Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
REALITY STAR CARVES OUT NEW
SELFIE-MADE reality queen Kim Kardashian has a £16million mansion, travels by private jet, wears jewels worth a fortune and is worth a billion dollars.
She is married to mega-rich rapper Kanye West, has four gorgeous kids and literally wants for nothing. The internet is drowning in images reflecting the high life she and her reality co-star sisters enjoy.
Days ago she threw open the doors of her Los Angeles home for a photo shoot.
Then came news she had sold a 20 per cent stake in KKW Beauty for £162million – putting the value of her business at $1billion.
You’d think she is the last person who would want to delve into the murky world of killers, rapists, muggers and drug traffickers.
But that’s just what Kim, 39, has done. A yearning to follow in the footsteps of her lawyer dad Robert – famously one of OJ Simpson’s legal team – has seen Kim championing the cause of reformed jailbirds.
She has gone behind bars, looked them in the eye and fought big legal battles for their release.
DREAMS
This isn’t the Kim we know – a model whose life has played out on TV for years. Millions tuned in to see Kim and her clan in Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Among them was killer Momolu Stewart. The same age as Kim, he had pictures of her on his cell wall.
Never, in his wildest dreams, did he think they would ever meet.
But in an exclusive interview, Stewart today reveals how, after learning Kim was filming a documentary inside prisons, he wrote to her – and she ended up supporting his release after 22 years inside.
He says: “A lot of us would watch the Kardashians, these beautiful women and, you know, we were Keeping up with the Kardashians!
“I had pictures of the Kardashians – especially Kim – on my cell wall.
“One day I wrote her a letter asking for help and, because it was from my heart, it touched her heart.
“I’m so humbled that she was willing to come to prison to sit down and get to know me. We had a conversation for an hour and afterwards she wrote a letter to my judge.
“She told him, ‘This guy made a mistake, a big one, but it’s time we extend some compassion for the man he is today because he’s not the same person he was at 16’.
“I think Kim has a beautiful heart and soul. She might even be an earth angel and there are no words to describe how grateful I feel.”
Stewart was jailed in Washington after a decade of hell. He was six when he saw his mum murder his dad. He was taken in by his aunt and abused by her crack-addict husband.
So he ran away, joined a gang and, on New Year’s Day 1997, he and another teenager shot dead Mark Rosebure, 22, who they accused of robbing them. Stewart was convicted of first-degree murder and had little hope of release until the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act was passed in 2017.
The new law gives inmates who committed a crime when they were younger than 18 – and spent at least 15 years in prison – a chance to have their sentences cut short.
Stewart stabbed a man a few years after he was jailed. But he considered himself reformed and was studying for a degree when he wrote to Kim. She was making a documentary called the Justice Project – focusing on cases like his.
The unlikely friends had their first meeting last summer, and her letter was one of 40 that convinced Supe
THE K TEAM Kim and Kanye rior Court Judge Robert Salerno to release Stewart for time served.
Stewart, who got to meet Kim and Kanye at a rally a few days later, has never denied the murder.
And he knows that his victim’s family – and others left bereaved – will resent Kim’s interference.
But he says: “I was a traumatised young man. When you are a child and see blood all over the room and know your father is dead. You see your mother in handcuffs and she is saying everything is going to be all right at the same time as she is led out of the room.
“You move to another household where you are being abused, drowned, beaten and then you run away and go into homelessness at the age of 14.
“You are stabbed in
Kim with prisoner Momolu Stewart before his release