Britney Spears – The Woman In Me: 10 revelations from star’s tell-all memoir – from relationship with Justin Timberlake to the conservatorship
Almost two years after the end of her conservatorship, Britney Spears is telling her story in her own words with the release of her memoir The Woman In Me.
Billed as a “brave and astonishingly moving” story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith and hope, the much-anticipated book gives an insight into her stage career, her relationship with Justin Timberlake, friendships with stars including Madonna and Paris Hilton, and her breakdown in 2007.
It also features details of the controversial 13-year conservatorship, which eventually ended after Spears, now 41, spoke out in court in a plea to be released.
She dedicates the book to her sons Sean and Jayden Federline, who are now aged 18 and 17 respectively: “For my boys, who are the loves of my life.”
Here are the key revelations from The Woman In Me.
Pic: Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Early life: ‘I was usually scared’
Spears describes an often difficult home life growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, saying her mother Lynne and father Jamie “fought constantly”. She talks about his struggles with alcohol, which were also described during later conservatorship hearings. “I was usually scared in my home,” she says, and “nothing was ever good enough” for him.
“The saddest part to me was that what I always wanted was a dad who would love me as I was – somebody who would say ‘I just love you. You could do anything right now. I’d still love you with unconditional love.'”
Aged nine, after failing to get into the Mickey Mouse Club on her first audition because she was too young, she says she went back to Louisiana and worked in a seafood restaurant, “cleaning shellfish and serving plates of food while doing my prissy dancing in my cute little outfits”. By the age of 13, the star says she was drinking and smoking, and that she started driving at that age, too.
Pic: AP/Mark J Terrill
Relationship with Justin Timberlake: Cry Me A River to termination of pregnancy
After getting into the Mickey Mouse Club on her second attempt – a “boot camp for the entertainment industry” – Spears got to know fellow future stars including Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake.
She had her first kiss with him during a game of Truth Or Dare and that they later started dating as their careers launched, hers as a solo star and his with NSYNC. She says she was “so in love with him it was pathetic”.
Details of Spears having an abortion during their relationship were revealed prior to the book’s release, with Spears saying of the pregnancy: “For me, it wasn’t a tragedy. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
The star admits cheating on Timberlake once but claims this came as she knew he had cheated on her several times. She talks about how it affected her when her cheating seemed to be referenced following their split in his Cry Me A River video. “In the news media, I was described as a harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy. The truth: I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”
Spears goes on to say there has “always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women … but I was shattered”. The video “shamed me”, she adds, and she felt there was “no way” to tell her side of the story.
However, when addressing how Timberlake once told an interviewer they had been in a sexual relationship, Spears defends her ex.
“Given that I had so many teenage fans, my managers and my press people had long tried to portray me as an eternal virgin – never mind that Justin and I had been living together, and I’d been having sex since I was 14.
“Was I mad at being ‘outed’ by him as sexually active? No. To be honest with you, I liked that Justin said that. Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my 20s. Whose business was it if I’d had sex or not?”
Pic: Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
The questions about her body and sex life
It is hard to imagine some of the questions Spears faced as a teenager and young woman at the start of her career being asked of stars today. In her book, she says she found it difficult to feel as “carefree” as Timberlake as “everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery”.
She goes on to write about the backlash to her appearance and dancing “that would last years”, saying: “I was never quite sure what all these critics thought I was supposed to be doing – a Bob Dylan impression? I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?”
She describes seeing “more and more older men” in the audiences for her shows, “and sometimes it would freak me out to see them leering at me like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy for them, especially when no one could seem to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot. If I was sexy, they seemed to think I must be stupid. If I was hot, I couldn’t possibly be talented”.
The star says she turned to religion – and prescription drugs. “Trying to find ways to protect my heart from criticism and to keep the focus on what was important, I started reading religious books… I also started taking Prozac.”
Fling with Colin Farrell and Madonna’s mentorship and kiss
Spears was very publicly pictured with actor Colin Farrell in 2003 following her break-up with Timberlake. She says she thought he was handsome, found out he was shooting his film S.W.A.T, and drove to the set to introduce herself.
The star details attending the premiere of one of his other films, The Recruit, with Farrell, saying she accidentally wore a pyjama top which she thought was a shirt, and describes their brief two-week fling as like a “brawl”.
Spears says she was not over Timberlake at the time but “for a brief moment … I did think there could be something there” with Farrell.
