CHAPTER THIRTEEN 

When I set out to chronicle the family’s unique place in popular culture, I had vowed not to let myself get caught up in these type of controversies, nor treat any such revelation as an exposé that would confirm Rolling Stone’s description of the Kardashians as the “vapid, vain and banal American dream.” I couldn’t be less interested in the drunken revelry of Scott Disick, nor could I give a rat’s ass about Kim’s alleged surgical enhancements. My goal was to determine what lies behind the remarkable cultural and business phenomenon that the family has come to represent. If I were to focus on the myriad tabloid rumors or the foibles of the Kardashians and their assorted hangers-on, I would have enough material for a trilogy.

A chance encounter in the spring of 2015, however, threw me briefly off course. While I was on a media tour promoting my book about the circumstances behind the death of Bobbi Kristina Brown, I found myself appearing on a radio show hosted by my old friend Greg “Opie” Hughes, whom I first met when he was one half of the popular radio duo Opie and Anthony, on whose program I had appeared multiple times. When I happened to mention to Opie that I was working on a new book about the Kardashians, he asked me whether I planned to reveal who Khloé’s real father was. “Who’s that?” I asked. With a straight face, he answered, “O.J.”

On its surface, it’s a story on par with Elvis spotted working at a 7-11. The genesis appears to be claims by both women who married Robert Kardashian after he divorced Kris. Both women have separately stated that Robert told them Khloé was not his biological daughter. “Khloé is not his kid—he told me that after we got married,” Jan Ashley told a magazine in 2012. “He just kind of looked at me and said [it] like it was a matter of fact. He said, ‘Well, you know that Khloé’s not really a Kardashian, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘OK,’ and that was it.”

In 2013, Ellen Pierson, who married Robert weeks before his 2003 death, told In Touch, “He never would have considered a DNA test. He loved her very much. Robert did question the fact that Khloé was his.”

Neither ever mentioned the Juice. The genesis of that rumor appears to lie in November 2013, when O.J.’s former manager, Norman Pardo, told In Touch, “It’s all going to come out sooner or later. Khloé could be O.J.’s kid. They all took their vacations together. There was a lot of partying going on back then. Kris cheated on Robert—she was known for having a good time.” Pardo said he believes that Khloé was conceived during a “drunken hookup.” While he offered no proof, Pardo claimed that he had brought up the question of Khloé’s paternity with O.J. “Whenever I bring it up, he giggles,” he said.

The story gained traction when O.J.’s good friend Thomas Scotto told Radar Online that even O.J. believed it could be true. “O.J. shared with me on a few occasions that it is a possibility, so it’s time to find the truth,” he said. “That would end all speculation and rumors, then the truth can be revealed once and for all.” Scotto, in fact, was the reason that O.J. had traveled to Las Vegas in September 2007—to be the best man at his longtime friend’s wedding. While he was there, the notoriously acquitted murderer learned that some men were trying to sell mementos of his football career and organized a group of friends to confront the sellers. When they arrived at the hotel room where the merchandise was allegedly being housed, O.J. physically stopped the men from leaving. One of them later called the police and accused the Juice of kidnapping, which resulted in his subsequent conviction and thirty-three-year prison sentence.

Could the stories be true? In the book she wrote with her sisters, Kardashian Konfidential, Khloé noted that when she was a child, “I just didn’t look like my sisters. I was little and petite and this big curly afro. . . . Everyone would say, ‘Oh my god. You’re a Karadashian sister? You look nothing like them.’ And it was true, I looked nothing like them.” In a 2009 episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Khloé wondered if she had been adopted because she looked so different from her sisters. Kris agreed to take a maternity test to prove that she was in fact Khloé’s biological mother. Conspicuously, however, Khloé’s DNA was never compared to her other siblings to determine whether they all had the same father.

When the O.J. rumors surfaced, Kris Jenner characterized them as “blatant lies.” On Good Morning America, she said, “I have never heard such crap in my life. . . . I mean, I was there. I gave birth. I know who the dad was. Everything is good.”

In a long-standing Twitter feud with the Kardashian siblings, model and hip-hop artist Amber Rose—a former girlfriend of Kanye West—Tweeted at Khloé, “U think because ur dad was a professional football player that got away with murder ur better than me girl? Haaaaannn?”

