During a recent Good Morning America appearance promoting his new memoir Darkness to Light, Lamar Odom insisted that the tome isn’t “just about… the Kardashians, or drugs.”
The former NBA star’s tell-all certainly is expansive, with detailed recollections of plays, trades, benders, overdoses, and instant reality TV fame. But readers scanning exclusively for Kardashian content won’t be disappointed—Odom’s memoir doesn’t shy away from his romantic entanglements. The 40-year-old self-identifies as a “sex addict,” writing, “I’ve had sex with more than two thousand women. I don’t remember most of their names. Many of them were one-night stands. There were too many strippers to count… I would fuck five or six girls a week, but my demons tormented me the one night I went home alone. I needed women as an outlet.” He also reveals that he’s paid for “plenty of abortions over the years.”
Odom’s sex and drug addictions proved to be serious impediments to lasting romantic relationships. He recalls meeting actress Taraji P. Henson in 2008 and quickly falling in love, and expresses genuine regret for his inability to be “faithful” to her. “I don’t think I ever connected with another black woman as deeply as I did with Taraji,” Odom writes. “And to be honest, because of that fact, it hurt that much more when we broke up soon after I decided not to travel with her. As a professional athlete you’re stereotyped for dating white women. Here I had this beautiful, successful, loving sister, and it gave me a sense of pride to be by her side. It’s just that I met Taraji at the wrong time in my life.”
But Odom’s most high-profile relationship was still to come. His memoir vividly details the night he met Khloé Kardashian through her brother Rob: “I wasn’t a big TV fan, but I knew enough to recognize him. I still remember his blue Dodgers hat, which he wore backward. We ended up in his booth, and about an arm’s length away was this woman with huge eyes. I was immediately attracted to her. We started talking and hit it off. She told me her name was Khloé. I just kept staring at her eyes and thinking how much they reminded me of my mother’s. But really, I was just telling her things she’d probably heard a thousand times. And I’m just thinking: How can I get her back to my hotel to smash?”
“Hey, look, I didn’t know this was going to be my wife,” Odom adds. “I didn’t know I was about to fall head over heels in love.” After “fifteen minutes,” Khloé agreed to go back to his hotel room, where it quickly “became clear that nothing was going to happen.” They talked for hours, and planned to meet for dinner the next day. “The conversation was just as good as the night before,” Odom recalls. “I quickly learned how intelligent and thoughtful she was. Unlike me, she was always on time and never missed appointments. I loved her for that and wanted those things to rub off on me. She had this endearing kind of OCD where she couldn’t stand having a mess in her house and would constantly rearrange things after I unsettled them.”
Of their well-documented whirlwind romance, Odom confirms that they “scarcely left one another’s side” for the next 30 days. “She introduced me to her family, and even though I had seen Keeping Up with the Kardashians a few times, I was taken aback at how close-knit they were. They would squabble and argue, but love always prevailed. I never had a strong family unit, and as a thirty-year-old man, it was something I still craved deeply. I’d always wanted brothers and sisters, and all of a sudden, I had five.”
“Being a part of Khloé’s life and getting to know each member of the Kardashian family is one of the things I’m proudest of in my life. It’s right up there with winning a championship and having kids.”
Khloé and Lamar got married just a month later; simultaneously, Odom recalls diving “even deeper into hard drugs.” He confesses, “I was either high or with Khloé. The cameras in my face blurred my reality.” Odom was quickly becoming a fixture on the Kardashian family’s reality TV show. “For a while, it was bliss and I was literally the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. We were one of the most famous couples in Hollywood, and we made more money together than we had individually at any other point in our lives. At the start of our marriage I was faithful to her. The Kardashians had the number-one-rated show on TV. I was an NBA champion, and the Lakers were barreling toward a second NBA title and third Finals appearance in a row.”
But behind the scenes, Odom was struggling to conceal his drug use from his wife. He describes running away to his “man cave in the basement” whenever Kardashian became too suspicious. The newlyweds partnered professionally on their spin-off show, Khloé & Lamar. “This meant we were around each other all the time, which I loved, even though it took some time getting used to the constant presence of the cameras… Nothing could prepare me for the spotlight that came with being a member of the Kardashian family.”
“I always marveled at how easily Khloé handled it all,” Odom writes. “I guess she was used to it. She gave me pep talks and told me to block out what I could. But my mind just didn’t function like that. I couldn’t move in secret anymore. My drug use and infidelity were starting to pick up again, and now I had the added pressure of television cameras, telephoto lenses, and video cameras wielded by the paparazzi.”
This all came to a head as the shooting of the second season of Khloé & Lamar came to a close. “I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants or the coke out of my nose,” he recalls. “I’d be down in my cave snorting insane amounts of coke, waiting for my dick to get hard like that first time at the Shore Club in Miami seven years ago. Then I’d run upstairs to the bedroom, where Khloé was waiting. She didn’t ask any questions. I’d always hit the lights and take care of business.”
One fateful day, Odom claims, Kardashian tried to breach his hideout. “Khloé came down and knocked on the door. I opened it suddenly and grabbed her forcefully by the shoulders, which frightened her. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I screamed, out of my mind. ‘You trying to embarrass me in front of my friends? I’ll fucking kill you! You don’t know what I’m capable of!’ She ran back upstairs and I slammed the door.” Odom describes this confrontation as “a new low for our relationship and for my life.”
