Kim Kardashian said a silent prayer — for her sister, her best friend and her family — as a masked man pulled her toward him in a Paris hotel room in the 2016 jewellery heist that changed her life. She was wearing only a bathrobe. She was bound with cable ties. She thought she wouldn’t survive.
“I was certain that was the moment that he was going to rape me,” she told a Paris court on Tuesday. “I absolutely did think I was going to die.”
When she heard footsteps thundering up the stairs that night, Kardashian said she first thought it was her sister Kourtney and a friend returning from a night out.
The noise got louder. “Hello? Hello? Who is it?” she called out. Moments later, her door flew open.
She begged the robbers: “I have babies,” she said. One replied that she would be OK if she stayed quiet.
The last time Kardashian saw the men that police say robbed her, she was bound at gunpoint and left locked in a marble bathroom while masked assailants stole jewellery worth millions of dollars. Nearly a decade later, she returned to Paris to face them — this time from the witness box.
Dressed in black and wearing dark sunglasses, Kardashian stood in the packed courtroom across from her mother, Kris Jenner. Her voice broke as she thanked French authorities for “allowing me to share my truth”.
She told the court that the attackers arrived dressed as police officers, with the concierge in handcuffs. “I thought it was some sort of terrorist attack,” she said.
She described how they tied her hands with cable ties, dragged her to the bathtub and pointed a gun at her temple. One robber gestured toward her ring. “He said, ‘Ring! Ring!’ and he pointed to his hand.”
French prosecutors say the men who orchestrated the heist — most in their 60s and 70s — were part of a seasoned criminal ring that tracked Kardashian’s movements through social media. Two of the defendants have admitted being at the scene. One claims he didn’t know who she was.
Twelve suspects were originally charged. One has died and another was excused due to illness. The French press dubbed the group les papys braqueurs — “the grandpa robbers” — but prosecutors insist they were no harmless retirees.
Kardashian, who once shared nearly every moment of her life online, later acknowledged the role that visibility played. “People were watching,” she said in a 2021 interview. “They knew what I had. They knew where I was.”

Earlier, Kardashian’s childhood friend and then stylist told the court that she heard the celebrity beg for her life during the robbery.
Simone Harouche, who was sharing their two-floor hotel suite during Fashion Week, said she heard a terrified Kardashian yelling: “’I have babies and I need to live’. That is what she kept on saying, ‘Take everything. I need to live.’”
“I was scared that she was raped or violated. I thought the worst,” Ms Harouche said. Kardashian was “screaming with terror in her voice”.
Ms Harouche told the court the trauma “forever” changed her friend, whom she’s known since age 12, robbing her of a basic human right, freedom.
“She now has a completely different lifestyle,” she said. “In terms of security, she can’t go alone, she doesn’t go alone to places anymore. To lose your sense of freedom … it’s horrible.”
David De Pas, the lead judge, asked Ms Harouche whether Kardashian had made herself a target by posting images of herself with “jewels of great value”.
“No,” Ms Harouche replied. “Just because a woman wears jewellery, that doesn’t make her a target. That’s like saying that because a woman wears a short skirt that she deserves to be raped.”