Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, shortly after returning from her meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House, Kim Kardashian sat down with the New York Times for an in-depth conversation about her prison reform project. The interview published Thursday.
In the past few years, Kardashian has become a force in prison reform, successfully lobby Trump and other politicians to get nonviolent offenders released early. She is studying to become a lawyer, and is spending about 18 hours a week on legal work. On Sunday, her documentary, Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project, will drop on Oxygen.
ON POLITICS
Kardashian tells the Times that she doesn’t plan to endorse Trump, or anyone else for president. She just wants to focus on reform: “I do love that I see so many different potential candidates discussing it. I will work with any administration.”
ON ASSOCIATING WITH TRUMP
Kardashian knows he’s controversial, but says that isn’t the point: “People would always warn me, well you can’t go into the White House, you can’t have any association. To me, that wasn’t what it was about. I thought, my reputation over someone’s life? It didn’t matter to me about what anyone assumed.”
ON LAW SCHOOL
Kardashian says: “I was never one to like school — honestly, I hated it. So the fact that I love it is so shocking to me. But everything kind of pertains to me now. Now, I get contracts all the time. So I read them, and I understand how to read them, and how to write them. And then criminal law, that’s just what I’m into. That’s super interesting to me.”
ON HER PLATFORM
She knows she has power: “I know my role, that I can be there at the end to push it through. I can also be a silent partner. I think it’s knowing when to speak out and when not to, and when to privately call. People think you need to shout it out on social media and shame people into making decisions, but that’s not how it is.”
ON PERSPECTIVE
Kardashian hopes that by showing both sides of a crime, people will gain perspective: “Doing the documentary, I wanted to pick very specific people — in a sex trafficking situation, in a murder — and really show people that once you maybe get to know their background and their history, you might soften up, too. And there’s a lot of people who are really deserving of these second chances.”