Do the Kardashians have an ex problem? The reality TV dynasty is currently under attack by the rotating cast of NBA players and video girls they used to bone. The Kardashian family is a well-oiled machine run by a woman (Kris Jenner) who may as well have five money printers in her Calabasas basement. As long as you’re willing to put in the work—modeling, appearances, emoji apps, etc—being a Kardashian pays. Unfortunately, sleeping your way into the family business doesn’t ensure lifelong dividends. Semi-famous exes like Adrienne Bailon, Kris Humphries, and Lamar Odom have learned the hard way that the Kardashian glow has a limited shelf life. After a few months, the Google alerts will slow down and the appearance offers will dry up. Before long, you’re back to being a Cheetah Girl/professional athlete, albeit with another credit on your IMDb page and some brand new emotional baggage to work through.
So what’s an ex to do? On Wednesday, two Kardashian has-beens displayed different approaches to being spurned by Calabasas’s first family. Blac Chyna, a woman who managed to parlay a stripping career into a reality TV show and a fake eyelash empire, has no intention of abdicating the spotlight anytime soon. As one of the most fascinating and persistent minor celebrities in the Kardashians’ orbit, Blac Chyna cemented her family ties by having a child with both Tyga and Rob Kardashian. While Tyga and Chyna were together when she conceived, he’s since moved on to Kylie Jenner, a barely legal Puma spokeswoman who’s clearly the head of their household. Apparently, Blac Chyna saw the 18-year-old Kylie paying her ex’s bills and thought, hey, I could do that. There’s really no other explanation for why Chyna, a woman with her whole life ahead of her and unlimited pairs of false eyelashes, would waste any time on Rob Kardashian. Kardashian’s well-documented mental health issues obviously shouldn’t disqualify him from finding love and starting a family. His designer sock business, however, is a red flag.
Fast forward a few months, and it seems that Chyna and Rob have called it quits, freeing up more time for Blac Chyna to attack her primary ex. In a series of snapchats Wednesday, the reality star came for Tyga, Rob, and Kylie, calling the rapper a “bitch” and writing, “No child support! So go tell Kylie and Rob about our son account! Cause that's the only reason I'm contacting ur f*g ass! But u wanna make it like I want u lol!”
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While Blac Chyna’s snap-rant confounded, Lamar Odom, Khloé Kardashian’s ex-husband, took a more traditional approach with an Us Weekly confessional. Because if there’s one thing an ex-Kardashian knows, it’s to hold out for a cover story and good Photoshop. Odom—Lammy, as he’s known to Keeping Up With the Kardashians fans—has been relatively quiet ever since he was found comatose at a Nevada brothel in October 2015. In his new Us Weekly tell-all, Odom reveals the powerful emotion that led him to the brothel: boredom. “I was home by myself. Bored. I wanted to get out and have a good time,” he recalls. “Looking back, I might have had a drink to get the mood started, but was I drunk or on drugs? Not at all. I remember lying in bed. Two women were in bed and then I fell asleep. That’s all. When I woke up four days later, I was trying to pull the tubes out of my mouth.”
The former NBA player suffered 12 strokes and two heart attacks; Dennis Hof, the owner of Dennis Hof’s Love Ranch South, said that Odom was taking a “Viagra-like herbal supplement” at the time.
But homeopathic aphrodisiacs are the least of Odom’s worries. The athlete has long battled drug addiction, and was suspended by the NBA twice in 2001 for violating their anti-drug policy. In 2013, he was arrested on a DUI charge. In 2009, Odom met Khloé Kardashian. They got married just one month later—a quick timeline for any newlyweds, but particularly concerning in light of Odom’s ongoing battle with addiction. To say that Khloé didn’t know what she was getting into is an understatement. “I was hiding it for a while, but then I got frustrated and was like, fuck it,” Odom explains. “Around two years before we split up [in 2011], I was in the man cave she had made for me and she caught me. She was disappointed. So was I. The sad thing about it is, I don’t know if I was disappointed because I was actually doing the drug or because she caught me. She knew I was doing cocaine the whole time after that. It was my drug of choice. I’m not going to say she accepted it because that would be the wrong word. Tolerated would be a better word.”
Kardashian was allegedly less tolerant when she caught Odom “in a sleazy motel room in L.A. getting high with this one girl," he says, adding, "It was atrocious. Looking back, I'm like, ‘What are you doing?’...That was like sticking a knife in her heart and twisting it.”
According to Odom, being a Kardashian companion had its ups and its down. In the pro column, “It opened up opportunities, like the fragrance Khloé and I created.” In the con-disguised-as-a-pro column, there’s the hordes of women who were lining up to get a piece of Lammy. Fame “opened this gate up with other women who probably wouldn’t have been interested in me," he says. "When I became Khloé Kardashian’s man and on TV, it made me look more enticing. People who didn’t even know basketball would approach me…Bitches and THOTs came out of the woodwork.” If nothing else, Lamar Odom is a testament to the raw sexual appeal (and burden) of fame-by-association: “If there is one thing I regret when I was married, it was having multiple affairs with different women. That wasn’t the stand-up thing to do. I wish I could have kept my dick in my pants.”
Ironically enough, according to Odom, sleeping with tons of women wasn’t even that much fun: “My life was all about drugs at that point. It probably helped the end of my career come along a little faster because drugs killed my drive to want to train and be in shape. It killed that and my sex drive. The only time you can fuck is when you take coke.”
These days, Odom is clean and sober, thanks to a wakeup call from his daughter. “She said, ‘Pops, you get help or I won’t talk to you.’…I was honest with them. There is no reason to lie now. But it was good for them to know it is a disease and one I may pass back to them.” And while he’s eternally grateful for Kardashian, particularly for waiting by his bedside in the wake of the brothel collapse, their relationship now is strictly platonic: “We haven’t been intimate in years.”
Odom finishes up his tell-all with a solid rationale for getting sober: without sobriety, we wouldn’t have this Lamar Odom Us Weekly interview. “If I would have done coke last night, you would have gotten some dickhead here trying to get out of here fast,” he confesses. “But you’re getting Lamar now.”
