hands were zip-tied. Her mouth was taped. She thought she wouldn’t survive.
“I was certain that was the moment that he was going to rape me,” she told a Paris court Tuesday. “I absolutely did think I was going to die.”
She said she was getting ready for bed when she heard stomping on the stairs. At first, she thought it was her sister Kourtney and a friend returning drunk from a night out at Paris Fashion Week.
“Hello? Hello? Who is it?” she called out. Then masked men stormed the room.
She grabbed her phone but didn’t know the French emergency number. She tried to call her sister and bodyguard, but one man stopped her. The men threw her on the bed, zip-tied her hands and pressed a gun to her.
“I have babies,” Kardashian said, according to her testimony. “I have to make it home. They can take everything. I just have to make it home.”
She was carried into the bathroom. One man taped her mouth. She was told she’d be OK if she stayed quiet.
The last time Kardashian saw the men that police say robbed her, she was locked in the marble bathroom while masked assailants stole more than US$6 million in jewelry. On Tuesday, nearly a decade later, she faced them again – this time, from the witness stand.
Her testimony marked the emotional climax of a trial that has gripped France and reignited debates about the cost of fame and what it means to live in public.
At the time of the robbery, Kardashian was one of the most recognised women on the planet. A fashion icon. A reality star. A billionaire business mogul. She had mastered a new kind of celebrity – one broadcast in real time, post by post, to millions of followers.
But in the early hours of October 3, 2016, that visibility became a weapon against her. The robbery marked a turning point for Kardashian, and for how the world understood vulnerability in the digital age.
Investigators believe the attackers followed Kardashian’s digital breadcrumbs – images, timestamps, geotags – and exploited them with old-school criminal methods.
Dressed in black with defiant sparkling diamonds, Kardashian on Tuesday stood across from her mother, Kris Jenner, in the heavily secured courtroom. Her voice trembled as she thanked French authorities for “allowing me to share my truth.”
She described how the attackers arrived at her hotel disguised as police officers, dragging the concierge upstairs in handcuffs. “I thought it was some sort of terrorist attack,” she said.
One attacker demanded she turn over her diamond ring valued at US$4 million on the bedside table. “He said, ‘Ring! Ring!’ and he pointed to his hand,” she recalled.
French prosecutors say the assailants – most in their 60s and 70s – were part of a seasoned criminal ring. Two defendants have admitted being at the scene. One claims he didn’t know who she was.
Twelve suspects were originally charged. One has since died. Another was excused due to illness. The French press dubbed them les papys braqueurs –“the grandpa robbers” – but prosecutors insist they were no harmless retirees.
They face charges including armed robbery, kidnapping and membership in a criminal gang, offenses that carry the potential for life imprisonment.
‘TAKE EVERYTHING. I NEED TO LIVE’
After the men fled, Kardashian rubbed the tape against the bathroom sink to free her hands. She hopped downstairs, still bound, to find her friend and stylist, Simone Harouche. Fearing the robbers might return, they went onto the balcony and hid in bushes. While lying there, Kardashian called her mother.
Earlier in the trial, Harouche recalled hearing Kardashian scream from upstairs: “‘I need to live.’ That is what she kept on saying, ‘Take everything. I need to live.’”
Harouche locked herself in a bathroom and texted Kardashian’s sister and bodyguard: “Something is very wrong.”
She described how her friend was “beside herself … she just was screaming.”
Judge David de Pas asked whether Kardashian had made herself a target by posting images of herself with “jewels of great value.” Harouche rejected the premise. “Just because a woman wears jewelry, that doesn’t make her a target,” she said. “That’s like saying that because a woman wears a short skirt that she deserves to be raped.”
After the robbery, critics slammed Kardashian for flaunting her wealth, including designer Karl Lagerfeld who told AP she was “too public” with her jewelry. But as details of the heist emerged, public opinion grew sympathetic.
The heist triggered a cultural shift, prompting publicists and managers to urge clients to delay social media posts, remove location tags and think twice before flashing luxury online. Yet Kardashian’s own image, some say, continues to complicate that narrative. As she testified Tuesday about her trauma, journalists received a press release touting her Paris courthouse appearance: “Kim Kardashian stuns … wearing a show-stopping US$1.5 million diamond necklace by Samer Halimeh New York, featuring 80 flawless diamonds.” Visibility, it seemed, remains currency.
She told the court her house in Los Angeles was robbed shortly afterward in what appeared to be a copycat attack. Without security guards, she said, “I can’t even sleep at night.” She now keeps between four and six guards at home.
“I started to get this phobia of going out,” Kardashian said. “This experience really changed everything for us.”
At the time of the 2016 robbery, she said, her bodyguard was staying in a separate hotel: “We assumed that if we were in a hotel it was safe, it was secure.”
She said Paris had once been a sanctuary, a place where she would walk at 3 or 4 a.m., window shopping, sometimes stopping for hot chocolate. It “always felt really safe,” she said. “It was always a magical place.”
Kardashian, who is studying to become a lawyer herself, said she was grateful for the opportunity “to tell my truth” in the packed Paris courtroom.
“This is my closure,” she said. “This is me putting this, hopefully, to rest.”
