By Juliette Jabkhiro and Lucien Libert
PARIS (Reuters) – Reality TV star Kim Kardashian shed tears and said she had feared she would be raped as she testified in a Paris court on Tuesday about the 2016 heist in which she was robbed at gunpoint in her hotel room by a gang who stole jewels worth millions.
Kardashian, dressed in a smart black outfit and wearing shiny jewellery, arrived in court in a black van minutes earlier, accompanied by her mother. Cameras are not allowed in the courtroom, and her testimony is not broadcast live.
“I came to Paris for fashion week, Paris was always a place that I loved so much,” Kardashian told the court.
“We were leaving the next morning so I was just packing up, it was around 3 in the morning. I heard stomping up the stairs when I was in bed,” she said, recalling the night of the robbery.
“And in my bedroom comes in a few police officers, or that I assumed were police officers as they were in police uniforms.”
“Then I heard one of the gentlemen forcefully say ‘ring! ring!’ in English, with an accent, pointing,” she said.
“I was pretty hysterical and I just looked at the concierge and told him what is going to happen to us, I have to make it home to my babies,” Kardashian said.
She said at one point she feared she was going to be raped as the robbers threw her on the bed and one of them grabbed her leg. “But he ended up tying me up and closed my legs,” she said.
The suspects are accused of tying up Kardashian with zip ties and duct tape before making off with jewellery, including a $4 million engagement ring given to her by her then-husband rapper Kanye West (now known as Ye), according to investigators.
Ahead of Kardashian’s testimony, her stylist Simone Harouche, who was asleep in the same luxury hotel flat at the time of the attack, told the tribunal of the “terror” they both felt during the robbery.
“‘I have babies, and I have to live’ – that’s what I heard her say. ‘Take everything – I need to live'” said Harouche, who was downstairs in the duplex flat at the time of the attack, while Kardashian was upstairs.
Harouche rushed to lock herself in the bathroom and texted Kardashian’s sister Kourtney and their bodyguard for help.
When the robbers left and Kardashian joined her downstairs, “she was beside herself, I’ve never seen her like that before,” Harouche said. “She just was screaming and kept saying we need to get out of here, we need help, what are we going to do if they come back.”
Harouche cried at times during her testimony, and said she had changed careers and underwent therapy because of the robbery, which she said caused her post-traumatic stress and made her fearful of being around celebrities.
In all, nine men and one woman are being tried by the criminal court. Five of them – all men – face armed robbery and kidnapping charges and potentially risk being sentenced to life imprisonment. The others are charged with complicity in the heist or the unauthorised possession of a weapon.
As the robbers escaped on foot or with bicycles, they lost some of the jewellery, including a cross with six diamonds, which a passerby found in the street and brought to the police. But most of the jewels, including the $4 million engagement ring, were never found.
(reporting by Juliette Jabkhiro; additional reporting by Lucien Libert, Marco Trujillo; writing by Ingrid Melander; editing by Mark Heinrich and Ros Russell)