The family chose to dismiss the stories with humor. Kim Tweeted, “Now we have all the answers! It makes sense now! Khloé u are so tan!” Khloé went on the Insider to address the allegations. “I would hope if I’m half black and [half] white, I would be a little tanner than [my siblings]. I don’t know where these stories come from. But, hey, you never know,” she said. She was a little crasser while hosting Chelsea Handler’s late-night talk show in 2014. Discussing the rumor, she said, “I really hope that’s not the case because I did fuck him once.”

In a 2012 episode of the spinoff Khloé and Lamar—before the O.J. Simpson story surfaced—we see Kim phoning Khloé and bringing up the rumor. “Have you been paying attention to this stupid story that’s been running in the tabloids?” she asks. Khloé says she hasn’t heard about it. “Well, you need to pay attention,” Kim scolds her. “Dad’s exes claim that Dad told them right before he died that you are not his biological daughter.”

Khloé uses the episode to accuse them of being “desperate for money” and calls it “disturbing.” Rob then tells her that Kris had recently called a family meeting, where she revealed that she had “made a mistake as a mother” but urged the siblings not to tell Khloé the truth, which is that she’s “not related to us.” When Khloé calls Kim to ask about it, Rob confesses that he has been playing a prank because the whole story is “ridiculous.” Later, Kourtney says that she and Kim are suggesting that “we get a DNA test” to prove the story isn’t true. “Wouldn’t you just want to know?” she asks her sister, revealing that Kris thinks it’s a great idea and “you’d never have to hear about this rumor again.”

Khloé refuses, saying, “I don’t really care. . . . I appreciate you and Kim offering your DNA services to me but this whole thing weirds me out, it makes me uncomfortable.” Later, we see Kris herself urging her daughter to take the test, but Khloé calls her a “psychopath.” When Kris later asks whether it’s upsetting Khloé to hear all these rumors, she admits that it is. “Of course,” replies Khloé, “because I know you had an affair on my dad who knows how many times, so who knows?”

“It was one time,” Kris assures her. “It’s not okay.”

When Khloé again says she doesn’t care, Kris tells her that’s not true. “There’s got to be a part of you that wants some resolution in your heart.”

“I don’t care either way, because my dad is my dad, and my stepdad is my stepdad,” she says, leaving Kris emotional.

In her final confessional, Khloé says, “I think I’ve been going back and forth on whether to get a DNA test and, you know what? I’m one million percent comfortable with not getting a DNA test and knowing that my father’s my father. I’m more than happy to live with that for the rest of my life.”

It’s fairly obvious that the entire episode has been stage-managed to do damage control after the claims of Robert’s exes received considerable media play. Suspicious about why Khloé had readily submitted to take a DNA test to prove that Kris was her mother but refused to take a similar test to determine paternity, Opie Hughes, who at the time had a radio show on Sirius XM radio, publicly offered $250,000 if Khloé would take a DNA test and prove that Robert Kardashian was her father. Hughes offered to donate the money to a charity of her choice.

Scotto also challenged Khloé to take a DNA test to clear up the matter. “That would end all speculation and rumors, then the truth can be revealed once and for all,” he said. “Simple, if she wants everyone to know that he is not the father, otherwise she wants to hide the results.”

When I heard the rumors, I immediately dismissed them out of hand. While it’s true that Khloé looked nothing like her sisters, I thought she was too light-skinned to have been fathered by O.J., notwithstanding the fact that he is a light-skinned African American with significant white blood in his ancestry. Still, Kourtney and Kim were darker than she was. They’d be more likely candidates, I assumed.

Then I saw a photo of O.J.’s daughter Sydney when she was young and a photo of Khloé at a similar age. They were the spitting image of each other. Maybe there’s something to this after all, I thought. But I had determined not to stray onto the path of tabloid trash, and this issue certainly appeared to qualify.