The star says that she started to suffer from increasing anxiety as her fame grew and “it became clear to me that whatever I did – and even plenty I didn’t do – became front-page news”. During a difficult period, she says Madonna visited her and “probably had some intuitive sense of what I was going through”.
Madonna “did a red-string ceremony with me to initiate me into Kabbalah”, Spears says, and she went on to have a Hebrew word tattooed at the base of her neck.
“In many ways, Madonna did have a good effect on me,” she writes. “She told me I should be sure to take time out for my soul… She modelled a type of strength that I needed to see.”
Spears goes on to say Madonna was right to call out sexism and ageism in the industry in recent years, and then details how the pair, along with Christina Aguilera, ended up performing together at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2003 – where they famously kissed on stage. Spears says she had wanted to create “a moment”.
55-hour marriage to Jason Alexander
Spears recalls getting drunk with her childhood friend in Las Vegas in January 2004 but says she doesn’t remember much about the night itself. They watched films together, Mona Lisa Smile and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, before heading to A Little White Chapel. “When we got there, another couple was getting married, so we had to wait,” she says. “Yes – we waited in line to get married.”
Spears describes her family’s reaction, saying they flew out to Las Vegas the following day. “They made way too big a deal out of innocent fun,” she says. “I didn’t take it that seriously. I thought a goof-around Vegas wedding was something people might do as a joke. Then my family came and acted like I’d started World War III.”
The star says that while she knew she did not want to be with Alexander forever, the way she was “interrogated” made her want to “rebel”.
Pic: AP
Suffering depression after childbirth
Spears went on to marry dancer Kevin Federline later in September 2004, and had sons Sean and Jayden in 2005 and 2006. “From the moment I saw him, there was a connection between us – something that made me feel like I could escape everything that was hard in my life,” she says of Federline.
But the singer says she suffered depression after Jayden was born. “I got a little depressed once I was no longer keeping them safe inside my body. They seemed so vulnerable out in the world of jockeying paparazzi and tabloids.
“I began to suspect that I was a bit overprotective when I wouldn’t let my mom hold Jayden for the first two months… Honestly, as a new mother, it was as if some part of me became the baby.”
Spears says she hopes her story might help others suffering. “I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early… I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue.”
Federline was away a lot, she says, and “no one was around to see me spiral – except every paparazzo in America”. She describes the photographers as “like an army of zombies trying to get in every second”.
Friendship with Hilton and shaving her head: ‘I was out of my mind with grief’
Spears says Hilton was “one of the people who was kindest to me” when she needed it following her split from Federline. She admits that this was the start of her “party stage” as the heiress encouraged her to have fun, but says “it was never as wild” as it was portrayed in the press.
Spears says she did not go out often but any occasion she did would make headlines. She says her drinking was never out of control but that her “drug of choice” was Adderall, which is used to treat ADHD. “It gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed,” she says, and goes on to say she “never had any interest in hard drugs”.
Amid a custody battle and following the death of her aunt from cancer at the beginning of 2007, Spears infamously shaved her head and the photos created headlines around the world. In her memoir, she says this came after a period in which she had not been able to see her sons “for weeks” and that paparazzi followed her as she “begged” to see them. Shaving her head, she says, “gave them some material”.
“Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me.”
Spears says that “everyone was scared” of her with her new look, but it was her way of “saying to the world: f*** you”. She was “tired” of being “the good girl”.
A few days later, Spears was pictured attacking a paparazzi photographer’s car with an umbrella. She describes how she “snapped” as he would not leave her along during “one of the worst moments of my whole life”.
She goes on to say that afterwards, she was embarrassed – and even sent the agency an apology note “mentioning that I’d been in the running for a dark film role, which was true, and that I wasn’t quite myself, which was also true”.
Jamie Spears pictured in 2012. Pic: AP
Conservatorship: ‘I was like a child robot’
A lot of the book tackles the subject of Spears’s conservatorship, which controlled her life for 13 years. Writing about the start of the legal arrangement, the star says she “begged the court to appoint literally anyone else – and I mean anyone off the street would have been better – my father was given the job”.
She says the court was told “that I was demented, and I wasn’t even allowed to pick my own lawyer”. She had been admitted to hospital “against my will”, she says, and soon after she was informed that the conservatorship had been filed.
