PARIS: The last time Kim Kardashian faced the men that police say robbed her, she was bound with zip ties and held at gunpoint, and feared she might die. On Tuesday, nearly a decade later, she returns to Paris to testify against them.
One of the most recognizable figures on the planet is expected to take the stand against the 10 men accused of orchestrating the 2016 robbery that left her locked in a marble bathroom while masked assailants made off with more than $6 million in jewels.
Kardashian is set to speak about the trauma that reshaped her life and redefined the risks of celebrity in the age of social media. Her appearance is expected to be the most emotionally charged moment of a trial that began last month.
Court officials are bracing for a crowd, and security will be tight. A second courtroom has been opened for journalists following via video feed.
Kardashian’s testimony is expected to revisit, in painful detail, how intruders zip-tied her hands, demanded her ring, and left her believing she might never see her children again.
Twelve suspects were originally charged. One has died. Another has been excused from proceedings due to serious illness. Most are in their 60s and 70s — dubbed les papys braqueurs, or “the grandpa robbers,” by the French press — but investigators insist they were no harmless retirees. Authorities have described them as a seasoned and coordinated criminal group.
Two of the defendants have admitted being at the scene. The others deny any involvement — some even claim they didn’t know who Kardashian was. But police say the group tracked her movements through her own social media posts, which flaunted her jewelry, pinpointed her location, and exposed her vulnerability.
The heist transformed Kardashian into a cautionary tale of hyper-visibility in the digital age.
In the aftermath, she withdrew from public life. She developed severe anxiety and later described symptoms of agoraphobia. “I hated to go out,” she said in a 2021 interview. “I didn’t want anybody to know where I was … I just had such anxiety.”
Her lawyers confirmed she would appear in court. “She has tremendous appreciation and admiration for the French judicial system,” they wrote, adding that she hopes the trial proceeds “in an orderly fashion … and with respect for all parties.”
Once dismissed in parts of the French press as a reality TV spectacle — and lambasted by Karl Lagerfeld for being too flashy — Kardashian now returns as a key witness in a case that has forced a wider reckoning with how celebrity, crime, and perception collide.
Her lawyers say she is “particularly grateful” to French authorities — and ready to confront those who attacked her with dignity.
Kim Kardashian will testify in the Paris trial about the jewelry heist that upended her life
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Kim Kardashian will testify in the Paris trial about the jewelry heist that upended her life
This handout photograph released on Jan. 21, 2026, shows a view of prehistoric cave paintings in the Sulawesi island of Indonesia, which includes faded hand stencils dated to at least 67,800 years ago. (AFP Photo/Maxime Aubert/Griffith University)
- Newly dated artworks are believed to have been created by ancestors of indigenous Australians
- Discovery shows Sulawesi as one of world’s oldest centers of artistic culture, researcher says
JAKARTA: Hand stencils found in a cave in Indonesia’s Sulawesi are the world’s oldest known artworks, Indonesian and Australian archeologists have said in a new study that dates the drawings back to at least 67,800 years ago.
Sulawesi hosts some of the world’s earliest cave art, including the oldest known example of visual storytelling — a cave painting depicting human-like figures interacting with a wild pig. Found in 2019, it dates back at least 51,200 years.
On Muna, an island off the province’s southeast, researchers have discovered new artworks which are faint and partially obscured by a more recent motif on the wall. They used a new dating technique to determine their age.
The cave art is of two faded hand stencils, one at least 60,900 years old and another dating back at least 67,800 years. This makes it the oldest art to be found on cave walls, authors of the study, which was published this week, said in the journal Nature.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, or BRIN, and co-author, said this hand stencil was 16,600 years older than the rock art previously documented in the Maros-Pangkep caves in Sulawesi, and about 1,100 years older than stencils found in Spain believed to have been drawn by Neanderthals.
The discovery “places Indonesia as one of the most important centers in the early history of symbolic art and modern human seafaring. This discovery is the oldest reliably dated rock art and provides direct evidence that humans have been intentionally crossing the ocean since almost 70,000 years ago,” Oktaviana said on Wednesday.
The stencils are located in Liang Metanduno, a limestone cave on Muna that has been a tourist destination known for cave paintings that are about 4,000 years old.
“This discovery demonstrates that Sulawesi is one of the oldest and most continuous centers of artistic culture in the world, with roots dating back to the earliest phases of human habitation in the region,” said Prof. Maxime Aubert of Australia, another of the study’s co-authors.
To figure out the stencils’ ages, researchers used a technique called laser-ablation uranium-series dating, which allows for the accurate dating of ocher-based rock art. The method uses a laser to collect and analyze a tiny amount of mineral crusts that had formed on top of the art.
The study also explored how and when Australia first became settled, with the researchers saying the stencil was most likely created by the ancestors of indigenous Australians.
