Kim Kardashian recalled taking the stand during the 1998 murder trial for her then-boyfriend TJ Jackson’s mother Dee Dee.
The 42-year-old Kardashians star described her teenage years as “hectic” as her late father Robert Kardashian Sr. was involved in numerous headline-making trials and she stood by TJ after his mom was found dead in the pool of her boyfriend Don Bohana in his Ladera Heights, California, home.
“My dad was going through all those trials and it was pretty intense in my life,” she told Vogue Italia. “My boyfriend’s mother whom I was really close with was murdered in 1994 and I had to be part of that trial.”
When asked how she was involved in the trial, the television personality — who has become involved in the criminal justice reform movement — shared, “I had to testify and was there every day with my boyfriend. I was just 14, you know.”
Four years after her death in 1998, Bohana was found guilty of second-degree murder in Dee Dee’s death and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. He’s spent 19 years in a California prison.
“To have that experience at such a young age was insane,” she explained. “And it was also back-to-back with the O.J. [Simpson] trial, there was just a lot of layers there.”
In 2020, the reality star opened up about her memories of the Simpson trial — with parents Robert and Kris Jenner on opposite sides of the contentious 1994 court case — during a sit-down with David Letterman for his Netflix talk show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
“It was dinner time, and we were all sitting down, and I answered the phone. It was a call from jail, and it was O.J., and I handed my mom the phone because he wanted to speak to her,” said Kim. “And I just remember them getting into it.”
The late Robert Sr. was a friend of Simpson and served as one of the NFL star’s defense attorneys during his murder trial for the violent deaths of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Kris, on the other hand, had been close with both Simpson and Brown, and stood by the Simpson children after Brown’s death.
Though he was acquitted of the double-murders in October 1995, Simpson was deemed liable for the deaths in 1997 in a civil case brought by the two victims’ families. In 2008, he was convicted for his role in the armed robbery and kidnapping of two sports memorabilia dealers in Las Vegas. He was released from prison in 2017 after serving nine years.
Kim, who was around 14 years old at the time of the initial trial, said it was difficult to navigate the opposition between her divorced parents.
“My mom was extremely vocal on her feelings — she believed that her friend was murdered by him and that was really traumatizing for her,” she shared. “And then we’d go to my dad’s house and it was a whole other situation there.”
“We didn’t really know what to believe or whose side to take as kids, because we didn’t want to hurt one of our parents’ feelings,” she continued.
In recent years, Kim has become an advocate for criminal justice reform, which she called “her life’s most meaningful work” at the TIME100 Summit in April.
The SKIMS founder’s legal efforts began in October 2017 after learning about the case of Alice Marie Johnson, who had been in prison since October 1996 after being convicted for helping facilitate communications in a drug trafficking case. (Johnson believed she would be pardoned in 2016 when then-President Barack Obama granted clemency to 231 people — including many with similar nonviolent drug charges — but Johnson was passed over.)
After learning about the case through a video report by Mic, Kardashian retweeted the clip, wrote “This is so unfair,” and began fighting for her clemency.
After Johnson was released from prison in August 2020, Kardashian continued to advocate for other wrongfully convicted inmates; most recently including asking for the temporary release of a jailed father whose daughter was killed in the tragic elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
She passed the first-year law students’ examination (“baby bar”) in December 2021 after first revealing her aspirations to become a lawyer in May 2019.
