Influencers inspired by the Kardashian origin story seem to have drawn the wrong lessons from it.
We know the story well: Kim Kardashian got famous off a sex tape. She was a twentysomething Los Angeles socialite and aspiring celebrity, the daughter of one of O. J. Simpson’s defense attorneys, gallivanting around town with her pal Paris Hilton and befriending tabloid reporters, hoping they’d feature her in their pages. (One former editor at In Touch Weekly said that Kardashian was a “mousy, dull girl” in desperate search of fame-inducing stunts; her lawyer has denied the claim that she ever planted or manufactured stories.) She finally rose to national notoriety in 2007, when a homespun pornographic video featuring her and her ex-boyfriend, the R. & B. singer Ray J, appeared online, presciently titled “Kim Kardashian, Superstar.” But the attention that she so anxiously coveted came at a cost. Like Hilton before her, whose own sex tape leaked in the early two-thousands, Kardashian became an object of public obsession and derision, seen less as a celebrity than as a porn star. She had no discernible skills to distract from the obviousness of her sex; she could neither sing nor dance nor act. She turned to reality television, launching what the E! network marketed as a “non-scripted family sitcom” called “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” which became one of the defining television shows of the twenty-first century.
From one vantage, Kardashian’s path to global superstardom was borne by a perfect storm of time, place, person, and opportunity—a convergence of the smartphone, social media, reality TV, and the changing conception of what constitutes a celebrity. The persistent criticism that Kardashian was simply famous for being famous—or, as the scholar Minette Hillyer once said of Hilton, a person whose “brand rides on her license to simply be in the public eye, to be in her body, to be visible”—misunderstood celebrity to be a purely meritocratic enterprise, which has never been the case, and is arguably less so today than ever. In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that celebrities “often seem to have celebrity and nothing else,” that they were not “celebrated because they occupy positions of prestige” but “occupy positions of prestige because they are celebrated.” If Kardashian, in those early days, was celebrated for anything, it was her body and her beauty—the lauded business acumen came later—which offered a maligned and narrow prestige that she strained to expand. (As she told Oprah Winfrey, in 2012, “I had to work ten times harder to get people to see the real me.”)
“She gonna be bigger than Kim K.!” the twenty-four-year-old Julian Newman said of his sister, Jaden, in a recent YouTube video. He sat behind the wheel of his car, suppressing a grin. Julian and Jaden, who is about two years his junior, are both former child basketball prodigies. Julian first went viral when he was a four-foot-something fifth grader performing acrobatic feats of ballhandling against high-school-age opponents. Some of his highlight compilations and training videos received tens of millions of views. The Times profiled him; both siblings appeared on “Good Morning America.” Julian told the show’s hosts that he would be the best player ever to compete in the N.B.A., and Jaden said that she’d be the first female. Their father, Jamie, always seemed to be around, smiling and shouting and stomping his feet. “They are the next Cheryl and Reggie Miller,” he told the Times.
As my colleague Jay Caspian Kang wrote in a piece last year detailing the hyper-professionalization of youth basketball, the Newmans have become the canonical cautionary tale for young athletes hoping to build and monetize their brands before they hit puberty, let alone become adults. Julian never grew taller than five feet seven and reportedly didn’t receive any Division I college scholarships; Jaden averaged less than one point per game across three seasons for California State University, Los Angeles, a Division II program. Having developed a taste for the limelight, however, the Newman family has tried to remain relevant by participating in any number of attention-grabbing stunts, with Julian as the eager face of the endeavors: a family-wide podcast, a boxing exhibition match, an ill-fated rap career. Jaden, meanwhile, has attempted to refashion herself as an influencer and a model; she opened an account on Fanfix, an OnlyFans competitor, where she says she posts modestly suggestive content aligned with the platform’s “safe-for-work” policy. Last month, however, her Snapchat account was allegedly hacked, and an explicit video of Jaden, which the Newmans have referred to as a sex tape, began circulating online.
If the leak was, in fact, malicious—an act of revenge porn, which is a federal crime—then the Newman family’s reaction hasn’t quite matched the gravity of the situation. Jaden and her brother went on the “No Jumper” podcast, hosted by the adult-film performer and media personality Adam22, where she explained that, when she first learned of the leak, she was “fucked up in the head.” But then she described coming to a realization: “It’s already out—there’s nothing you can do about it, so at this point you just got to capitalize off of it.” In the same interview, Julian framed his sister’s exposure as almost inevitable; he revealed that he’d been encouraging her to launch an OnlyFans account since she’d turned eighteen. On “Pillow Talk,” a podcast that frequently features porn performers and social-media stars, the siblings, along with their father, dismissed the leak as overblown, insignificant. “If you’re not having sex as an adult, then I don’t know what you got going on in life,” Jamie said, wearing aviator sunglasses and a dark-green jumpsuit. In one of their most notable media appearances, the Newman family joined a live stream hosted by the popular streamer N3on, in which Jamie joked about the streamer having a threesome with his daughter and asked his son if he’d watched his sister’s sex tape.
Despite her brother’s overtures, Jaden Newman is unlikely to become the next Kim Kardashian—and her father is certainly no Kris Jenner. There’s no mainstream crossover appeal for incest-baiting former child stars hungry to recapture the haloed attention that they once so innocently absorbed. The Newmans must instead enter the hellscape of clip-farming interview shows and boundary-pushing live streams, hoping to drum up whatever virality they can from this particular incident before pivoting to the next stunt, then the next. Attempting to capitalize on a sex tape might seem like a bridge too far, but for the Newmans, the move is arguably low-risk and high-reward; as pornographic and adult content have become more seamlessly integrated into the fame-making infrastructure of social media, it’s no longer life-ending to have your intimate moments leaked to the masses.
Part of what makes the celebrity sex tape such a resilient cultural phenomenon, though, is its inherent illicitness. It is a homemade and secret thing gone public. It is a twenty-four-year-old Rob Lowe, in an Atlanta hotel room, shooting a threesome with two women, one of whom is too young to legally appear in such a recording. It is leaked footage of Chuck Berry peeing on women. It is an electrician breaking into Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s home and stealing a safe that contains a sex tape they made on their honeymoon. It’s “1 Night in Paris”; it’s “Kim Kardashian, Superstar.” It is the ultimate tabloid scandal: a grainy, unvarnished glimpse into the bedrooms of those we read about in magazines and see on screens. But, for the figures on the other end of the camera, the violation is often described as torturous. Anderson said that the stress caused by her sex tape’s leak affected her pregnancy. Lowe said the ordeal pushed him to sobriety. “It was like being raped,” Hilton said, of her sex tape being leaked, in a 2018 documentary. Kardashian told Oprah that she regretted the release of her sex tape not because she was ashamed of having sex but because she feared that the viewing public would now permanently perceive her through the lens of her private promiscuity. That it helped boost her career is undeniable but ultimately ancillary to her enduring success—her celebrity, in some ways, has grown in spite of the leak. Her remorse was key in complicating her public persona, in deepening her perceived humanity. What the Newmans do not seem to understand is that, once a sex tape is actively promoted and bragged about, it is no longer a sex tape; it is simply pornography. ♦
