Kim Kardashian’s Africa Trip With Kanye West Included a Terrifying Gunpoint Encounter, Former Producer Reveals

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Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian’s 2018 trip to Uganda with Kanye West included a scary moment in which the couple had a tense interaction with local police.

Jonathan Van Meter, author of Citizen Kim, a new authorized biography, said that this was the “point of no return” for Kardashian and West. The two married in 2014, but officially divorced in 2021. And for Farnaz Farjam, an executive producer on Keeping Up with the Kardashians  at the time, he “first realized how bad things were for the couple.”

“They were shooting at a remote location in Uganda when Kanye became paranoid and agitated. ‘He basically got the local police to believe that there were people trying to drug him and so they came and they had guns out. He had them raid everybody’s rooms,’ ” Farnaz told the author.

But as they raided the rooms, Van Meter said that “one of the policemen had a gun to Kim’s head.” She ultimately “ended up having to get a private jet and get my crew out of there,” and the producer eventually “forgave Kanye for the Africa fiasco ‘because he lives with bipolar disorder and he was in a manic place,’” Van Meter penned.

Kim Kardashian Details The ‘Big Burden’ Of Co-Parenting With Kanye West

Despite the couple’s rocky relationship, Kardashian admitted that she will always worry about West because the couple share four children: North, 13, Saint, 10, Chicago, 8, and Psalm, 7.

“I worry about him all day. That’s the father of my kids. I’ll never not worry about him,” Kardashian told the author. “And that’s a big burden of having kids with someone who you don’t necessarily get along with. My kids would never know that.”

She says that she has to forget “all the negative things that happened” in order to have a cordial relationship with West.

“It’s been pretty smooth for a while. I guess because we don’t talk that much. But when we see each other, we give each other a hug,” she added.

Citizen Kim Came Out on Tuesday, October 27

On Tuesday, October 27, Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created The Future hit the shelves. It took five years for this to come together, with Kardashian saying on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that she “read a copy and cried because I thought it was told so well in a way that I’ve never seen myself.”

In a review, Anna Wintour detailed that the book is “the kind of intelligent and incisive book that comes along when a great journalist finds his perfect subject. Irresistible.”

“Kim Kardashian is a self-made mogul, social media genius, fashion icon, and unlikely advocate for criminal justice reform. But she is also dismissed as a figure of scandal, spectacle, and reality television,” the book’s description reads, per Amazon. “Stylish, incisive, and deeply reported, Citizen Kim is a portrait of a woman we think we know. Born into an Armenian American family in Beverly Hills and marked early by proximity to tragedy and notoriety, Kim’s sense of ambition was evident from the start. She rose from Paris Hilton’s sidekick to tabloid fixation, reality-television star, and ultimately, the luminary of a new celebrity economy—an ascent that reveals how precisely she understood the culture she would come to create in her image.

“Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Kim and dozens of her closest friends, family members, and associates, the book is a symphonic portrait of a woman who comes sharply into focus as the major cultural currents of the past four decades—fame, technology, beauty, capital, family—take shape around her. Cutting through years of self-narration and relentless scrutiny, Jonathan Van Meter reveals a fascinating figure who has repeatedly transformed pressure and trauma into momentum. Equal parts cultural history, high-fashion chronicle, and intimate family study, Citizen Kim is a dazzling, whip-smart exploration of one of the most influential—and misunderstood—celebrities of our time, and the world that made her superstardom possible.”