After this, she describes how sometimes she would be “smuggled a private phone”, but says she was “always caught”. And “the sad, honest truth” was that “after everything I had been through, I didn’t have a lot of fight left in me”. Spears says she “didn’t see a way out” and “felt my spirit retreat, and I went on autopilot”. She says she “went along with it” for her children.
“It’s difficult for me to revisit this darkest chapter of my life and to think about what might have been different if I’d pushed back harder then,” she says. “I don’t at all like to think about that, not whatsoever. I can’t afford to, honestly. I’ve been through too much.”
As she detailed in court in 2021, Spears describes being given daily medication and having her every move watched.
“If I was so sick that I couldn’t make my own decisions, why did they think it was fine for me to be out there smiling and waving and singing and dancing in a million time zones a week?” she writes. “I’ll tell you one good reason. The Circus Tour grossed more than $130m.”
She says she exchanged her freedom for time with her children. “It was a trade I was willing to make.”
Security would run background checks and do blood tests on any men she wanted to date, she says.
Spears says she “became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself… The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child.”
#FreeBritney
Spears says she first started attempts to end the conservatorship in 2014, saying she went to court but the “case didn’t go anywhere”. She continues: “What followed was a cloak-and-dagger effort to get my own lawyer. I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow, that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”
On stage, she says she held back in an attempt to rebel. “I did the moves and I sang the notes, but I didn’t put the fire behind it that I had in the past. Toning down my energy onstage was my own version of a factory slowdown.”
At the end of her Las Vegas residency, Spears claims she was again hospitalised against her will, and that she was put on lithium. “I felt my concept of time morph, and I grew disoriented,” she says, adding that she felt like she was in “solitary confinement”. She says she came close to suicide during this period.
But she says it was during a stay in hospital that she first found out about the #FreeBritney movement. “The nurse showed me clips… fans saying they were trying to figure out if I was being held somewhere against my will, talking about how much my music meant to them and how they hated to think I was suffering now. They wanted to help. And just by doing that, they did help.”
Once she was home, she says she reported her father for alleged “conservatorship abuse” in June 2021. On getting to tell her story in court, she says she felt like she’d “finally been listened to” after 13 years. Speaking about the decision to end the legal arrangement, which came in November 2021, she says: “And now, finally, it was my own life.”
Pic: AP
Sam Asghari – and her message to fans
Spears describes meeting her now estranged husband Hesam (Sam) Asghari on the set for the video for her song Slumber Party, and says she was “instantly smitten”. The book went to print before their split earlier this year so there is no detail of their break-up. Spears says Asghari helped her believe she could do anything and that they wanted to have a baby – but as she said during her conservatorship court hearings, she had been fitted with an IUD – she alleges her father would not allow her to have it removed.
After the end of the conservatorship, she did become pregnant but miscarried. “I was devastated to have lost the baby. Once again, though, I used music to help me gain insight and perspective.
“Every song I sing or dance to lets me tell a different story and gives me a new way to escape. Listening to music on my phone helps me cope with the anger and sadness I face as an adult.”
She finishes the book by saying: “There’s been a lot of speculation about how I’m doing. I know my fans care. I am free now. I’m just being myself and trying to heal. I finally get to do what I want, when I want. And I don’t take a minute of it for granted…
“It’s been a while since I felt truly present in my own life, in my own power, in my womanhood. But I’m here now.”
Entertainment
Upskirted, assaulted, accused of faking their music skills: Why female DJs need to be ‘bulletproof’
To see Koven’s Katie Boyle perform live is beyond impressive. Hailing from Luton, she is one of the most influential women in drum ‘n’ bass today, an artist who pioneered the art of singing live while DJing.
Although she’s now been doing it for 12 years, her vast knowledge doesn’t silence the trolls online.
“There is a real bad misogyny online against women,” she says of the industry, with plenty of critics refusing to “believe they’re doing what they say they’re doing, and that’s been quite a hard thing to combat”.
Koven is a duo. In the studio, Boyle collaborates with producer Max Rowat; live, she performs and mixes alone. They have just released their second album, Moments In Everglow.
Koven (L-R): Max Rowat and Katie Boyle
While both Boyle and Rowat are equally involved in making tracks, a minority of very vocal fans still refuse to accept she does anything other than sing.
“I will always be accused of the male half doing more on anything to do with technology,” says Boyle. “The amount of comments [I get] to say, ‘she didn’t make this’. No explanation as to why they think that it is, just purely because [I’m] a woman, which is just mad.”
