Kris Jenner fired off a blistering tirade at Kim Kardashian over a single line in the latter’s forthcoming biography.
On Thursday’s episode of “The Kardashians,” the family matriarch, 71, confronted her daughter about Jonathan Van Meter’s speculation that Kim does not think she has “childhood trauma” because she “just doesn’t see it.” Jenner deemed the passage a direct assault on her parenting legacy and demanded its removal.
“You should tell him to take the trauma part out. I’m insulted,” Jenner said during the confrontation. “You can tell him, for me, that he can f–k off. … That is very offensive to me.”
The author, who spent six years shadowing Kim and interviewing her inner circle for “Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future,” had floated the childhood trauma theory in the Oct. 27 release. Jenner dismissed Van Meter as a profiteer “putting things in a book that are dramatic and will sell books.” She instructed Kim to make plain that she wanted no such characterization included.
Kim, 44, agreed she would “make that very clear” to her authorized biographer. Yet she defended the overall project in a separate confessional, framing it as a bulwark against misinformation.
“I stood behind” the book, she said, “since there is so much misinformation out there and so much bad information, why wouldn’t we want someone that’s so smart and so genuine and so great to write a great book that’s super interesting and factual and great?”
Jenner was having none of it. She branded Kim “insane” for having “given [their] rights to [their] lives away to some stranger,” raging that her daughter was handing over access to “your entire life, and to our lives.”
“That, you know, is ridiculous,” she continued. “Why give someone that access?”
The other Kardashian sisters sided with their mother. Khloé Kardashian asked why Van Meter could not “take what you say for face value.” Kourtney Kardashian, in her own confessional, backed Jenner’s account of their upbringing.
“I don’t think we had some deep, dark trauma, so I would be pissed too if someone tried to say we did,” she said.
Jenner herself offered a characteristically quippy summation of their collective hardship.
“My legacy is my children, so I don’t want anybody interrupting what my truth is,” she explained. “And my truth is: I worked really hard raising you guys, and there was no trauma. The biggest trauma that we had was the day that Toys ‘R Us closed.”
Van Meter had foreshadowed the on-camera blowup in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last month. He recalled Jenner “flip[ping] out on camera” over the biography, quoting her as yelling, “Why did Kim drag us all into this? Why is my affair from 30 years ago in the book?”
The journalist noted a swift reversal, however. “Two days later, Kris was fine,” he told the outlet. “But it’s going to be on the show.”
The biography, which Van Meter constructed through extensive access to Kim’s personal and professional worlds, has now become a flashpoint in the family’s ongoing negotiation of public narrative control.
“The Kardashians” streams Thursdays on Hulu.