“ I was going to die ”: Kim Kardashian shares fears as she faces suspects of theft in Paris before the court

Kim Kardashian said a silent prayer – for her sister, her best friend, her family – as a masked man drew her in a Paris hotel room in the robbery of 2016 jewelry that changed his life. She only wore a robe. It was linked with zipped links. She thought she would not survive.

“I was sure it was the moment when he was going to rape me,” she told a Paris court on Tuesday. “I absolutely thought I was going to die.”

The reality TV star and business tycoon said she was preparing for the bed when she heard the stairs trampled. At first, she thought it was her sister Kourtney and a friend who came back from an evening at the Paris Fashion Week.

“Hello? Hello? Who is it?” She called. Then the masked men stormed the play.

She caught her phone but did not know the French emergency number. She tried to call her sister and her bodyguard, but a man stopped her. The men threw him on the bed, tied his hands and pressed a pistol to his temple.

“I have babies,” said Kardashian, according to his testimony. “I have to go home. They can take everything. I just have to go home.”

She was transported to the bathroom. A man stuck his mouth. She was told that she would be fine if she remained silent.

The last time Kardashian saw the men who, according to the police, stole her, was linked under the threat of a weapon and left a marble bathroom locked up while masked attackers stole more than $ 6 million (8.4 million dollars CDN) in jewelry. Almost a decade later, she returned to Paris to face it – this time from the witness stand.

His testimony has marked the emotional highest point of a trial that seized France and rekindled debates on fame, private life and what it means to live – and almost die – in public.

The sword of glory with double -edged swords

At the time of the flight, Kardashian was one of the most recognized women on the planet. She had mastered a new type of celebrity – a distribution in real time, post by post, to millions of followers.

But in the early hours of October 3, 2016, this visibility became a weapon against it. The flight marked a turning point for Kardashian and the way the world understood vulnerability in the digital age.

Investigators believe that the attackers followed Kardashian’s digital breadcrumbs – images, horodatages, geotags – and exploited them with old -fashioned criminal methods.

Dressed in black with provocative and sparkling diamonds, Kardashian stood in the packaged courtroom in front of her mother, Kris Jenner. Her voice broke as she thanked the French authorities for “allowing me to share my truth”.

She described how the attackers arrived dressed as police officers, with the concierge handcuffed. “I thought it was a kind of terrorist attack,” she said.

An attacker signaled to his diamond ring.

“He said:” Ring! Ring! “And he showed his hand,” she recalls.

‘Grandpa thieves’

French prosecutors say that men who orchestrated the robbery – most of them in the sixties and the 1970s – were part of a experienced criminal cycle. Two of the accused admitted to be on the scene. It is claimed that he did not know who she was.

Twelve suspects were originally charged. One has died since. Another has been apologized due to an illness. The French press nicknamed the group Papy robbers – “Grandpa thieves” – but prosecutors insist that they were not harmless retirees.

They are faced with accusations, including an armed robbery, a kidnapping and members in a criminal gang, offenses that have the perpetuity imprisonment.

Kardashian, who once shared almost every moment of his online life, later recognized the role that visibility played. “People were watching,” she said in an interview in 2021. “They knew what I had. They knew where I was.”

After the men fled, Kardashian rubbed the adhesive tape against the bathroom sink to release his hands. With her still linked ankles, she jumped down to find her friend and stylist Simone Harouche. Fearing that the thieves will come back, they went to the balcony and hid in bushes. Lying there, Kardashian called his mother.

Earlier in the trial, Harouche remembers hearing Kardashian Scream upstairs: “” I need to live “. This is what she continued to say:” Take everything.

Harouche locked himself up in a bathroom and sent a text to the sister and Kardashian bodyguard: “Something is not going well.” Later, she heard Kardashian struggled on the stairs. “She was out of her,” said Harouche. “She was just crying.”

The flight has changed “ all ” for Kardashian

J. David de Pas asked if Kardashian had made a target by publishing photos of her with “great jewelry”.

Harouche rejected the premise. “Just because a woman wears jewelry, it doesn’t make her a target,” she said. “That’s like saying this because a woman wears a short skirt that she deserves to be raped.”

After the flight, criticisms like designer Karl Lagerfeld criticized Kardashian for having displayed his wealth, with Lagerfeld telling the Associated Press that she was “too public” with her jewelry. But while the details emerged from theft, public feeling changed.

Kardashian told court that she had developed anxiety after the flight of Paris, declaring that his house in Los Angeles had also been stolen shortly after in what seemed to be a copy attack.

“I started getting this phobia to go out,” she said. “This experience has really changed everything for us.”

She added that she now keeps between four and six bodyguards at home, just to make her feel safe enough to sleep.

The robbery triggered a cultural change, encouraging publicists and managers to exhort customers to delay publications on social networks, to remove location labels and to think twice before flashing luxury online. But even if she testified on her trauma on Tuesday, journalists received a press release touncing the appearance of the Kardashian Paris courthouse. He said that the “breathtaking” diamond collar that she was carrying for the appearance was worth 1.5 million dollars.

The trial should end later this month.