Koven’s Katie Boyle says she has had some ‘awful incidences’
While Boyle loves performing live, there are moments, she admits, where being one of the few women on the scene can feel unsafe.
“I’ve had some awful incidences,” she says. “I had someone run on stage and completely grab me, hand down my top, down my trousers, while I was on the stage, which is crazy because you think that’s happening in front of an audience. I mean, this guy literally had to be plied off me.
“That was when I did think, ‘I need to bring someone with me to most places’. I didn’t feel safe travelling around by myself.”
‘You get trolled for everything’
DJ Paulette. Pic: Paulette
Sadly, Boyle isn’t alone. Over a 30-year career, DJ Paulette has scaled the heights of dance music fame, playing throughout Europe, with a residency back in the day at Manchester’s Hacienda.
“Let’s just say I have two towels on my rider and it’s not just because I sweat a lot,” she jokes, miming a whack for those around her.
“I’ve spent time in DJ booths where I’ve had a skirt on and people have been taking pictures up my skirt. People think upskirting is a joke… and I got fed up with it.” Wearing shorts, she says, she still ended with “people with their hands all over me”. Now, she sticks to trousers. “But we shouldn’t have to alter the way we look for the environment that we work in.”
She admits, in order to stick it out, she’s had to bulletproof herself. “You get trolled for everything, for the way you look – if you put on weight, if you’ve lost weight.”
Not only is the discourse towards female DJs different online, she says, she has also been repeatedly told by those working in the industry that because she’s a woman, she has a sell-by date.
“I went for dinner with three guys… one of them said to me, ‘you know Paulette there is no promoter or organiser who is ever going to employ a black female DJ with grey hair’, and they all laughed.
“That was them saying to me that my career was over, and I was in my 40s. At the time, I felt crushed… I think it really does take women who have a real steel will to make their way through.”
‘I will not stop talking about it’
DJ Jaguar at the International Music Summit in Ibiza. Pic: Ben Levi Suhling
As the great and the good of the dance world gather in Ibiza for the industry’s annual International Music Summit, with dance music more popular than ever there is of course much to party about.
But for BBC Radio 1 broadcaster and DJ Jaguar, one of this year’s summit’s cohosts, some serious conversations also need to be had.
“You can get off the plane and look at the billboards around Ibiza and it’s basically white men – David Guetta, Calvin Harris, and they are incredible artists in their own right – but the women headliners, there’s barely any visibility of them, it’s awful.”
She adds: “I will not stop talking about it because it is the reality.”
Trolling and safety are also big concerns. “You’re in these green rooms, there’s a lot of people there, drinking and doing other things… and I’ve walked into green rooms where I felt incredibly uncomfortable, especially when I was a bit younger. I was on my own, it’s like 2am, and you have to watch yourself.”
Male DJs don’t have the same stories
The International Music Summit in Ibiza
She says she has female friends who have had drinks spiked when they were DJing. But her male friends? “They don’t have the same stories to tell me.”
Creamfields, arguably the UK’s biggest dance festival, is emblematic of the gender imbalance. It remains one of the least representative festivals in terms of female artists, with last year’s line-up more than 80% male.
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Laila MacKenzie, founder of Lady Of The House, a community that supports and tries to encourage more women into dance music, says the talent pipeline problem isn’t helped by the current discourse online.
“There is a real damaging factor how people can be really nasty online and really nasty in the media and how that actually may discourage and demotivate women from stepping forward into their talent,” she says.
In reality, for so many women working within dance music, the trolling can be so unpleasant that it’s drowning out the good.
“There is so much positivity and so many lovely and supportive people,” says Boyle. “But unfortunately it feels like the negative and the toxic energy is just louder sometimes.”
In October 2016, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint – with jewellery worth millions of dollars stolen during the audacious heist in Paris.
It was the biggest robbery of an individual in France for more than 20 years – and made front pages around the world.
Now, almost a decade on, the case is finally coming to court.
Why has it taken so long? Will Kardashian give evidence? And who exactly are the “grandpa robbers” facing trial?
Here’s everything you need to know.
Kardashian at the Siran Presentation on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
What happened?
Two years after Kardashian and rapper Kanye West tied the knot in an ostentatious week-long celebration spanning Paris and Florence, the Kardashian-West clan were back in the French capital for Paris Fashion Week.
