Do we like Kim Kardashian?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Years of prison reform work and no campaigning against anyone, set against a paid-promo settlement and a cosy line about gay mates.
Kim Kardashian grew up in Los Angeles, became famous for a tape and a reality show, then turned it into a business empire, including the shapewear label Skims, launched in 2019. The twist nobody saw coming was the law: she's been studying through a law-office apprenticeship rather than law school. She passed the first-year 'baby bar' in December 2021 on her fourth go.
The law bug came from prison reform. She helped push for the 2018 commutation of Alice Johnson's sentence, and she kept going back to the White House with other women whose sentences had been commuted. She said she wanted to bring light to those women and push for change the justice system desperately needs. Whatever you think of the company she kept to get it done, it's work with real people at the end of it.
The mess is the 2003 tape, released in 2007 by Vivid Entertainment, which says it got the video legally from a third party. In October 2025 she and Kris Jenner sued Ray J for defamation, accusing him of making up claims about a federal investigation. He countersued, alleging they breached a 2023 settlement by discussing the tape on their Hulu show. In March 2026 the judge refused to seal that settlement, calling their privacy-harm arguments vague and unsupported.
The money stain is the SEC. In 2022 she settled charges over a 2021 Instagram post promoting EthereumMax tokens, for which she was paid US$250,000 without saying so. She neither admitted nor denied the allegations, paid more than a million dollars and agreed not to promote crypto tokens for three years. Dodgy, but a one-off and a regulatory settlement, not a pattern of ripping people off.
On the harm test, nothing in what we read shows her campaigning against anyone's rights. In 2018, after a spat with model Tyson Beckford, she called him 'sis', which some fans read as a dig at his sexuality, and then said her gay friends meant she couldn't be homophobic. That's a clumsy line, not a campaign. In 2022 she condemned hate speech and said she stood with the Jewish community, without naming her ex-husband Ye. Her public thanks to Trump on prison reform will split readers: some see pragmatism, others see an endorsement.
The good stuff is recent and specific. For Mother's Day 2026 she worked with REFORM Alliance and Ladies of Hope Ministries to cover the cost of children visiting 50 mothers in federal prisons. She also visited a women's prison in Chowchilla, California. It's the same cause she's been on for years, which is the point.