“When Kim talks about the ‘video that changed my life,’ she is not talking about her sex tape,” writes Jonathan Van Meter in his book Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future. The book’s subject, Kim Kardashian, has become so ubiquitous in the 19 years since the appearance of her 2007 sex tape with then-boyfriend Ray J Norwood, Kim Kardashian: Superstar, and the subsequent premiere of her E! reality show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, that one could almost forget that’s how she shot to fame.
In the intervening two decades, Kardashian has been married and divorced twice—once for 72 days, the other to the most famous rapper on the planet. She was robbed at gunpoint in Paris; launched two billion-dollar companies, a successful mobile app and her own line of emojis; had four kids; and filmed 28 seasons of Keeping Up, which ended in 2020, and its subsequent iteration, The Kardashians, on Disney+, not including its many spin-offs.
I don’t know if she’s the woman who created the future, as Van Meter posits in the subtitle of his book, but she’s certainly defined the culture for the past 20 years—whether we like it or not.
Instead, the video Kardashian is referencing is the clemency plea from Alice Marie Johnson, a first-time offender who was sentenced to life in prison for her role in a 1993 drug bust. This didn’t sit right with Kardashian, and thus Johnson became the first person Kardashian helped release from prison as part of her criminal justice reform advocacy and budding career as a lawyer following in the footsteps of her father, Robert Kardashian, who brought the family name to notoriety as one of the lawyers for OJ Simpson. Talk about a full circle moment.
The clandestine footage (which some believe was engineered by Kardashian’s momager Kris Jenner to launch her daughter’s career), remains Kardashian’s biggest regret, alongside her aforementioned short-lived second marriage to basketballer Kris Humphries, but it’s almost become a footnote in her story. So has Humphries, for that matter. Some will still try to reduce Kardashian to it, but that ignores her robust biography that Van Meter artfully crafts in Citizen Kim.
To be a Kardashian clan fan, or at least someone who follows their capers either through their reality shows or just by, you know, being a person who looks at the internet, is to be in a constant dichotomy. Indeed, when people say they’re only famous for Kim’s sex tape, I gesture at everything I’ve written above, and at Van Meter’s book.
Likewise, when others praise them effusively, I bring up how they’ve co-opted Black women’s aesthetics and even physical features, allegedly stolen their work (two designers have claimed Kylie and Khloe’s fashion lines strongly resemble their own work), or their promotion of techo-fascism by supporting Meta’s “perv glasses” and Elon Musk’s Cybertruck, for example.
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Though Van Meter seems to have become friendly with his subject in order to gain unprecedented access to her over the course of several years of reporting and interviews, he’s not uncritical by any means, probing Kardashian’s upbringing and family life. He writes that “Kim defines childhood as ages one through ten” and that she says she “had the perfect childhood” because at the conclusion of that period her parents got divorced and the Simpson case, in which her father defended the former American footballer for the brutal murders of Simpson’s wife—her mother’s best friend—Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, was tried shortly thereafter.
One anecdote in the book harkens back to the day of Simpson’s infamous white Bronco car chase through the streets of Los Angeles. Kardashian calmly recalls the clothes she had on (“I was wearing jean shorts; it was so hot that day”) in a kind of dissociative moment. She tells Van Meter throughout the book, and in confessionals in recent episodes of The Kardashians, that her calmness has served her well throughout her life, such as the 2016 Paris robbery, so it doesn’t register as a trauma response.
Van Meter also writes about Kardashian’s well-documented generosity (Kim tracking down her dad’s Bible for sister Khloe, anyone?), specifically when, for Kris’ birthday, Kim rented her former childhood home from a private owner, which took much convincing, and restored it to the decor of the time when the family was living there. He positions it in the family trajectory of “creating memories”; copious home movies and grandiose gestures like the themed birthday parties they throw for their own kids as documented on the show and social media, that combined made the Kardashians “so perfectly calibrated to be the subjects of a reality show.”
Kardashian’s second act as a lawyer (or at least playing one on All’s Fair, the dismal Disney+ legal drama returning for its second season the week after Citizen Kim is published, as she has not yet passed the bar exam that qualifies her to practice) might seem out of left field, but Van Meter contends that it aligns with everything else we’ve learned about Kardashian in Citizen Kim. “Nearly a quarter-century later, it was as if Kim began to make amends for her father’s transgression by redirecting justice,” he writes.
It also aligns with the present moment, and both Van Meter and the people he speaks to who work with Kardashian on her prison reform advocacy state that if the US didn’t have a reality TV president, Johnson and the many others Kardashian has helped get released from prison early, or at all, would probably still be behind bars.
“If it were any other president, Kim Kardashian’s advocacy might not make a big difference,” Jennifer Turner of the American Civil Liberties Union tells Van Meter. “But under Trump, who loved celebrities almost as much as he loves signing executive orders with a Sharpie and a flourish, [Johnson] had a chance,” he writes.
Just as Kardashian’s naysayers dismiss her as being famous for nothing, they also dismiss her clemency work as not being, to use reality TV parlance, for “the right reasons” (how can getting wrongfully incarcerated people out of prison not be for “the right reasons”?!). “Maybe I’m just the girl with the sex tape and a lot to prove,” Kardashian says of her motivations.
But if you’ve been paying attention, the Kardashians are the closest thing America has to royalty, as Cosmopolitan anointed them not even a decade into their reign in 2015. In the era of the tradwife, they are a rare matriarchy of “independent-minded, proto-feminist businesswomen,” Van Meter writes, whose dynasty is punctuated by “superhero tropes… fairy tales, prophecies, Shakespearean drama and Greek tragedy” and encompasses the lineages of the Jacksons and the Pressleys. And they managed to do it all not in a millennium but in less than 20 years.
Kim Kardashian said it best: not bad for a girl with no talent.
Citizen Kim by Jonathan Van Meter is published by Ebury
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