A deer in the headlights? Viewers thought Tristan Thompson looked genuinely worried during the Thursday, April 14, premiere of The Kardashians as Kim Kardashian showed Khloé Kardashian a controversial ad.
“Khloé, look at this,” the Skims CEO, 41, told her sister, 37, at the family’s low-key barbecue, carrying her son Saint‘s tablet over to the Good American cofounder.
“What? Let me see,” Khloé replied, as the KKW Beauty guru added, “I feel like you’re the only one that would understand.”
Following the debut of the Hulu series, a TikTok user dissected the scene in a now-viral post, highlighting the 31-year-old athlete’s reaction to the sisters’ conversation. Thompson goes wide-eyed, turning his head and staring directly at the camera while sitting at a table next to Kris Jenner’s longtime boyfriend, Corey Gamble.
“Guys I’m crying, Tristan’s heart was deffo pounding,” the user wrote over the video, hinting that the Canada native seemed nervous that Kim was showing Khloé something regarding his affair with Maralee Nichols, which had not yet been revealed when the episode was filmed.
One fan commented, “The way his face dropped,” while other social media users joked that they didn’t notice Thompson’s shock when they initially watched the episode.
However, the Selfish author’s discovery had nothing to do with Thompson. “There was a picture of my cry face, and then it said something super inappropriate, like, ‘Kim’s new sex tape,’” she said in a confessional, revealing that the content popped up on her 6-year-old son’s device while he was playing Roblox.
“This is supposed to be unreleased footage from my old sex tape. The last thing that I want as a mom is for my past to be brought up 20 years later,” Kim added, referring to her sex tape with ex-boyfriend Ray J, which was leaked in 2007.
Thompson made it through the family meal unscathed, but he and Khloé talked about their tumultuous relationship — and his past infidelity — during the series premiere. The on-off couple began dating in 2016 and have split multiple times over the years due to Thompson’s cheating.
“I have thrown water on all your clothes when I was nine months pregnant,” the Kocktails With Khloé alum told her ex, reflecting on when she learned of his affair while she was pregnant with their daughter, True, now 4, in 2018.
“If I wasn’t pregnant, I would have f–ked you up,” she added. “I just didn’t want to break my nails before delivery.”
The pair initially stayed together amid the scandal, but they called it quits in 2019 after the athlete was caught kissing Kylie Jenner’s then-BFF Jordyn Woods. After quarantining together during the COVID-19 pandemic, Us Weekly confirmed in 2020 that the twosome rekindled their romance.
“Every day he tries to show me and prove to me that he is a different person and that I should have faith and trust him,” Khloé told the cameras during Thursday’s episode. “But him and I have been through so much together that I have a lot of reservations. My guards are up.”
Thompson, however, seemed optimistic about their future, telling the Strong Looks Better Naked writer, “I want to get us back together and build our family and hopefully be able to expand our family one day.”
Us confirmed in June 2021 that the pair broke up again, with Thompson’s paternity lawsuit with Nichols, 31, making headlines six months later. The Chicago Bulls athlete revealed via his Instagram Story in January that he is the father of Nichols’ son, Theo.
“Khloé, you don’t deserve this,” he wrote in a lengthy statement at the time. “You don’t deserve the heartache and humiliation I have caused you. You don’t deserve the way I have treated you over the years. My actions certainly have not lined up with the way I view you.”
Ahead of the Kardashian-Jenner family‘s return to reality TV, the Khloé and Lamar alum told USA Today that Kim was the one who broke the news to her about the paternity scandal. “It was hard,” Khloé recalled in an interview published on Wednesday, April 13.
Last month, Khloé revealed that her ups and downs “will be addressed on the show,” telling Variety, “We try as a family to protect the privacy of our partners or significant others, since they didn’t really sign up for this; we did. But if something is really public like this was, it would be strange if Tristan was a part of the show and then all of a sudden he disappears and we don’t ever talk about it.”
The Kardashians airs Thursdays on Hulu.
