The Kardashians do their best to make sure everyone struggles to keep up with them, but it almost feels like the family was working overtime in 2016 to not only maintain their relevancy, but also to ensure pop culture domination.
This year alone, their seemingly never-ending drama included, but wasn’t limited to, divorces, feuds, nude selfies, health issues, a horrific robbery and a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump.
That’t a lot to pack in one year, especially when it was only a decade ago that a blind item arguably helped launch Kim Kardashian’s entire career. Yes, Kim Kardashian is so much more than a sex tape, but have you ever wondered where the seedlings for the rumor that started it all began?
Ten years ago this Christmas Day, AOL Black Voices writer Jawn Murray ran a blind item about an R&B singer who was shopping an X-rated home video he had made with his ex-girlfriend to adult entertainment companies. The item is, of course, referring to the tape that Kardashian made with ex-boyfriend Ray J, which helped catapult her into the spotlight.
Can’t Say Names...
Desperate times call for desperate measures! Sources say a certain R&B singer, who has never really caught a major break, is peddling an X-rated home video to adult entertainment companies in hopes that it will do for his career what it has done for Paris Hilton’s. I’m also told that said singer believes that releasing the video will serve as revenge to his ex-girlfriend who recently dumped him for another entertainer.
With those kind of hints it didn’t take long for gossip sites to correctly guess the identities of the parties involved, since Kardashian had recently begun dating Nick Cannon.
As far as blind items go, it was a good one, but not perfect and it didn’t quite get everything right. When The Huffington Post spoke to the author of the item this year, he said he since realized what he wrote was “probably 75 percent accurate.” Murray, who is now a pop culture commentator and editor of AlwaysAlist.com, explained that the notion the tape’s release was motivated by revenge is inaccurate.
Regardless of who was actually involved in releasing the tape, it remains true that this little blind item had a hand in helping launch what would ultimately become an empire. It started a guessing game that was officially put to rest a few weeks later when TMZ confirmed the existence of the tape.
The rest is history. What we know now as “Kim Kardashian, Superstar” was released in February 2007, and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” premiered in October that same year.
Before You Go
