Kim Kardashian Wants You to Believe Weight Loss Spon Con Is Good Because It Funds Prison Reform

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Multiple things can be true at once: for years, Kim Kardashian-West has posted a slew of questionable, sinister weight-loss spon-con Instagram, some for $1 million a pop, regardless of the vitriol her detox teas and dieting aids have inspired across the internet and in the heart of Jameela Jamil. Sometimes she’ll stop, but she’ll always return to promoting dangerous products that reassure consumers they will lose weight because it will make them “shit their brains out,” to borrow a phrase from actor Sophie Turner. Now, it looks like Kim is done apologizing and would like you to realize that all the proceeds from these deals go to her prison reform work, so being anti-Flat Tummy Co. is basically support for the prison industrial complex. Or something?

Kim told the New York Times on Wednesday that she’s fast and loose with her acceptance of paid ads and she’s even more willing to hawk goods that are “off-brand” because the money goes to her prison reform work. “If I have a paid post that comes in and I think, ‘O.K., well this can fund x amount of people that are behind bars, that can help free them with simple legal fees that they just can’t afford, then that would be worth it to me, even if the post might be a little bit off-brand for me,’” she said. “I really weigh out different things now than I used to.”


There is perhaps no person less equipped to draw a line between what is appropriate and what is not—excluding, say, Kanye West—and I’m not solely referring to the fact that Kim helped free Alice Marie Johnson and then had her model the new KKW shape wear line. It also strikes me as absolutely wild that one of the world’s wealthiest women feels the need to divvy up her income in such a way that she has a separate stream reserved solely for her activism. The reality appears to be much clearer: she’s attempting to use her good work to justify her poor behavior online.

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Maria Sherman

this is my day job: senior writer at jezebel