Eight Found Guilty in Paris Over 2016 Robbery of Kim Kardashian

New York Times

23-05-2025

Eight people were found guilty by a court in Paris on Friday in connection with a brazen robbery against Kim Kardashian nearly a decade ago.
Ms. Kardashian, 44, a reality TV star and entrepreneur, was gagged, bound with zip ties and robbed at gunpoint of jewelry worth millions of dollars at a luxury residence she had rented during Paris Fashion Week in October 2016.
Seven men and one woman were found guilty on charges ranging from direct involvement in the robbery to lesser complicity in it. The court sentenced them to three to eight years in prison, with the sentences mostly or entirely suspended.
'The sentences are fairly lenient,' David De Pas, the presiding judge, acknowledged as he read out the ruling, citing the advanced age and health issues of many of the defendants as one of the main reasons.
Even so, he added: 'You did harm.'
The court found a ninth defendant guilty of illegally acquiring and possessing firearms but cleared him of involvement in the robbery. It acquitted a 10th defendant entirely on the grounds that there was not enough evidence against him for a conviction.
Reporters had nicknamed the main suspects in the case the 'grandpa robbers' — a group of grizzled criminals, most of whom are now in their 60s and 70s, who were accused of staging one of the most daring celebrity heists in France's recent history.
Ms. Kardashian had testified earlier this month that she had feared for her life during the robbery and that it had pushed her to sharply upgrade her private security and to scale back the amount of personal, real-time information that she posted online.
Most of her stolen jewelry, including a $4 million diamond engagement ring from her then-husband, was not recovered. At the time, it was estimated to be worth at least 8 million euros, or about $9 million. The final estimate is unclear, but Ms. Kardashian told the court the insurance payout she received was about $6 million.
Of the 10 defendants — eight men, ages 35 to 72, and one woman, age 79 — only two had acknowledged their involvement.
One was Aomar Aït Khedache, 69, whose DNA was found at the scene but who denied accusations that he masterminded the robbery by recruiting accomplices, giving orders and arranging to sell the stolen diamonds in Belgium. The other was Yunice Abbas, 72, who acted as a lookout and later wrote a book about the heist.
'I forgive you for what had taken place,' Ms. Kardashian tearfully told Mr. Khedache in court earlier this month, after he apologized to her. 'But it doesn't change the emotion, and the feelings, and the trauma, and the ways that my life is forever changed.'
Ms. Kardashian, who completed a legal apprenticeship this week that makes her eligible to take the California bar exam, has campaigned for prison reform.
Lawyers for the oldest defendants had urged the court to be lenient in its sentencing, arguing that there was no risk of them committing further crimes and that forcing the men to spend the rest of their lives behind bars was unnecessarily cruel given their ailments.
Stenographers transcribed the court proceedings on a screen for Mr. Khedache, who has a severe hearing impairment and who was often mobbed by photographers and camera crews as he hobbled through the courthouse's marble hallways with a cane.
Mr. Abbas's hands shook from Parkinson's disease when he spoke in court. Another defendant, Didier Dubreucq, 69, was absent from court several times to undergo chemotherapy for cancer. One person who was charged in the case had died, and another was too ill to be tried.
The prosecution argued that the defendants were not harmless retirees but career criminals who had carefully prepared their heist and who had shown no empathy for Ms. Kardashian or for the residence's night watchman, who was forced to lead the robbers to her apartment.
'Today, they are being presented as small-time crooks,' Anne-Dominique Merville, the prosecutor in the case, told the court this week. But they were 'seasoned robbers' with extensive criminal records, she said, as she told the three judges and six-person jury not to trust the defendants' 'reassuring wrinkles.'