Khloé Kardashian says she turned into a psychopath when she caught then-husband Lamar Odom cheating on her with another woman in a motel in downtown L.A.
It was 3 a.m. when she found them, she said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast Wednesday. That night she had seen people talking on Twitter about seeing Odom, then scoured the #LamarOdom hashtag to get clues to his location. When he asked her later how she found him, she mentioned that he was 7 feet tall and a famous member of the Los Angeles Lakers. Duh.
“Everyone knows who you are. Like, you’re very identifiable,” Kardashian, who was 26 at the time of the incident, said on the podcast.
At the motel — which was apparently not exactly the Four Seasons — she asked the person at the front desk which room Odom was in, got an answer and headed in that direction.
“I saw in the window that him and this girl were — they were either naked or she was in lingerie, something like that,” she said. “I knocked on the door, they answered it for some reason and I just started going ballistic.”
The next day she went to a cowboy-themed birthday party for sister Kourtney’s daughter, Penelope.
“My knuckles were all bloody and gross and I just had bandannas wrapped around — I was on theme,” Kardashian said. “And I acted as if nothing ever happened and I don’t think I ever said a thing.”
Kardashian didn’t share details of what “going ballistic” entailed, but it’s probably a safe bet she didn’t get bloody knuckles from knocking on the motel-room door. She said Odom seemed to be stunned that she managed to find him.
“He could not understand how I knew where he was and I was like, ‘I don’t give a s—, I’m not telling anybody anything. And why are you in a motel in downtown L.A. at 3 in the morning?’”
Of course, that marriage ended in divorce, though it wasn’t finalized until after Odom recovered from overdosing at a brothel in Nevada in 2015. L.A. County’s slow court system meant the divorce papers were waiting to be signed by a judge when Odom got in trouble. They were still married and he was covered by her health insurance, which he needed as he rehabbed from the 12 strokes and six heart attacks he had while comatose. They called off their divorce temporarily, then split permanently the next year.
“When you force a woman to go crazy, it’s like, what did you do?” podcast host Alex Cooper said right before Kardashian shared that 3 a.m. hotel story.
“That’s what I hate,” Kardashian said. “It’s like, do not act like you did not put me in this position and you did not make me be this psychopath. But I think that’s something I need to think is a red flag in a man, when they create the psychopath in me.”
You think you should consider that a red flag? Well OK then.
“It’s so true,” Cooper replied. “But it doesn’t mean we can’t look back with fond memories.”
They also discussed it being “freeing” when they finally rid themselves of their cheating significant others. Yup, Cooper had a cheating boyfriend too. Via an old iPad, Cooper got access to his iCloud and became so obsessed with what she found that a friend pretty much had to pry the iPad out of her cold, dead hands.
“It’s an obsession and an addiction and the best thing is when you’re free of that,” a sympathetic Kardashian said. “And I pray I’m never back there again.”
After Odom, Kardashian started a relationship with another basketball player, Tristan Thompson, and had daughter True Thompson. When she was nine months pregnant, in 2018, Kardashian found out that he too had been cheating on her. A year after that, in 2019, she went a little ballistic once again when it was rumored that her sister Kylie Jenner’s friend Jordyn Woods was connecting with Thompson — a rumor Woods denied. Apparently Thompson proposed to Kardashian that year, but she turned him down and kept the proposal a secret.
Kardashian and Thompson’s relationship was over, but also not really over, opening the reality star up to a lot of public criticism. They gave their relationship another try in 2020, went house shopping and discussed having another baby together via surrogate. Son Tatum Thompson came a couple of years later, after Thompson fathered a kid with another woman and after Kardashian finally decided she was done with the NBA star as a partner.
She said on the podcast that the second time around with Thompson, she could never “get back there” with regard to trusting him and feeling safe. If she hadn’t had True, Kardashian said, she never would have gotten back together with him after he cheated the first time.
That said, she and the now-Cleveland Cavalier are friends and co-parent their kids.
“I think the worst part of that experience was how much I let down my younger sisters,” Kardashian said on the podcast, “’cause I remember they were like, ‘He’s gonna do this again. Don’t stay with him.’ I don’t know exactly what was said, but I just remember sort of the disappointment in them.”
“I still feel really horrible about that.”