Photo illustration by Coda. Image of Kim Kardashian by Gotham/GC Images.
A few weeks before Christmas, Kanye West made a public plea for his wife Kim Kardashian to take him back while performing to more than 70,000 fans. Standing atop a massive mound of cement that had been poured into the middle of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, he altered a line of his introspective classic “Runaway” to make a gentle appeal for Kim to “run back” to him.
It was impossible not to be moved by the vulnerability on display. Kanye, his voice sounding as if it was splitting from emotion, singing directly to Kim seated in the audience next to their eldest kids, North and Saint. It was a moment of restraint from a man whose affinity for spectacle has resulted in him approaching his divorce from Kim as if it’s a Balenciaga styled, Shakespearean drama for the social media age.
In hindsight, though, it was a glimpse of the love bombing he’d unleash once Kim made it clear to him—and to us—that she was indeed moving on from the marriage. The morning after the concert she filed to have her maiden name restored and to be legally declared a single woman (normal course of action for a person proceeding with a divorce). Then she started going out with Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson and everything changed.
From the second paparazzi shots of Kim and Pete first hit the Internet, Kanye has used his Instagram to openly stalk, harass and abuse his wife much to the encouragement of his fans and media outlets eager to capitalize on the latest saga in the world of Kanye.
Since Kanye’s plea to Kim at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum—livestreamed to over 240 countries, by the way—in December, he’s accused her of kidnapping their children and keeping them from him; criticized her parenting; threatened her boyfriend in music and online; accused her family and friends of manipulating her against him; bragged about buying a house across the street from the home they once shared; tagged her in countless posts; told anyone who’d listen that Pete was a drug addict that had contacted AIDS; and lambasted anyone not aligned with helping him win Kim back.
And that is just what he’s done online for all of us to see for ourselves.
For weeks now, Kanye has filled Instagram on a near-daily basis with all-caps proclamations veering between classic love bombing and aggravated harassment. As he sees it, this is about reconciling his family. Anyone that questions that, according to his posts and statements he’s made publicly, doesn’t respect his desire to reunite his family or can't grasp the magnitude of him being a Black man fighting for his kids.
A month ago, I reflected on Kanye’s commitment to controlling the narrative. We’ve known this about him for as long as we’ve known him. His impulse to reframe our opinions of him in real-time has made him both a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac and one of the most compelling public figures of our time (as we've been reminded with the new Netflix documentary event jeen-yuhs). Kanye has single-handedly transformed celebrity into an art form. A performance artist constantly at work, he uses his music, fashion, ideas and cultural tastes to shape the ways we think about him. And his union to Kim was an extension of this. Their relationship was as much a statement on the power of celebrity coupledom as it was a reflection of Kanye’s taste and influence—and he’d frequently remind us of this in his music, ideas and via the narrative he constructed, and revised, through his public persona and how he wanted us to see Kim in proximity to him and vice versa.
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Photo illustration by Coda. Photo by JOCE/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images.
As I wrote then, Kanye’s certainly not the first man to publicly have a jealous fit about his ex moving on. Nor is he the first man to use the kids as leverage in a breakup. But his decision to reframe Kim as a "petty" baby mama keeping the father of her kids away was spectacularly cruel in its calculation.
Kanye, better than anyone, knows how critical we are of Kim and her sisters. We demonize the Kardashians/Jenners as femme fatales who curse the men who court them. To many, these are culturally biracial women freely appropriating the physical traits of Black women in order to lure mostly Black men who are then ruined by the Kardashians/Jenner fame complex. Kanye knows this, which is exactly why he weaponized the racial politics that have followed Kim—and her family—ever since she had the audacity to not allow the violent crime of having her private moments with Ray J leaked to the world by flipping her shame into a reality show that (like it or not) became a cultural institution.
