One night in October 2016, Kim Kardashian returned to her hotel after an Alaïa dinner during Paris Fashion Week. She was, as now, something beyond a fixture of runway front rows, trailed at every turn by paparazzi. Around 3 a.m., three armed men wearing masks broke into her room, tied her arms and feet, and taped her mouth. They made off with one of the rings given to her by then husband Kanye West and between $6 million and $10 million worth of other jewels.
A representative said at the time that Kardashian was “badly shaken but physically unharmed.”
Paris police quickly came to know the robbery, as my colleague Mark Seal reported at the time, as L’Affaire Kardashian or simply “Kim.” On Monday, 10 men will stand trial in connection with the heist. Collectively, the suspects, some of whom were in their 60s and 70s, have come to be known in press coverage as the “grandpa robbers,” and during the expected four weeks of proceedings, they will come face-to-face with their alleged victim—Kardashian’s lawyer has said she will testify.
According to prosecutors, five men dressed as police officers held a concierge at gunpoint before a few went to Kardashian’s apartment. Twelve men were originally charged; the allegations against the larger group include armed robbery, membership of a criminal gang, and sequestration. Eight of the men deny playing any role; one has died; another, age 80, was ruled too sick to stand trial at present. The other two men have admitted to some level of participation, with Yunice Abbas, 71, publishing his account of the night, J’ai Séquestré Kim Kardashian, with a coauthor in 2021.
While fleeing the hotel by bicycle, one of the suspects dropped a diamond cross worth $33,180. It was found and given to the police by a passerby. (The majority of the stolen jewelry was never recovered and was reportedly sold in Belgium.) An attorney for Abbas told Reuters that his client immediately admitted to his involvement after arrests were made. DNA on the plastic bands used to tie Kardashian’s wrists helped lead police to Abbas, who had previously served nearly 20 years in prison and described himself in his memoir as a “hardened criminal” who began a long string of lawbreaking at 18 years old.
“I saw one of her shows where she threw her diamond in the pool, in that episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” Abbas told Vice in 2022. “I thought, She’s got a lot of money. This lady doesn’t care at all.”
“Since she was throwing money away,” he went on, “I was there to collect it, and that was that.”
Kardashian’s ubiquity circa 2016, and the path she pioneered to reach it, led to an undercurrent of such moralizing in the immediate aftermath of the robbery. “You cannot display your wealth and then be surprised that some people want to share it with you,” Karl Lagerfeld told reporters at a Chanel show a day after the heist, expressing a common sentiment among some observers.
There was some amount of debate as to how Kardashian was targeted and monitored. A paparazzo who had been following her that day told Vanity Fair that he couldn’t be sure whether the suspects had embedded within the pack of photographers. When asked whether the thieves had employed her social media footprint, the Paris police chief responded by saying only that “she gives information on social media all the time.” Kardashian took a break from social media in the following months and didn’t attend Paris Fashion Week the next year.
As the case wound its way toward a trial date, there was some speculation as to whether Kardashian would give testimony. “She has tremendous appreciation and admiration for the French judicial system and has been treated with great respect by the French authorities,” Kardashian’s lawyer, Michael Rhodes, recently said in a statement that confirmed her intention to appear in person. “She wishes for the trial to proceed in an orderly fashion in accordance with French law and with respect for all parties to the case.”
In interviews she’s given about the night, Kardashian has spoken of it as something of a turning point as well as a source of trauma. “It was meant to happen to me…I really feel like things happen in your life to teach you things,” she told Ellen DeGeneres through tears in 2017. “I kept on thinking about Kourtney,” she later told David Letterman. Her sister had been at a club the night of the robbery. “I kept on thinking, She’s gonna come home and I’m gonna be dead in the room, and she’s gonna be traumatized for the rest of her life.”
Another man who will stand trial in the coming weeks is Aomar Ait Khedache, a 68-year-old known as Old Omar. He has acknowledged participating in the heist but denied prosecutors’ allegation that he was the mastermind. A year after the theft, TMZ reported that Khedache had sent Kardashian an apology letter after seeing clips on French TV of her discussing the incident.
“I want to come to you as a human being to tell you how much I regret my gesture, how much I have been moved and touched to see you in tears,” he wrote, according to the outlet. “Know that I fully sympathize with the pain you are enduring, your children, your husband, and your close ones. I hope that this letter will allow you to forget little by little the trauma that you suffered by my fault.”
Kardashian is currently expected to testify on May 13.
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