Professional influencer Kim Kardashian West is parlaying her newfound passion for prison reform into a new career, and she's apparently planning on taking the California bar exam without going to law school.
The Chronicle picked up the story from an interview Kardashian West did in the May issue of Vogue in which she claims she's been studying criminal law on her own, and she's doing a legal apprenticeship with Oakland-based criminal justice reform organization #cut50.
#cut50 issued a statement to the Chronicle saying, "We are excited to work with Kim as she she pursues her apprenticeship. Like everyone on our team, she cares deeply about people negatively impacted by the criminal justice system."
You may recall that Kardashian West, along with CNN's Van Jones, helped advocate last year for the release of a 63-year-old Alabama inmate, Alice Marie Johnson, who had served 32 years in jail for a non-violent drug offense. Jones tells Vogue that Kardashian West was indispensable in easing President Trump's fears about issuing a pardon for Johnson, raving that he watched her "unleash the most effective, emotionally intelligent intervention that I’ve ever seen in American politics."
Flash forward some months, and she now tells Vogue that after a bit of reading, "crim law I can do in my sleep." "Took my first test, I got a 100," she says. "Super easy for me. The reading is what really gets me. It’s so time-consuming."
Kardashian West does not have a college degree — she took some classes at a community college before dropping out — but that actually isn't a requirement for becoming a lawyer in California. All one technically has to do is "read the law" and pass the bar exam. And Kardashian West says she's planning to take the bar herself in three years. First she'll be taking what's known as the "baby bar" exam this summer, after which, if she passes, she'll get the green light from the state to go forward with her studies. "The concepts I grasp in two seconds," Kardashian West brags.
Meanwhile, this is the same interview in which Kardashian West reveals that husband Kanye West made her cry by tossing out hundreds of pairs of her shoes when they first got together. And, addressing Kanye's reported mental health issues, she says, "I think we’re in a pretty good place with it now... For him, being on medication is not really an option, because it just changes who he is. Traveling a lot does set it off, so he doesn’t travel as much as he used to. But honestly, I never want to speak for him, because I am not in his mind."
Photo: Eva Rinaldi/Wikimedia