Forget divorcing Kanye. Let's talk about future Attorney Kim Kardashian
- Bernadette Crane
- Feb 19, 2021
- 3 min read
October 2017: Kim
You stumble across a heartfelt plea on Twitter. Alice Johnson is serving her twentieth year in a life sentence after a single nonviolent offense. No parole, no chance at the rest of her life, because she didn’t know how else to feed her family after losing a decade-long position in management. Someone has to do something. It’s so unbelievably unfair.
You’re rich, you’re powerful, you have nearly 70 million followers on social media. There’s got to be something you can do, right? You call your friend Ivanka, daughter of that guy who also came from a background of reality TV. That guy who now gets to make really big decisions, like who to release from prison.
Your friend Ivanka forwards you to her husband, Jared Kushner. Currently enjoying his unfathomable rise to the spotlight. Claiming to be a huge champion of prison reform, after his father, Charles Kushner, served a year for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering (Charles Kushner was pardoned by Donald Trump in December of 2020).
The next thing you know, the White House has invited you to visit, advising on change in “the clemency system”. You take the opportunity, here is your chance to help Alice Johnson and several others already in mind. You leave behind your PR team and bring a gaggle of attorneys, ready to make change. Only to find out how little you understand about how any of this works. How broken the system is. You came to advocate empathy, a humanitarian context that needs to take place to fix the present framework of incarceration. Your attorneys have all the facts to back your points.
The conclusion is swift, Alice Johnson will be pardoned! But now your eyes are open. Now you know how to do more. How to fix a broken system. You decide to risk it all to become a lawyer. To become a part of the system, to fix it from within. Four years of studying, shadowing lawyers, potentially taking a hammer to the brand your family has built for more than a decade. Possibly endangering your relationship with your husband, father of your kids, an outspoken supporter for the current Commander-in-Chief. Do you go for it? Do you choose the rocky path? The one that could blow your comfortable life apart?
Would it be worth it, for all the people you could save from unethical incarceration. Would it be worth it to the Alice Johnsons? The Cyntoia Browns? To reunite them with their families, give them a better life, inspire their kids to become lawyers and make the system better, too? You’re damn right.
February 2021: Bernadette Speaking
A huge conversation caught my attention today around a new Netflix movie called “I Care A Lot”, in which Rosamund Pike plays a con artist dancing within the legal system, robbing senior citizens of their estates. People are so bored, so raw from the social injustices we’ve encountered in the last year, that we're on board, we'll entertain a new girlboss. It’s rewarding to see someone win against the system, even if they’re the bad guy. After all, she says she cares. It's an easy lie to swallow.
Say what you want about Kim Kardashian. She took a risk putting her name on the line to have citizens released from prison, to give them another chance. When your name is worth a reported 780 million dollars, that’s not a light risk to take.
No one is saying she’s a traditional lawyer. I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s the future.
“I really genuinely just stay focused on the cases and the people… I really do care”.
I’m no fool. And neither is Kim Kardashian. But the facts indicate that when her life was as rich, cushioned, comfortable as possible, she chose a new career. She chose ambition against the grain because she had always wanted to do more. Believe it or not, she cares. Talk about her products, talk about her divorce, talk about her TV show, sure.
But you better damn well talk about the future she’s forging. For herself, and for American citizens ready for change.
Feel free to fact-check:
Vanity Fair on the Kim/Ivanka/Kim/White House connection
Kim sharing her choice in career-change, regardless of image
Sharing details of her progress toward becoming a lawyer
Trump pardoning Charles Kushner
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