CULTURE

Kylie Jenner’s Bodyguard Comes Out of Hiding to Deny Stormi Paternity Rumors

Look what you made Tim Chung do.

May 12, 2018

@timmm.c

After the birth of Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott’s daughter, Stormi, a rumor began building, quietly at first and increasing in volume: that Scott was not, in fact, the father—and instead, Stormi was the result of an illicit affair between Jenner and her pizza-loving part-time-model bodyguard, Tim Chung. The evidence, it seems, was simply that Stormi and Chung sort of look alike (do they?) and that, if you work backward from her birth date, Stormi was probably conceived before Scott and Jenner went official (but as any Keeping Up With the Kardashians fan knows, chronology is a construct), and Travis Scott seemed, from a public standpoint at least, pretty absent from the whole thing anyway.

The rumor prompted dismissive laughs on Jenner and Scott’s part, according to Hollywood Life—but Chung himself apparently only made everyone more suspicious with his stoic silence. When a TMZ crew approached him to ask about the alleged paternity, he shook his head and mumbled, “Can’t answer that,” which, in tabloid world, is sort of like taking the Fifth—it shouldn’t necessarily imply guilt, but it sort of does. (It got swiftly more outrageous, with one fan proposing that Kris Jenner had engineered the affair as a new Keeping Up With the Kardashians plot.) Chung’s sister, apparently, told Radar she didn’t know if he could be the father—but then again, she wasn’t aware of the whole conspiracy theory in the first place.

Anyway, at some point, everyone in the Kardashians’ orbit has to come out with an absurd statement about something or other, and this weekend Chung emerged out of hiding to speak out about all the gossip, leading the venerable British news outlet the Daily Mail to declare Chung has all-caps “FINALLY” denied rumors about Stormi’s paternity. “I am a very private person and would normally never answer to gossip and stories that are so ridiculous that they are laughable,” he wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram feed and stories early Saturday morning. “Out of deep respect for Kylie, Travis, their daughter together and their families, I would like to set the record straight and say that my interactions with Kylie and her family have been limited in a strictly professional capacity.” In the closing line of the statement, he borrowed from Taylor Swift’s infamous 2016 statement: “There is no story here and I ask that the media no longer include me in any narrative that is incredibly disrespectful to their family.” Media, look what you made Tim Chung do.

The whole thing has been great for Chung’s follower count—just last week, it numbered just more than 500,000 followers, and now, he’s amassed nearly 700,000. Considering Chung’s penchant for flirting in the comments section of his Instagram, he’s really coming out ahead.