Businesswoman and socialite Kim Kardashian-West has heard people’s criticism of her working with United States President Donald Trump and she does not care about it, because she wants to save lives.
Last June, the Republican US leader, who is deeply unpopular in her home state of California, commuted the life sentence of Alice Johnson, who had been serving time in prison since 1996 for a first-time drug offense. He granted her clemency after Kim Kardashian-West lobbied and met with him at the White House. The ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ star later met Alice Johnson after she was released on parole.
Kim Kardashian, who recently announced that she is studying to become a lawyer, has continued to push for criminal justice reform. She has maintained a relationship with the White House and is working with officials to try to obtain more clemencies.
“So many people have would say to me, ‘Don’t go to the White House, your career will be over. Don’t go there,’ and I just kind of weighed the decision where it was like, to save a life, or to get maybe bad tweets about me or a bad news story for a few days,” she said on CNN’s Van Jones Show in an interview airing on Saturday. “I guarantee you the people sitting behind bars do not care who the president is. They just want that relief. And so if I could have done that, I don’t care.”
Many fans have contacted Kim, one of the most popular stars in the world with more than 135 million Instagram followers, to get her to try to use her celebrity to bring more political change. She told Van Jones that people write her “every time there is an issue going on in the White House, which is pretty often”.
“I think that people, I see on Twitter people writing me all the time, ‘Kim, do something, do this, do that,’ and I have been very honest with the administration,” she said. “I have been very honest with everyone, from Jared and Ivanka, to everyone in the White House about how I feel about immigration in particular and we’ve had the conversations.”
“The reality is, I can’t do everything,” she continued. “I’m not in that position and if I can change people’s lives in a different area, I have to focus on that and I have definitely voiced my opinion on other things and requested things in other areas.”
Last year, Kim told Jones in a CNN interview, when asked about the scepticism over the reason for her meeting with Trump, “I have children and why would I spend my time away from my kids for a publicity stunt? To a lot of people, it was a risky move to take, going. If there was a possibility that it could have hurt my brand, I mean, I wouldn’t take that kind of public relations risk.”
Jones noted at the time that people may think that Donald Trump “used” her as a political pawn and that their meeting could be seen as her endorsing him.
“I think Kanye’s already given him legitimacy in that way,” she said, referencing husband Kanye West’s support for the president, who he has also met at the White House. “So I don’t think I would be used, and at the end of the day, he heard me out. We got the job done. So I don’t think like, what could he really use me for?” “When I got the meeting, I knew there would be tons of backlash, I knew people wouldn’t understand it,” Kim told Jones. “And at that point, I had to make a decision that this was bigger than me.”