Evolution of Kim Kardashian: Bombshell to Billionaire

Everyone knows who Kim Kardashian is, and that’s exactly how she wants it.

The reality star, socialite, and business mogul has always been obsessed with fame, and has harnessed her sexuality to achieve it.

Before her breakthrough with her own reality TV series, Kim even admits to going to hotels where she knew real celebrities were staying, hiding in a phone booth for an hour, and then posing for paparazzi as if she had just had lunch with Britney Spears.

But fame ran in her family. Her late father, Rob Kardashian, had a decades-long friendship with the well-known football star OJ Simpson. Rob climbed his way up from being OJ’s waterboy to the best man at his wedding.

But Kim’s dad was truly put in the spotlight when OJ was put on trial for murdering his ex-wife, Nicole, and her lover, Ronald. Rob became one of the defense attorneys on the biggest trial of the decade. Meanwhile, Kim’s mom (and soon-to-be manager), Kris, was best friends with Nicole at the time. The 1995 trial was a lightning rod for heated discussions about race, sex, and domestic violence. 

At 15, Kim had a front-row seat to infamy. She describes coming home to find her father’s car vandalized with racial slurs, her mom’s best friend posing for playboy, and her godfather on every TV in America.

Imagine that being your teenage years!

Think of how OJ was acquitted when a less famous man probably wouldn’t have been.

At 19, while high on ecstasy, she married the music producer Damon Thomas, who was ten years her senior. I’m sure it helped that he worked with big artists such as Lionel Richie, Pink, Chris Brown, and R Kelly.

After three years of marriage, they divorced, citing he was controlling.

After there divorce, Kim quickly attached herself to the most famous socialites of the day. She became, as she puts it, a “closet organizer” to Paris Hilton and often appeared with her in front of paparazzi and on her mega-hit reality show The Simple Life. But Kim was a background character, and that couldn’t be.

Many believe Paris Hilton gave Kim a crash course in becoming mega-famous. Most notably, Paris had released a sex tape that landed her a reality show. Paris to this day claims this was released without her consent. In 2007, just as Paris’ career was waning, Kim followed in her footsteps and created a sex tape with the then-famous rapper Ray J. Kim says that she didn’t want to release the tape. However, many conspiracy theories say otherwise, even claiming her mom a party to it.

Kim readily took on the role of a seductress, posing for Playboy and filming the shoot for her reality show, which ended up having 20 seasons and several spin-offs. At the time, Kim was still interested in accessing conventional forms of fame, starring in B-list movies and even releasing music. But she couldn’t dance or act. So Kim endorsed everything from burgers to weight loss to sneakers. 

Regardless, her mom catapulted the new-found fame – and male attention into a reality show about their family.

"I think that's how I was definitely introduced to the world," Kim said of her sex tape. Her momager said that it was her job to turn 15 minutes of fame into 30.

"I started to look at our careers like pieces on a chessboard," Jenner wrote in her biography. "Every day, I woke up and walked into my office and asked myself, 'What move do you need to make today?' It was very calculated. My business decisions and strategies were very intentional, definite, and planned to the nth degree.”

She and her sisters had brick-and-mortar clothing stories and a tanning line, the occasional perfume, but she was far from uber-wealthy.

She was, however, dating high-profile men who were. Nick Lachey, Nick Cannon, NFL star Reggie Bush, followed by NBA player Chris Humpries.

Humpries, who Kim was married to for an infamous 72-days, was a disaster. Not for the reason you think. Kim said, at the time, she felt enormous pressure to marry and have kids at 30, just like her peers. 

Years later, she admitted that she knew she wasn’t in love with him by their honeymoon. But because she had so publicly married him - and even sold the photos and filming rights to their nuptials, she didn’t call it off until she was overwhelmed. The wedding reportedly brought $18 million in licensing fees, endorsement deals, and broadcast deals for Kim, and calling it off made her a global laughingstock.

Youth held so much power over Kim, just like many women who fit a seductress archetype.

Once Kim left Humpries, life started to work out. Kanye West, perhaps the biggest rapper in the world at the time and certainly the most famous person Kim has ever dated, invited her to Paris. Unlike anyone before, he was an A-List celebrity. He admitted he was in love with her in a song released to the world.

This relationship was fundamentally different. Kanye told everyone Kim was a marketing genius, and invited her to the Met Gala when she was previously forbidden. He encouraged her to make her own brands that she completely owned, like his sneaker line Yeezy. Although he himself was worth millions (or billions, as he bragged), he wanted Kim to gather her own gold.

She released an app that made tens of millions, her own makeup line, perfumes, and more. Unlike the burgers or playboys, she started selling her sex appeal to women who wanted to be just seductive as she was. They wanted her hair, body, clothes, and, most of all, to land a man like her.

After having their first child, Kim married Kanye and had three more. She appeared on the cover of Vogue and became respected in her own right.

But Kanye (as we all know now) was not a shining knight in armor. As much as he wanted her to become a mogul, it was always by his design. He raided her closet and threw out all of her clothes. He meticulously dressed her daily. Their martial home could only be in the color beige.

And then, there was the public embarrassment. Kanye would dive into manic episodes and give interviews where he would say the most controversial things possible. He claimed slavery was a choice, that he was Jesus, publicly told everyone that the considered aborting their first child, that he would never allow their child to do playboy or a sex tape, attacked Kim’s family, publicly supported Donald Trump…

Kim was deeply loyal to Kanye, remembering how he had defended her to the media, who considered her low-class. She even feuded with his enemies like Taylor Swift in his defense.

Then Kim was back in Paris, not to meet Kanye, but to attend fashion week as an honored guest. Men dressed as police broke into her hotel room.

​​"They grabbed me and took me into the hallway. I was wearing a bathrobe, naked underneath. Then we went into the room again, and they pushed me on the bed. And, it was this time, they tied me up with plastic cables and taped my hands, then put tape over my mouth and legs."

"They ask for money. I said I don't have any money," she tearfully tells her sisters in a clip from the second episode. "That's when I saw the gun clear, like clear as day. I was kind of looking at the gun, looking down back at the stairs."

Kanye’s antics continued, but Kim’s willingness to accept his mistreatment. After more public embarrassments, a failed presidential run, and his putting his hubris over their family, she filed for divorce, citing that she was done with the extravagance. She wanted real intimacy.

Kim is a great example of how financial independence can lead to personal growth, but how we as woman cannot only look to materialism to make us feel free. 

It’s the little things that make life worth living, and sometimes we need to have the large things stolen from us to learn that. All in all, while many people underestimate Kim Kardashian, I think in many ways she’s an effective role model to young women about personal growth, sex tape and all.