Kim Kardashian Tells Robber She Forgives Him During Paris Trial

After Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in the early morning hours of Oct. 3, 2016, in Paris, she didn’t post any personal content on her social media platforms until the following January—which, not coincidentally, timed with the new promos for the upcoming season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, premiering in March 2017 and featuring Kim’s first comments about her experience.

 While she was working with Paris authorities in the interim, she chose to break her silence publicly on her family’s long-running E! show.

Talking to Kourtney Kardashian, who was sharing a room with Kim during their fateful trip but was out when the robbery occurred, and Khloe Kardashian, Kim recalled lying in bed in her robe, dozing off while she debated getting up to wash her face.

Then she heard pounding coming up the stairs toward her room. She called out, thinking it was Kourtney and her friend coming home drunk.

“Then at that moment when there wasn’t an answer, my heart started to get really tense,” Kim said in a confessional. “Like your stomach just kind of knots up and you’re like, ‘OK, what’s going on, what’s going on?’ I knew something wasn’t quite right.’”

Through her partially open door she saw what she thought were policemen holding down another guy, who turned out to be the building concierge.

Seconds later Kim realized she didn’t know how to call 911 in another country. Then one of the men dressed as a cop came in, took her phone and threw her on the bed.

“And I was like, ‘This is it,’” she told her sisters. She recalled thinking, “It makes me so upset to think about it, but like, either they’re going to shoot me in the back, or if I make it and they don’t, there’s no way out.”

Of the jewelry she lost, “It’s all replaceable, none of it matters.”

Kim Explains Why She Told Her Story for the First Time on Keeping Up With the Kardashians

Before the March 19 episode premiered, Kim explained sharing her story in this way.

“Tonight's episode is going to be very tough for me,” she wrote on Instagram, captioning the last family photo she had from Paris, a shot of her with Kourtney, Kendall Jenner and mom Kris Jenner. "However, I thought it was important to share this story through my eyes & not in an interview where my own words could be twisted. I have always shared so much & I'm not going to hold back when this was probably one of the most life changing experiences for me. I would never wish this experience upon anyone, but have learned some valuable lessons & feel so blessed to be safe home with my babies & husband. To my friends, family, and loved ones I can't thank you enough for being there when I needed you the most. To the French police, thank you for your incredible hard work.”

Kim Reacts to Suspects’ Arrest

"I honestly never thought that they would catch the robbers," Kim said on a May 2017 episode of KUWTK, referring to the arrests of 17 suspects that January. "I just thought so much time has gone on and I didn't really realize how diligent the French police were being and just all the hard work they were really putting into it."

She continued, “To find out that there were so many people involved, hearing detail after detail, really just opened up a whole different perspective for me of feeling safe."

Ultimately 12 people were charged and 10 went on trial in May 2025, one of the suspects having died in the interim while another was deemed too ill to stand trial.

Kim Came to Believe the Robbery Was Meant to Be

“I know this sounds crazy, but I know that was meant to happen to me,” Kim said during an April 2017 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I am such a different person…I really feel like things happen in your life to teach you things, and this was like—it was probably no secret, you see it on the show, us being flashy, I was definitely materialistic before. Not that there’s anything bad with having things and working hard to get those things and I’m really proud of everyone around me that’s successful. But I’m so happy proud that my kids get this me and that this is how I’m raising my kids, because I just don’t care about that stuff anymore.”

The Robbery Changed Kim’s Approach to Security Overnight

Kim Returns to Paris for the First Time Since the Robbery

Kim steered clear of the City of Light until June 2018, when she returned to Paris with then-husband Kanye West to attend their friend Virgil Abloh’s first show since being named artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton.

"Even though I'm nervous, I think it's really important to Kanye to go," Kim mused to Khloe and Kourtney before the trip. "I feel like it's the right thing to do for Virgil."

In a Keeping Up With the Kardashians confessional, she reflected, “"I have so many special memories in Paris. I hope that this trip will just be so good that I can start to remember all the magical things about Paris and why Kanye and I fell in love with it."

Talking to her sisters once she was back in L.A., Kim admitted she was anxious but “fine” overall for most of the trip.

"It was so good,” she said. “Like, honestly, I'm so glad we went.”

Kim Calls Robbery “the Scariest Thing” That Ever Happened to Her

Kim may have found purpose and meaning, and preferred her priorities after the robbery, but it was still admittedly a horrifying experience.

“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life,” she acknowledged on an October 2019 episode of Felony Files, “just thinking that, you know, you’re about to die…You’re bracing yourself for the moment they’re going to shoot you and kill you. That 10 minutes really changed my whole life. “

Kim Recalls Steeling Herself to Be Sexually Assaulted

Kim further recounted her experience to David Letterman on an episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction that dropped in October 2020.

Two masked men “were yelling at me in French and I just sat up, and they kept on saying ‘The ring, the ring,’ and I was just so startled,” Kim said. She eventually realized he was referring to her engagement ring, which she’d placed by the bed. “So I handed him my ring and he grabbed me, and I was wearing a robe and I wasn’t wearing anything under it.”

Blinking back tears, Kim added, “I don’t want to ruin my makeup.”

“He grabbed me and pulled me towards him,” Kim continued. “But I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, so I was like, ‘Okay, this is the time, I’m going to get raped, like, just deal, it’s gonna happen, like, just prepare yourself.’ So I did, and then—I don’t know why I’m crying, I’ve talked about this before—but then he tied me up with handcuffs and zip ties, and then duct tape, and then duct-taped my mouth and my eyes.”

Before he covered her eyes, Kim said, “I saw he found my whole jewelry box and held it up, like, ‘Aha!’ you know, like, ‘We got it.’ But I kept on looking at the concierge [who’d been forced to unlock her door at gunpoint] because I didn’t know who he was, and I’m like, ‘What is happening? Are we going to die? Just tell them I have children, I have babies, I have a husband, I have a family, like I have to get home! Tell them to take anything, I’ll never say I saw them, like, take everything!’”

Kim Couldn’t Stop Thinking About Kourtney Finding Her Body

As one of the robbers pointed a gun at her, “I just kept on thinking about Kourtney,” Kim told David Letterman. I kept on thinking, she’s going to come home and I’m going to be dead in the room, and…she’s going to be traumatized for the rest of her life if she sees me. We’re sharing a room, like, on her bed, but I thought that was my fate.”

But “this one guy, the guy that didn’t have the gun,” she continued, he kept saying “like ‘Shhh, if you shhh, you ok.’”

“He could hardly speak English,” Kim added, “but I was like, ‘Okay, is he giving me a signal?’”

 “I’ve watched every single CSI show on the planet,” Kim quipped, describing how she tried to take a mental picture of her assailant so she could describe him to police, but “it all goes out the door.”

After she was tied up, “he picked me up and he put me in a bathtub,” Kim said, “and then he picked me up again and just put me on the floor and ran.”

The Shine Was Off the Diamonds for Years

"After I was robbed in Paris, I haven't bought jewelry,” Kim said in an episode of The Kardashians after Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana presented Kim with a striking cross necklace in the fall of 2022 as a thank you for serving as creator director of their Dolce & Gabbana Spring-Summer 2023 show. “I haven't really been about wearing jewelry, because when it was taken from me, it was such a—I didn't know I was ready for that experience and what that meant, but I was. I was ready to, like, give it up."

She added, “This symbolized to me more than just getting a diamond cross necklace. This, like, brought a piece of my glamour back to me, and that's why it's so special that I got it back from a really meaningful experience."