Before Kris Jenner, 60, was the momager du jour, she was simply Kris, mother of four, ex-wife of lawyer Robert Kardashian and current wife of Bruce Jenner, and best friend of Nicole Brown Simpson.
This time in Jenner’s life has been turned into yet more entertainment in the form of the TV series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, but it’s one show about her family she’s unwilling to promote.
The movie features a fictionalised conversation between Jenner (Selma Blair) and her and Nicole Brown Simpson’s friend Faye Resnick (Connie Britton) discussing domestic abuse in the Brown-Simpson household.
Jenner says a conversation of this nature never happened — because she didn’t have a clue her friend was in trouble.
Kris Jenner says that even now, 21 years later, her “heart breaks” that she never knew what her friend endured at the hands of O.J. Simpson.
“I saw all the pictures and the police reports, and I heard the tapes of her calling 911, and that was stuff I didn’t know anything about [at the time]. It’s wild that she kept that from us. So I feel bad. I beat myself up because I feel like I wasn’t paying attention. Like, ‘How did I miss this?'” she told People.
“They say it’s very typical in an abusive relationship that the woman doesn’t really speak out about how she’s being treated. And that I will always feel sick about it – that she didn’t really or couldn’t tell any of us what was going on. I look back on some of that stuff and I go, ‘Oh, now I get it.’ Some things come to my memory and then I realize that’s what was going on there.”
In The People v. O.J. Simpson, we meet Jenner and Resnick gossiping at their friend Brown Simpson’s funeral. We also encounter the adolescent Kardashian children.
There was a time when the name Kardashian wasn’t ubiquitous. Contrary to popular belief, the world didn’t first encounter the Kardashian/Jenner family via their eponymous reality show.
The real rise of the family in public consciousness began with the “trial of the century” — that of NFL player and movie star O.J. Simpson. The rabid public fascination with his trial spawned the 24-hour news cycle, which in turn gave birth to the 24-hour reality TV cycle of which the Kardashians are the undisputed rulers.
The makers of The People v. O.J. Simpson are acutely aware of this — why else insert a scene in which Simpson threatens to commit suicide in Kim Kardashian’s bedroom, adorned with Jonathan Taylor Thomas posters, as reported by The Daily Beast?
“Do not kill yourself in Kimmy’s bedroom!” exclaims David-Schwimmer-as-Robert-Kardashian.
In another scene, the Kardashian children huddle around their TV set for a glimpse of their dad — “Oh my god, it’s daddy!” the scream, before chanting “Kar-dash-i-an! Kar-dash-i-an!”
It will be truly surreal to see the current queens of reality television in their nascent stages. The trial must have given all of them — including Kris Jenner — a taste of fame and publicity. It’s odd to think that little more than a decade later, the family tied to the biggest crime trial in America would come to be associated with sex tapes, gender transitions, and fashion lines.
Would the Kardashian/Jenners be where they are had the O.J. trial not occurred? We’ll never know…