Kim Kardashian’s Inbox Is Flooded With Inmates Hoping to Get a Trump Pardon
Long gone, apparently, are the days when Kim Kardashian‘s inbox was innocently flooded with fashion missives from her husband Kanye West, who bombarded her with pleas to, for example, please start wearing “tiny little glasses.” These days, according to TMZ, her inbox has been deluged with pleas of an entirely different sort: “an endless amount of notes from prison,” asking Kardashian and her legal team for assistance in getting granted clemency.
Those pleas, of course, aren’t coming out of nowhere. In less than a year, Kardashian has established herself as one of the most vocal celebrities advocating for prison reform, which she made crystal clear last year by secretly working with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to schedule a meeting with Donald Trump, which took place last May in the Oval Office. Once there, Kardashian made the case for Alice Marie Johnson, a then 63-year-old woman who’d been in federal prison without parole since her arrest for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense in 1996. Controversial as it was, it worked: Trump, ever swayed by star power, granted Johnson clemency just a week after what he later described as his “great meeting” with Kardashian.
We may be only eight days into 2019, but this year has already seen Kardashian continue to move at warp speed in her efforts; on January 3, new broke that another prisoner who Kardashian had previously advocated for, Matthew Charles, had (once again) been set free after the passage of the national First Step Act. And on January 7, news broke that 30-year-old Cyntoia Brown will soon be released on parole after being granted clemency by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, nearly 15 years after she was given a lifetime sentence for killing a man to whom she had been sold for sex in 2004, in what she said was self defense. While Cara Delevingne and Rihanna played a role in publicizing her case, too, Kardashian again led the crusade for justice, declaring that “the system ha[d] failed” and hiring a top-notch lawyer to assist the legal teams of both Johnson and Brown.
So far, then, that’s three for three in Kardashian’s book, making TMZ’s rather outlandish claim that both staffers and inmates in the prison system now refer to Kardashian as “the Princess of Prison Reform” actually somewhat plausible. It shouldn’t take an A-lister’s tweets to see a little justice in America’s broken criminal just system, but the letter-writers have got it right: At least while Trump’s in office, Kardashian is no doubt their best bet. Indeed, the claim has arisen that President Trump has essentially rewritten the traditional rules of seeking a presidential pardon. There’s no word on whose case Kardashian might take on next, but aside from clemency, they’re no doubt guaranteed to, upon their release, also get a celebratory lesson from Kardashian on how to use a Snapchat filter, just like Johnson.
Related: It Shouldn’t Take Kim Kardashian to See a Little Justice in America’s Broken Criminal Justice System
