Kim Kardashian West on Keeping Bruce’s Secret for 13 Years

In the essay, Kim admits that she overheard rumors from her dad (Robert Kardashian) and his friends that Bruce dressed up as a woman. “I thought my dad was jealous of my mom’s new husband, that he was joking with his friends on the phone, but suddenly I knew it was all true,” Kim wrote.

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Kim said that after seeing Bruce dressed as a woman, she drove right over to Kourtney’s house and they searched for old episodes of Oprah to better understand what cross-dressing meant. “For over a decade, we assumed he was a cross-dresser, not transgender,” Kim says. She explained that the reason she didn’t tell her mom was because her sisters Kendall and Kylie were so young and she was “afraid of breaking up the marriage.”
It was nine years after Kim walked in on Bruce that he finally called her and wanted to discuss what she saw — but Kim claims she didn’t walk away thinking that Bruce would become Caitlyn. And then Bruce and Kris’ marriage fell apart and Bruce started to get caught by the paparazzi with his fingernails painted red. “That’s when we started to talk about it; at that point, I still thought he wanted it to be a secret. I didn’t understand why he was being careless and getting caught if he didn’t want to reveal anything. He was saying he didn’t want anyone to know but he was leaving clues for people to find out. He had been seeing a therapist and eventually decided that’s how he wanted to live his life,” Kim wrote.
And now that Bruce has officially transitioned to Caitlyn, Kim says that decision was such a huge weight lifted off her shoulders. “Is it weird for me? Yes, this person has been my stepdad for half my life,” Kim admitted. “But life is just about being happy – that’s the one common denominator that everyone can understand. If you aren’t able to be you, who can you be?”