When I heard that Opie’s offer of $250,000 applied to anybody who could conversely prove that O.J. was indeed Khloé’s father, however, I had a change of heart and an idea. By this time, I had watched nearly two hundred hours of soul-destroying episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and its assorted spinoffs. I had seen things that made me want to have my eyeballs sewed shut. I had watched the sisters engage in what they called a “vagina smell-off” in which—hearing that pineapple juice makes everything sweeter—Kourtney and Kim decided to drink vast quantities of the juice and then have Khloé judge whose nether regions smelled better. And then there is the episode where Kim decides on a dare from her sisters to have her butt x-rayed to disprove the rampant speculation that she has had her derriere enhanced with implants.

Surely even I couldn’t get any more distasteful than that. If it’s true that most people watch the Kardashians as their “guilty pleasure,” I decided my guilty pleasure would be to pursue one of the countless tabloid reports to its logical end. I decided to write to O.J. at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada, where he is serving his sentence for kidnapping and armed robbery. Because he had lost a civil suit filed by Ron Goldman’s family and been ordered to pay more than $33 million in damages, I knew that O.J. was in dire financial straits and would be looking for sources of revenue after he was eventually released. I was also aware that any official income would immediately be seized to pay what he owed Goldman.

With this in mind, I crafted a letter that I hoped would pique the Juice’s interest. My goal was simply to get a face-to-face meeting with the wife-killing maniac. If I could establish his trust, my goal would be to have him at least admit that he had had an affair with Kris Jenner back in the day. That would at minimum attract enough headlines to send my book soaring up the bestseller lists. I had a vague notion that perhaps I could also convince him to take a DNA test if it ever came to that. In the unlikely event that I could win Opie’s challenge, I figured I’d donate the $250,000 to a charity that benefits battered women, which would both accomplish a good deed and get me some positive publicity. But first I had to simply get my foot in the door—or in this case, the cell.

In the letter, I told O.J. I’d be interested in having him document his time behind bars for a film that I planned to produce. I had enough credibility as a New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning filmmaker to pull it off, I reasoned. As an incentive, I implied that a creative arrangement could be worked out to siphon the proceeds offshore beyond the purview of the authorities or perhaps into a trust for his children if he so chose.

I was hoping that he would at least be intrigued enough to ask for a meeting. If nothing else, it would be an excuse to spend a weekend in Las Vegas, located a few hours’ drive from the prison where he was being held.

Alas, I never received a response from the charismatic killer. I should have known that anybody smart enough to get away with murder is too smart to fall for a transparent ploy by a desperate writer hoping for a diversion from Kardashian watching. Just as well.

Although I had little interest by this point in the family’s vapid day-to-day lives as chronicled onscreen, I had to my surprise developed a fascination and grudging respect for the behind-the-scenes machinations of its matriarch. In 1987, long before he became better known as a xenophobic Republican blowhard, Donald Trump published a memoir, The Art of the Deal, that rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on it for nearly a year. The book chronicled the rise of Trump’s business empire and quickly became a Bible of sorts for budding entrepreneurs hoping to duplicate the Donald’s success. However, I never drank the Kool-Aid regarding Trump’s supposed business genius. The fact is that he was hardly a rags-to-riches success story. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth to a millionaire tycoon father whose business and real-estate empire he merely expanded to impressive proportions.

In contrast, I found myself considerably more impressed with how Kris Jenner—the middle-class daughter of a small-business owner married to a nearly bankrupt former athlete—managed to parlay the notoriety of her daughter’s sex tape into a billion-dollar empire. In her memoir, Kris Jenner quotes one of her producers, who says, “Fame may come and go but family is forever.”

It’s been said that Kris sold her soul to the devil to achieve her success or that she is a monster who whores out her family as a vanity exercise for the sake of her narcissistic ego. That’s the Kris Jenner whom I assumed I would encounter when I probed deeply into the Kardashian phenomenon. Instead, I discovered that Kris is a loving but controlling mother who cares deeply about her family, and it is for them that she devotes the grueling hours and nonstop wheeling and dealing. Indeed, her children have become rich beyond their wildest dreams and appear to be living a lifestyle that most people can only envy. She is also an undeniable business genius who serves as a genuine inspiration to female entrepreneurs.

Beyond the fairy tale, however, there lies a cautionary tale. In Kris Jenner’s single-minded pursuit of success, the telling fate of young Rob Kardashian reminds us that such an outcome may not be possible without unintended consequences.