Her then husband had returned to the US to pick up his Saint Pablo tour – but Kardashian, along with her sister Kourtney and various members of their entourage, remained in Paris, staying in an exclusive set of apartments so discreet they’ve been dubbed the No Address Hotel.
Nestled on Tronchet Street, just a stone’s throw from Place de l’Opéra, and close to the fashionable Avenue Montaigne, the Hotel de Pourtalès is popular with A-list stars staying in the French capital.
A stay in the Sky Penthouse, the suite occupied by Kardashian, will currently set you back about £13,000 a night.
Kardashian was staying at the Hotel de Pourtales
On the evening of 3 October, after attending a fashion show with her sister, Kardashian remained in the apartment alone while the rest of her convoy – including her bodyguard Pascal Duvier – went out for the night.
At about 2.30am, three armed men wearing ski masks and dressed as police forced their way into the apartment block – and according to investigators, they threatened the concierge at gunpoint.
Two of them are alleged to have forced the concierge to lead them to Kardashian’s suite. He later told police they yelled at him: “Where’s the rapper’s wife?”
Kardashian said she had been “dozing” on her bed when the men then entered her room.
She has said she believes her social media posts provided the alleged robbers with “a window of opportunity”.
“I was Snapchatting that I was home, and that everyone was going out,” she said in the months after the incident.
The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star vividly described the attack in a police report, as reported in the French weekly paper Le Journal du Dimanche.
“They grabbed me and took me into the hallway. They tied me up with plastic cables and taped my hands, then they put tape over my mouth and my legs.”
She said they pointed a gun at her, asking specifically for her ring and also for money.
Police guard the entrance to the Hotel de Pourtalès the day after the robbery
Kardashian says they carried her into the bathroom and put her in the bathtub. She said she was wearing only a bathrobe at the time.
She had initially thought the robbers “were terrorists who had come to kidnap me”, according to a French police report taken in New York three months after the robbery.
Kardashian told officers: “I thought I was going to die.”
According to police, the robbers – who left the room after grabbing their haul, escaped on bicycles with items estimated to be worth about $10m (£7.5m), including a $4m (£3m) 18.88-carat diamond engagement ring from West.
After they had left, Kardashian said she escaped her restraints and went to find help. After speaking to detectives, she immediately returned to the US on a private jet and later hired a completely new security team.
Kardashian shows off her $4m ring on Instagram
What was stolen?
As well as her engagement ring, Kardashian said the thieves took her large Louis Vuitton jewellery box, which she said contained “everything I owned”.
In police reports given to the French authorities at about 4.30am on the night of the alleged robbery, Kardashian listed these items as having been stolen:
• Two diamond Cartier bracelets
• A gold and diamond Jacob necklace
• Diamond earrings by Lauren Schwartz
• Yanina earrings
• Three gold Jacob necklaces
• Little bracelets, jewels and rings
• A Lauren Schwartz diamond necklace
• A necklace with six little diamonds
• A necklace with Saint spelt out in diamonds
• A cross-shaped diamond-encrusted Jacob cross
• A yellow gold Rolex watch
• Two yellow gold rings
• An iPhone 6 and a BlackBerry
Police recovered only the diamond-encrusted cross that was dropped by the robbers while leaving.
It’s likely the gold in the haul was melted down and resold, while the diamond engagement ring that is now so associated with the robbery would be far too recognisable to sell on the open market.
Kardashian at the Siran Presentation on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
What will happen in court?
The hearing will begin at the Court of Appeal of Paris – the largest appeals court in France – on 28 April and is scheduled to last a month.
It will consist of a presiding judge, two professional assessors, and six main jurors.
The hearing involves more than 2,000 documents and there are four civil parties.
Kardashian at the Balenciaga show on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
Who is being tried?
There were initially 12 defendants in the case, but one person has died and another has a medical condition that prevents their involvement. This means 10 people – nine men and one woman – are standing trial.
Five of them, who were all aged between 60 and 72 at the time of the incident, face armed robbery and kidnapping charges. They are:
• Yunice Abbas
• Aomar Ait Khedache
• Harminv Ait Khedache
• Didier Dubreucq
• Marc-Alexandre Boyer
Abbas, 72, has admitted his participation in the robbery. In 2021, he published a book about the robbery, titled I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian. In 2021, a court ruled he would not benefit financially from the book.
