Kim Kardashian thought she was going to die in 2016, when armed robbers burst into her hotel room in Paris and stole millions of dollars’ worth of jewels while holding her at gunpoint.
The “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star spoke about the terrifying incident in Wednesday’s episode of David Letterman’s new Netflix show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”
She got emotional reliving the ordeal, as did her mom and her sisters, who were sitting in the audience with Kanye West.
″[One of the masked robbers] grabbed me and I was wearing a robe and I wasn’t wearing anything under it,” Kardashian said, starting to cry. “‘OK, this is the time I’m going to get raped. Just deal, like, it’s gonna happen. You know? Like, just prepare yourself,’” she recalled thinking to herself. “So I did.”
The KKW Beauty founder said the man then bound her with zip ties and duct taped her mouth and eyes. She kept telling the concierge, who was also in the room, to tell the men that she had a family waiting for her at home.
Kardashian said she tried to bargain with the robbers, telling them they could take anything they wanted and she’d never turn them in.
“I saw [a robber] have a gun out to me, and I was like, ‘OK, this is it,’” Kardashian said, adding that she just kept thinking about her older sister, Kourtney, who was also in Paris at the time and sharing a hotel room with Kardashian, but was out at a club that night.
“I kept on thinking she’s going to come home and I’m going to be dead in the room,” Kardashian said. “And she’s going to be traumatized for the rest of her life if she sees me.”
Against all odds, Kardashian survived physically unscathed, but emotionally and mentally scarred for years. The reality star said she’s “totally fine now,” but can only sleep if there are six security guards around the house. Still, Kardashian said she thinks it’s better that the incident happened to her instead of anyone else in her family.
“I remember calling all my sisters from the car ― we were on a conference call. I said, ‘Guys, just thank God that was me,’” she said.
″‘I am very mentally strong and that would have fucked all of your lives up for the rest of your life,’” she added as the audience laughed.
Kardashian has previously said that she blamed herself for the robbery after living a “flashy” lifestyle and “oversharing my every move on social media.” But she told Alec Baldwin in 2018 that she’s “grateful” the incident occurred.
“There was a lot of me that measured who I was by how much I had. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m worth so much.’ That needed to change in me,” she said on “The Alec Baldwin Show,” adding that she was “grateful for the experience.”
“Even though it was horrific and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, it really did deeply change me to where now I feel like I can get back to myself,” Kardashian said.