A pretty much unavoidable news story of the last week or so has been the very high profile robbery of reality TV, and shameless self promotion queen Kim Kardashian-West, in her Parisian apartment. Now of course, as with anything related to the Kardashian cash-cow, the story reached dizzying heights in the worlds press. Questions quickly turned to who was to blame for such an attack where Kardashian-West was bound and locked in her bathroom as five masked men stole £8.5 Million of jewellery.
Admittedly, I am a bit of a Kardashian fan – I can’t really tell you why…maybe it’s the glamour, or maybe I’m just a bit basic – who knows. Despite my own views, my defence of Kim is based more around what I see as moral justification and explanation.
Fingers quickly pointed at Kim herself, with her lavish lifestyle being no secret to…well anyone with access to the internet, a magazine, or indeed a pair of eyes. Her reputation for self-promotion and basically showing off on her Instagram and Snapchat profiles made it easy for critics to lay into her. Even known friends of Kardashian-West took to the media to essentially say ‘she was asking for it’, with Karl Lagerfeld bluntly stating “You cannot display your wealth and then be surprised”. Twitter was also of course over capacitated with its loyal group of trolls who quickly lowered the moral tone and made horrendous ‘jokes’.
For all of Kim’s faults and perhaps distasteful social media posts, is it really fair to launch such a scathing opinion? Wouldn’t it be fairer and indeed more logical to question those who carried out the attack? Of all the millions of people all over the world who saw Kim’s Snapchat of her eye-wateringly large diamond ring, I’m sure there was a multitude of responses. There was most probably the predictable mix of anger and jealousy, topped with the few who are in awe of Kim’s riches (I probably fall somewhere in between that, cringe!). However, whether it was from these series of Snapchats, or perhaps simply the sea of paparazzi photos available daily from Kim’s recent trip to Paris, this usual cocktail of commentary was garnished with the small minority who took their anger or jealousy or greed or whatever it was too far…and we need to just accept that.
I just don’t understand how we can mock such an attack. We probably wouldn’t be so quick to judge a host of other celebrities like we do the Kardashian’s, even if they too annoyed us with their antics, because they are probably pretty decent people who love their friends and families – just as we do. And who’s to say the Kim and her family are any different? It’s time to re-focus the lens of the media away from what Kim has done, and will probably continue to do ‘wrong’ in the eyes of millions across the world on social media, and to accept that for all of her faults in the whirl wind of celebrities we encounter every day, she didn’t deserve this attack at the hands of blatant criminals.
This blog references E online: http://www.etonline.com/news/199591_karl_lagerfeld_shades_kim_kardashian_after_robbery_you_cannot_display_your_wealth_and_then_be_surprised/
Images:
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/conspiracy-theories-about-why-kim-kardashian-was-robbed.html