Aomar Ait Khedache, 69, known to French crime reporters as “Old Omar”, has also admitted participating in the heist but denies the prosecution’s accusation that he was the ringleader.
The remaining five defendants are charged with complicity in the heist or the unauthorised possession of a weapon. They are:
• Florus Heroui
• Gary Mader
• Christiane Glotin
• François Delaporte
• Marc Boyer
Among those, Mader was a VIP greeter who worked for the car company Kardashian used in Paris, and Heroui was a bar manager who allegedly passed on information about Kardashian’s movements.
With many of the accused now ageing and with various serious health conditions, and some having spent time in jail following their arrest, all are currently free under judicial supervision.
If found guilty, those accused of the more serious crimes could face 10 years to life imprisonment.
Kardashian at the Off-White show three days before the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
Will Kardashian give evidence?
Yes.
Lawyer Michael Rhodes said Kardashian has “tremendous appreciation and admiration for the French judicial system” and “wishes for the trial to proceed in an orderly fashion in accordance with French law and with respect for all parties to the case”.
A trainee lawyer herself, Kardashian has become a high-profile criminal justice advocate in the US in recent years.
(R-L) Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kris Jenner in the front row three days before the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
Why has it taken so long to come to court?
There was initially a manhunt after the robbery, with French police under pressure to prove that Paris’s security was not in question.
Just the year before in 2015, the capital had been shaken by terrorist attacks by Islamic militants, in which 130 people were killed, including 90 at a music event at the Bataclan theatre.
French police initially arrested 17 people in the Kardashian case in January 2017 – three months after the robbery – assisted by DNA traces found on plastic bands used to tie her wrists. Twelve people were later charged.
It was ordered to be sent to trial in 2021 – at a time when limited court proceedings were happening due to multiple COVID lockdowns, and France was holding its largest ever criminal trial over the November 2015 terror attacks.
Kardashian at the Givenchy show on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
What has Kardashian said about the incident?
Kardashian has described the robbery as a “life-changing” moment. She took three weeks away from filming her reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and took a three-month break from social media.
In a March 2017 episode titled Paris, Kardashian first spoke publicly about her ordeal.
She described first hearing a noise in her apartment, and calling out, thinking it was her sister and assistant: “At that moment when there wasn’t an answer, my heart started to get really tense. Like, you know, your stomach just kind of like, knots up and you’re like, ‘OK, what’s going on?’ I knew something wasn’t quite right.”
She went on: “They asked for money. I said, ‘I don’t have any money’. They dragged me out to the hallway on top of the stairs. That’s when I saw the gun, clear as day. I was looking at the gun, looking down back at the stairs. I was like, I have a split second in my mind to make this quick decision.
“Either they’re going to shoot me in the back or if I make it [down the stairs] and the elevator does not open in time or the stairs are locked, there’s no way out.”
Three months later, she told a Forbes Power Women’s Summit she had changed her approach to posting on social media: “They had followed my moves on social media, and they knew my every move and what I had.”
She added: “It was definitely a huge, huge, huge lesson for me to not show off some of the things that I have. It was a huge lesson to me to not show off where I go.
“It’s just changed my whole life, but I think for the better.”
West and Kardashian at the Off-White show three days before the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
In October 2020, Kardashian told US interviewer David Letterman she feared she would be raped and murdered during the heist, and that her sister had been at the forefront of her mind during the incident.
Speaking on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Kardashian said: “I kept on thinking about Kourtney, I kept on thinking she’s going to come home and I’m going to be dead in the room and she’s going to be traumatised for the rest of her life if she sees me… I thought that was my fate.”
When speaking to French police about the impact the robbery had had on her three months after it, Kardashian said: “I think that my perception of jewellery now is that I am not as attached to it as I used to be. I don’t have the same feeling about it. In fact, I even think that it has become a bit of a burden to have the responsibility of such expensive jewels.
“There is nothing of sentimental value to compare with the act of going home and finding one’s children and one’s family.”
She went on to describe Paris as “not the right place” for her, and didn’t return to the French capital for two years following the robbery.
Kardashian has since said in a 2023 episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians that she did not purchase any jewellery in the seven years following the robbery, kept no jewellery at her home and only wore items that are either borrowed or fake.
She said the realisation that material items don’t matter has made her “a completely different person in the best way”.
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