You can say a lot of things about Kim Kardashian, but one thing that she can’t be accused of is being anything other than totally transparent when it comes to how fame-hungry she used to be.
If you need reminding, Kim was originally known in Los Angeles social circles for being friends with Paris Hilton. However, in 2007, she made a name for herself with her family’s reality TV series, Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
Keeping Up ran until 2021, with Kim and her family sharing absolutely everything with their fans as they gradually worked their way up to being some of the biggest names in the celebrity world. In 2022, the family’s reality show The Kardashians premiered on Hulu.
Through all of this, Kim has been extremely candid about her desire to be famous. Speaking to Robin Roberts in a 2022 ABC interview, she said: “If you were to ask me years ago, when I first started my career, I would have done anything to be famous. I’m so open and honest about the fact that I love being famous.”
This echoes what she previously confessed to Vogue Arabia in 2019, which was: “Money was always the goal, but I was obsessed with fame, like embarrassingly obsessed. I do agree that fame can be addictive.”
“[Being famous] was all I wanted, I lived for it,” Kim began. “We were at a restaurant, and we heard these people like: ‘Oh, Britney Spears is staying at this hotel in New York.’ So, this person at dinner had this crazy Phantom Rolls-Royce. Jonathan [Cheban] and I could hardly even get a cab. So, we were like: ‘Can we get a ride to our hotel?’ and the guy’s like: ‘Yeah.’”
“And we were like: ‘We’ll sit in the back.’ So, it looks like we got out with a driver at this hotel,” she went on. “Paparazzi everywhere waiting for Britney at her hotel. They weren’t following us at this point, and we got out and they were like: ‘Kim, Kim, Kim, are you here to visit Britney?’ and Jonathan’s like: ‘Keep your head down and just, like, shut up.’”
“We go inside, and we go in a phone booth because we don’t know anyone at this hotel,” Kim then admitted. “So we go and, like, hang in the phone booth in this hotel for 20 minutes. And we’re like: ‘Alright, let’s go out.’ And we come out, and they’re like: ‘Kim, how was Britney?’ We took a cab, I think, because this Rolls-Royce dropped us off.”
“We totally scammed the system,” Kim joyfully concluded. “And it was on, like, every cover, and we thought we were killing it!”
And people have had mixed responses to Kim’s honesty, with some praising her smarts while others criticized how she seemingly used Britney’s fame to cultivate her own. One tweet reads: “Always knew this woman wasn’t dumb. You have got to be brilliant to become a billionaire.”
“Say what you want about her, but Kim has always known how to market herself. Playing the paparazzi like that is actually genius marketing for someone with zero budget at the time,” another agreed.
But somebody else argued: “Stories like this show how many people benefited off Britney when she was vulnerable Kim turning it into a funny anecdote feels very self serving.”
And one more echoed: “The way Britney was dehumanized by society should be studied. Was there not a soul on earth who didn’t see her as an opportunity for fame and money???”
What do you make of Kim’s comments? Let me know down below!