But the lows kept on coming. In one of the most scandalous passages in the memoir, Odom reveals how Kardashian was able to catch him in a compromising position by monitoring his Black Card statements. Following the charges, Khloé traced her husband to the Roosevelt Hotel one night in 2012, where he “had arranged for two strippers to meet me there for an indefinite stay.”
“The girls called other girls to come over to do blow and fuck, and I didn’t mind at all,” Odom writes. “Around midnight I heard a pounding on the door. I got up and looked through the peephole, shocked to see Khloé, Kris Jenner, and their security team in the hallway. They had asked the front desk what room I was in because that information didn’t show up on the credit card statement. The front desk gave them a key card to my room. There were naked girls everywhere. Khloé opened the door and pounced on the first girl she saw. That’s when her security bulldozed the door and rushed into my den of iniquity. Try to imagine the scene: Khloé’s beating the shit out of one of the girls who tried to protest. She’s dropping vicious blows all over the top of this girl’s head. Kris is screaming and her security guard jumps in and pulls Khloé off the beaten stripper.”
While Odom is largely complimentary toward the Kardashians, he reveals that at points he felt abandoned and betrayed by the family. “I would do anything for that family,” he writes, but “Now they didn’t want me around. Well, mostly Kris. So, Khloé by extension. Kris was only interested in protecting the Kardashian brand, which was an international phenomenon. She was the matriarch and guardian of a massive empire and the hundreds of millions of dollars it generated. It was always about her brand. I was nothing to her.”
During a relationship nadir, Odom claims that Kris Jenner essentially tricked him into making a grand gesture that would end his marriage once and for all. He insists that the Kardashian momager told him that Khloé “wanted to speak to me in person the next day in L.A.” In order to meet Khloé before her 6 a.m. SoulCycle class, per Jenner’s orders, Odom drove overnight from Vegas to LA. Khloé was right where Kris said she would be, but she seemed shocked to see her husband, sporting a “stunned expression.” And then Odom spotted the sea of cameras. “It had to be Kris,” he writes. “She must have called the paparazzi and arranged for them to be there, knowing Khloé would be caught off guard and react accordingly. Now here’s the kicker—and this will show you how devious Kris Jenner is—Khloé had no idea I was going to be there. She was frightened and jittery. From the outset it looked like I was ambushing her while she walked to her workout. We were on bad terms and she didn’t want me there. It all began to make sense.”
“The cameras caught the entire encounter on tape,” Odom continues. “There had been a sliver of hope for us to reconcile. I wanted to get back together. Kris knew this was my last chance, but she didn’t want a drug addict in the family. It wasn’t good for business. Any chance I had left with Khloé exploded on the spot.”
Despite their breakup, Khloé Kardashian rushed to be by Odom’s side when he was found unresponsive at a Las Vegas brothel in 2015. But as the Kardashians descended on the hospital, tensions rose between the famous clan and Odom’s family and friends. Odom writes that Khloé “took control.” Since the two were technically still married, “She was in charge of all medical decisions and was the primary contact point for the doctors who delivered constant updates. She tightly guarded access to my second-floor ward and decided who was allowed to enter the room.”
“The tension only worsened after the rest of the Kardashians arrived,” Odom continues. “I had cousins and childhood friends waiting for hours who got bumped out of line by my famous sisters-in-law. Obviously, I had no idea what was going on. This was Khloé’s call, and she had never even met most of my family.” One family member, Odom’s Aunt JaNean, apparently dismissed Kim and Khloé at first meeting, saying “Y’all ain’t that cute…You’re cuter on TV.”
Lamar Odom and the Kardashian clan attend Kanye West Yeezy Season 3 on February 11, 2016, in New York City.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty“There wasn’t any comeback for that. Kim’s and Khloé’s faces said it all: What the fuck just happened? Plus, I know my aunt, and if they had responded, the room would have exploded. Khloé knew enough not to say anything, and it just isn’t in Kim’s nature. Though they were sitting right next to each other, they started texting back and forth furiously.”
Relations devolved even further when Kris Jenner allegedly got territorial over a waiting room seat. “Khloé started working the phones and then met with her security,” Odom narrates. “She wanted everyone who entered the room to sign nondisclosure agreements, which meant no one could talk or write about what they saw. In the middle of the chaos, they were still trying to protect their brand. My family refused to sign. When everybody balked, Khloé fumed and locked down the second floor. She added more security by the elevators and cut off all visitation. The thirty-five people downstairs had no shot to see me. Even my father, who I had just repaired a thirty-year broken relationship with, was only allowed in once. But Khloé never left my side.”
Odom also reports that Kim was incredibly attentive, despite being seven months pregnant, and that “they would put three chairs together for her to sleep across at night.”
Considering Khloé’s vigilance, Odom concludes, “She wanted to maintain control of all information going in and out of the room. She clung to control the narrative of my impending death like only she could.” Still, Odom doesn’t appear to bear any ill will toward Khloé and her family, calling Kardashian “the love of my life” near the end of his memoir and thanking “the entire Kardashian family for embracing me and giving me an incredible kind of love.”
In closing, Odom writes, “I will always be ‘Lammy.’”