But this was also about power. If Kanye, an absurdly wealthy Black man, can be kept from his kids by way of security guards and private birthday parties, what hope did men with less than him have? That’s what he wanted us to see with his posts. We were supposed to view unhinged behavior like pummeling an autograph seeker in front of Soho House as him sticking up for himself against someone who provoked him. We're supposed to see his call to action for fans to shout “KimYe Forever” if they see Kim out with Pete as helping him woo her back. And we're supposed to see his tantrums against his longtime friend and collaborator Kid Cudi or the random fight he picked with Billie Eilish as Kanye just being Kanye. Passionate and free-thinking. Everything he's doing is just part of his desire to reconcile with his wife.
Despite flaunting his own post-Kim romance, Kanye has asked that we see him as both a man fighting to reconcile with his wife and as an aggrieved father being kept from spending time with his kids. And it’s largely been working. Outlets have treated his posting as a juicy celebrity saga by covering treating every update from Kanye as the latest move in his quest to “win” his wife back and his posts are riddled with encouragement by fans and celebrities rooting for him and Kim to get that old thing back.
What’s missing from all of this, though, is any actual consideration of Kim or any real engagement on how his behavior crossed the line towards abuse quite some time ago.
In one of the many since-deleted posts we’ve seen, he shared a screenshot from a text conversation with Kim telling him that he’s creating a “dangerous and scary environment” and reminding him that someone out there just might actually listen to him and bring harm to Pete. And then there’s another screenshot of a text where she’s asking him why he’s incapable of keeping their conversations private. That the texts come from a contact saved as "Kim's Other Phone" leads me to believe that perhaps she's had to block him for crossing boundaries she placed around how they could communicate as co-parents. "Divorce is difficult enough on our children and Kanye’s obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation so negatively and publicly is only causing further pain for all," she wrote in the rare public statement about Kanye.
Since many of us look at Kim and her sisters as vapid and talentless women unworthy of the fame they’ve earned or the billion-dollar empires they’ve built, there seems to be a willingness to play into Kanye's manipulation. So much of the empathy I see directed towards Kim is couched by some declaration around not liking or respecting her. “I don’t like Kim Kardashian but…” “I hate the Kardashians but...” I saw some variation of that refrain over and over and it was such a jarring reminder of what we tend to demand of women in order to see them as worthy of our compassion. We punish women for the abuse and violence they experience based off our judgements of their past. If only they showed their body less or were less sexy this wouldn't have happened to them. If only they were perfect. Then they’d be deserving of our protection, or our care or our belief in them.
Because of Kim's past—the "sextape," the reality fame, the short marriages—the willingness to extend empathy for her must be wrapped in judgement of her past.
“She's known who and what Ye was for years and how to provoke him/push his buttons. She's playing this game too and it seems like the only one getting a finger wagged at him is Ye,” a friend said in response to a thread I wrote about the dangers of not calling out Kanye for his online harassment. But that’s what we often do to women, famous or not—we blame them for the behaviors of men. She must be provoking him offline to keep him going. She must have done something for this. She must have known this day would come considering his past relationships and his past controversies. She could have avoided all of this.
It's disappointing to see the amount of Tweets or comments from people echoing those thoughts or dismissing Kanye’s posts by using his mental illness as an excuse—despite the fact that he’s shown us time and time again how brilliantly strategic he can he in his manipulation, even when it doesn't appear to be the case.
You don't have to like, or even respect, Kim to have a modicum of consideration for the fact that she is trying to raise kids with a man who is constantly humiliating her on the Internet all because he's upset that she went and got a boyfriend and won't take him back. If this were your sister or your homegirl would you not be alarmed by this?
But watching how Kanye's online antics have been received, I can’t help but think of the women who don't have the wealth to keep lawyers on retainer and foot the bill for a divorce while raising kids or the women who saw their harassment overlooked only to be met with violence or of the men who lost themselves when their marriage fell apart and harmed themselves—or their family.
And I can't help but wonder if Kim only stuck around as long as she did simply because she knew the moment she left Kanye would villainize her and we’d co-sign it simply because we don’t like keeping up with the Kardashians.
