Two decades after the filming of the sex tape that made Kim Kardashian famous, House of Kardashian looks to find the truth behind its 2007 release. While the world may never know what actually happened behind the scenes, the docuseries’ director Katie Hindley told Variety that everything the Kardashian clan does is “intentional.”
“They’re very intelligent, smart women who know what they’re doing, is how I would describe them,” she explained to the outlet shortly before the three-part tell-all aired in the UK on Sky Documentaries. “They do things with intent, it’s not a mistake.”
One example of this is how the family leans into the incorrect perception that they don’t actually work, Hindley said.
“I think it helps them for people to believe that they’re famous for being famous,” Hindley said. “That they don’t work too hard, that this is just their life and — whoops! — this is what appears on Instagram in the morning.”
In the docuseries, Kim and then-boyfriend Ray J‘s sex tape — which was filmed in 2003 and released months before the Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiere in 2007 — is a hot topic, specifically whether the Skims founder and momager Kris Jenner purposely leaked it to create buzz.
“The sex tape was a means to an end, it was to create a controversy,” longtime family friend and Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis says in the doc, per Vogue. He claims it was “leaked by them together” — as in Kim and Ray J — but added that it’s “ludicrous” to speculate that Kris also played a role.
On the other hand, celebrity agent David Weintraub — who represented Kim’s close friend Paris Hilton in the early 2000s — alleges that Kim wanted her mother to “negotiate the deal” once she and Ray J decided they wanted to make the sex tape. Weintraub’s statement was similar to Ray J’s 2022 claim to The Daily Mail that Kris allegedly watched two different sex tapes before deciding which one to release.
As for Caitlyn Jenner — the beauty mogul’s ex-stepparent and only family member interviewed for the show — she was busy on the golf course when the rest of her family was dealing with the fallout of the controversy, per E! News.
“To be honest with you, I just stayed out of it. Kris never talked to me about it. I never talked to Kimberly about it. I don’t know what happened, why it happened,” she said, adding that she has “no idea” whether her ex-wife and Kim worked together to release the footage. “I never, ever once had that conversation — or did I want to have that conversation.”
Both Kim and Kris have previously denied intentionally planting the NSFW tape.