Kim Kardashian West to Launch Criminal Justice Reform Podcast

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Kim Kardashian West will co-host and co-produce a podcast series with TV producer Lori Rothschild Ansaldi. The show will be exclusive to Spotify, and though its exact premise remains unclear, it will focus on issues of mass incarceration and prison reform.

This project won’t be the lawyer-in-training and producer’s first time working together. In the past, the two had worked on investigating and advocating for the release of Kevin Keith, a Black man sentenced to life in prison. Some of their research will be highlighted in the podcast.

Sentenced to death in 1994, Keith is now facing life in prison with no parole. Ohio’s governor took him off death row, but in 2018 the state’s supreme court denied to hear his case. Kardashian West tweeted a link to an article about his legal situation, and began to advocate for his release. After her initial tweet, Kardashian shared a photograph of herself video chatting with Keith done from an account in Rothschild Ansaldi’s name, and told her followers that Keith was working on helping the lives of his fellow inmates.

Kardashian West has long been a vocal supporter of sentencing reform. In 2018, the mother-of-four visited the Trump White House to ask for clemency for Alice Marie Johnson, a Black woman who was unjustly sentenced to life in prison for a low-level nonviolent drug offense. After Johnson was granted clemency, she published a memoir that reviewers called “a moving, inspirational story that makes a powerful argument for sentencing reform.” Kardashian West wrote the book’s forward.

She has also publicly advocated for clemency for Cyntoia Brown, Momolu Stewart, Judith Negron, Crystal Munoz, and Tynice Hall.

“I’m raising four black kids in this society and our system is so discriminatory against Black and brown people. I want to do as much as I can to make their lives easier…” the CR cover star said in Issue 16. “I never knew much about the system until I started to dig in, and once I learned and saw how many things were wrong, I really couldn’t stop.”

So far, Kardashian West’s legal work has focused on helping individual people who have wronged by an unjust system. However, the current moment has encouraged conversations not just about prison reform, but also about how to redesign the legal system so that it no longer continues to target Black Americans.

It will be interesting to hear Kardashian West’s thoughts not just on specific cases, but also on prison reform and prison abolition—two separate but related movements—and on productive allyship.


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createdAt:Fri, 19 Jun 2020 20:24:05 +0000
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