This is an excerpt from Kim, There's People That Are Watching, BuzzFeed News' brand-new newsletter dedicated to the 20th and final season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. You can sign up here.
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Over the last 14 years, the Kardashians have dominated pop culture and built a brand worth $2 billion, but many of their biggest career successes stemmed from scandal.
Each week, we take a look back at how the family's most ~kontroversial~ moments have defined their lives and empire. This week, we're looking at how Khloé's DUI arrest was a masterclass in Kardashian image control...
"I just know I’m going to jail," Khloé says in a confessional after being pulled over and failing a series of sobriety tests.
The scene is a reconstruction of Khloé's 2007 DUI arrest. For the Kardashians, the incident was disastrous.
Now the Kardashians needed to find a way of explaining the arrest while also differentiating themselves from the rest of Hollywood’s ~bad girls~ or risk similar short-lived notoriety. And so the Season 1 episode "Remembering Dad" was born.
It charted the family grieving for the late Robert Kardashian ostensibly at around the time of his fourth anniversary. As Kris explains in a confessional, Khloé always "struggled with her grief and anger at this time of year," and that was the reason she got drunk and was ultimately arrested.
However, these scenes weren't actually filmed around the anniversary. Khloé was arrested on March 7, but the anniversary doesn't fall until Sept. 30.
This suggests that Khloé was either grieving six months in advance of the date or the family engineered the episode as a more palatable explanation for her misdemeanor.
This skewing of timelines to support the family's desired narrative is a technique they employed many times over.
The clearest instance was a scene in which Kim tells Kris Jenner about the struggles in her marriage to Kris Humphries. It portrays Kim in a more positive light in the face of immense public backlash, and suggests that her decision to divorce Kris was something she agonized over.
However, paparazzi shots later revealed that it was actually filmed in an LA studio two months after she filed for divorce.
This proves the extent to which the show was used to shape and control the family's public image, but its masterful storytelling is also the reason KUWTK remains the longest-running reality TV show of all time.
