Kim Kardashian West is studying to become a lawyer [View all]

[demmiblue]

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As with most things to do with the Kardashians, you’ve doubtlessly absorbed the news (whether you wanted to or not) that Kim played a role in the release last summer of Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old woman who’d been in an Alabama prison on a nonviolent drug charge since 1996, and whose case Kim had learned about through social media. After President Trump met with her, the CNN commentator and activist Van Jones, and several lawyers, he granted Johnson clemency and then invited her to his State of the Union Address in February. What you probably don’t know is that Kim has been working with Jones and the attorney Jessica Jackson, cofounders of #cut50, a national bipartisan advocacy group on criminal-justice reform, for months, visiting prisons, petitioning governors, and attending meetings at the White House. And last summer, she made the unlikely decision—one she knew would be met with an eye roll for the ages—to begin a four-year apprenticeship with a law firm in San Francisco, with the goal of taking the bar in 2022.

“I had to think long and hard about this,” she says, gleefully devouring chile con queso with chips now that her Vogue shoot is over. What inspired her to embark on something so overwhelmingly difficult and time-consuming—even as she also runs a multimillion-dollar beauty enterprise—was the combination of “seeing a really good result” with Alice Marie Johnson and feeling out of her depth. “The White House called me to advise to help change the system of clemency,” she says, “and I’m sitting in the Roosevelt Room with, like, a judge who had sentenced criminals and a lot of really powerful people and I just sat there, like, Oh, shit. I need to know more. I would say what I had to say, about the human side and why this is so unfair. But I had attorneys with me who could back that up with all the facts of the case. It’s never one person who gets things done; it’s always a collective of people, and I’ve always known my role, but I just felt like I wanted to be able to fight for people who have paid their dues to society. I just felt like the system could be so different, and I wanted to fight to fix it, and if I knew more, I could do more.”

Jones had been collaborating with Jackson on building bipartisan unity around the need to “shrink the incarceration industry,” and with folks on the other end of the political spectrum, like Newt Gingrich and the American Conservative Union. And it was working. Then, says Jones, Trump “runs and wins on this law-and-order, Blue Lives Matter platform, and he gives an inauguration speech with his American-carnage line, making it seem like he’s going to unleash police and prisons everywhere.”

And then the unexpected happened. “Kim Kardashian,” says Jones, “wound up playing this indispensable role, and a lot of people have gotten furious with me, saying I’m stealing the credit from African American activists who have been working on this issue for decades. And first of all, I’m one of them. But I was in the Oval Office with Kim and Ivanka and Jared and the president, and I watched with my own eyes Trump confess to having tremendous fears of letting somebody out of prison and that person going and doing something terrible, and the impact that that would have on his political prospects. He was visibly nervous about it. And I watched Kim Kardashian unleash the most effective, emotionally intelligent intervention that I’ve ever seen in American politics.”

https://www.vogue.com/article/kim-kardashian-west-cover-may-2019

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