Kim Kardashian West has always had a passion for law. Growing up with her father, Robert Kardashian, the attorney best known for being part of O.J. Simpson’s defense team, how could she not?
In fact, that may have led to her latest career aspirations. She just finished her first year at law school and is now an executive producer on Oxygen’s The Justice Project. In the series, she travels to prisons to help incarcerated inmates and hear their stories. The documentary includes a look at the cases of Dawn Jackson, Alexis Martin, Momolu Stewart and David Sheppard, all who legal professionals have considered to be wrongfully convicted.
“I think that by the time I was a teenager and he was working on the O.J. case, I was sneaking in his office, looking at all of the evidence and things I shouldn’t have been looking at,” the reality star, 39, recalled on Saturday, January 18, at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour.
She continued: “Maybe it was in my soul for years that that’s what I would have wanted to do. And I’ve even seen interviews pop up now from six or seven years ago. People ask what I wanted to do if I wasn’t filming my show. I always said I wanted to be a crime scene investigator or an attorney.”
Robert, who passed away when Kim was 22 in 2003, also made Kim “sign a contract for everything,” which got the KKW Beauty founder thinking. Now, she knows her dad would be proud of how much she’s succeeded. She admitted that, in a way, her new career makes her feel closer to her late father.
“There are times when I could be frustrated and up studying really late and have to get up and wonder how he did it having four kids. He must’ve been going through some of the same things that I have gone through,” she told Us Weekly and other reporters after the panel. “It would have been exciting to talk to him about that, and I know that he would be so, so proud.”
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star also revealed that she’s made many sacrifices in her life in order to do the project, attend law school and spent time with her husband, Kanye West, and their four children, North, 6, Saint, 4, Chicago, 2, and Psalm, 8 months.
“Obviously, my kids and my husband are my life, so I just had to cut out a lot of all the extra stuff that I was doing and the friends [I had],” the Selfish author told Us. “I’m best friends with all my friends I’ve been friends with forever, but they understand. They know I just don’t go to all these events anymore, the movies. I don’t do that extra stuff, and that’s OK for me.”
Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project debuts on Oxygen April 5 at 7 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Amanda Champagne
