Are we too cruel to Kim Kardashian?

There were many shocking elements to the attack on Kim Kardashian last week, said Deborah Orr in The Guardian. The reality TV star was asleep in a Paris apartment when a gang of men broke in, put a gun to her head, bound and gagged her, threw her in the bath, and then made off with her jewellery, including a £3m diamond ring given to her by her husband, the rapper Kanye West. Almost as “chilling” as the crime itself was the unkind public reaction. Some people accused Kardashian of staging the robbery to boost her TV ratings; others suggested she had brought it on herself by flaunting her super-rich lifestyle on social media. (Days earlier she had posted a picture of the £3m ring on Instagram.) As the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld opined: “You cannot display your wealth and then be surprised that some people want to share it with you.”

I bet Lagerfeld would be surprised if someone ripped the hideous jewel-encrusted “loo chain” from around his “quivering turkey neck”, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times; “but then, there has always been one rule for Kim and another for everyone else”. A reality TV tycoon who last year earned $51m – nearly twice as much as the boss of Jpmorgan Chase – she is doomed always to be regarded as “cheap”. That is partly because people don’t get what she does, said Philip Delves Broughton in the Financial Times. It isn’t just about baring all (sometimes literally) on social media and TV. The bulk of her fortune comes from persuading fans to make “hundreds of thousands of small, digital purchases”. There’s a game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, that lets you “rise to fame and fortune” by wearing the right clothes and dating cool people; and a $1.99 Kimoji app, featuring emojis of her crying, pregnant and exercising. She is a pioneer “in the borderlands between the virtual and the real”.

Alas, “her life in the public eye seems to have stripped people of any ability to empathise with her”, said Alex Abad-santos on Vox. Kardashian has become a caricature, a “phantasm of Instagram filters”, a “hollow brand”. We don’t react humanely towards her because we have forgotten she is human.