The investigators were immediately under pressure. The case was sensitive, and the image of Paris, already badly damaged by the wave of terrorist attacks the previous year, was at stake. They began by retrieving images from surveillance cameras near the hotel that showed some of the alleged thieves leaving by bicycle. Four days after the robbery, there was a break. Despite the gloves worn by the thieves, DNA was found on the rolls of tape used to tie up Kardashian and also on the cable used to restrain the concierge. This DNA was eventually traced back to a man called Pascal.
At the same time, investigators found several burner phones. They discovered that Pascal was in fact an alias used by Ait Khedache, whom they began to track. Within a few weeks, police realized that the owner of a bar Ait Khedache frequented was close to the brother of the driver that Kardashian regularly hired when she visited Paris.
The widening ring of suspects, unaware their phones were now tapped, talked about the heist among themselves. They expressed annoyance at not getting the money they expected from the robbery, and their loot was hard to unload. The police had a front-row seat for the gang’s activities. According to later reports, Ait Khedache put pressure on a certain Nez Râpé (“Rough Nose”), suspected of being the fence for the goods and entrusted with selling the jewels in Antwerp. But selling a ring like Kardashian’s is not easy. Generally, thieves recover only a very small fraction of a piece’s market value—10 to 15 percent once all the intermediaries have been paid.
Authorities made their first arrests in the case on January 9, 2017, three months after the robbery, taking 17 people into custody early in the morning. They were almost all repeat offenders: a Marais bistro owner, the limo driver, the fence. Of the 10 defendants who would eventually face charges, most were over 60 years old, and at first all of them denied any involvement with the crime. But two came under particular pressure from the police. First, Ait Khedache. At his home the police found 16,900 euros in his refrigerator. He claimed to be “able to explain” but then struggled to do so when the investigators told him that his DNA was found in Kardashian’s bedroom. Although he denied robbing her, he finally broke down and confessed to having played a small role in the affair.
The second was Abbas, Ait Khedache’s old friend, who was quicker to confess. The investigators found almost 60,000 euros in small bills at his son’s house, and his DNA was also at the hotel. Abbas says his role was merely to stay on the first floor of the Hôtel de Pourtalès and keep watch. What about the others? They all denied the evidence against them. Take Dubreucq, “Didier Blue Eyes,” for example. He is suspected of being the second hooded man to have entered the suite. But he insisted that he was the victim of a combination of circumstances, having merely been an acquaintance of Ait Khedache, whom he used to call Pascal. Even so, an individual on CCTV images bore a resemblance to him. And the police also said he had one of the burner phones. “I only have peace phones,” he joked in a book interview, playing off the French phrase for a burner phone, portable de guerre, or “war mobile.” Dubreucq presented himself as an innocent father.
Dubreucq spent nearly 11 months in pretrial detention, only to be released to receive chemotherapy for lung cancer. Abbas, after quadruple-bypass surgery and getting a new heart valve, spent 22 months in pretrial detention. Ait Khedache was the last to be released, in April 2020, due to the COVID pandemic. He returned to prison only a year later, after a police check unearthed the outstanding five-year sentence for drug trafficking. Abbas, Dubreucq, and Ait Khedache were all charged with a criminally organized robbery at gunpoint and sequestration and faced life imprisonment.
“My client will assume responsibility for his part in the crime,” said Gabriel Dumenil, Abbas’s lawyer, before the trial. According to Dumenil, Abbas couldn’t wait for the process to be over, though his client didn’t make it easy for himself. Abbas cowrote a 2021 book about the affair, J’ai séquestré Kim Kardashian (I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian). It was like shooting himself in the foot, confessing to more than he was accused of, and perhaps even more than he actually did. Was it driven by a sudden desire for fame or money? Or both? Perhaps Abbas felt he’d be seen as a hero, as some sort of Robin Hood. In a newspaper interview, he explained how he enjoyed favorable treatment in prison from other inmates. “Some of them would pat me on the back and congratulate me: ‘You did a good job, well done.’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, well, I ended up here with you, so I don’t see what the big deal is.’ ” Strangers began to recognize him on the street and asked for selfies. And then Abbas became disillusioned with it all. At the request of the hotel concierge’s lawyers, the copyright to his book was seized by the courts.
In June 2017, Ait Khedache wrote something of his own, a letter to Kardashian: “After witnessing your emotions and realizing the psychological damage I have inflicted on you, I decided to write, not in the hope you will forgive me but as a human who wishes to tell you how much I regret what I did, and how moved I was when I saw you in tears.”
Four months after the robbery, a French judge traveled to the US to question Kardashian. She said she had been transformed by the trauma and had become less materialistic after the robbery. “My perception of jewelry is that I don’t care about it like I used to, I don’t have the same feelings about it. In fact, I feel like it’s become a burden to be responsible for such expensive items. No object of sentimental value can compare with coming home to your children, your family.” On a Tuesday in May of this year, Kardashian arrived at the Paris courthouse in a cinched black dress designed by John Galliano and vertigo-inducing pumps. She accessorized with a necklace of gems around her neck and a dazzling ring. She was accompanied by her mother and five bodyguards with earpieces. It was the third week of the trial and a few yards away was Ait Khedache, now 69 but looking 15 years older, his arrival announced by the clanking of his cane. The dozens of reporters covering the proceedings watched as Kardashian testified that she had come to “let [her] truth be heard” about the night that “traumatized” her. “Paris is a place I love,” she began. “I used to walk down the street even in the middle of the night. I felt safe in this city. I could walk around, window-shop. I’d stop in little hotels for hot chocolate. It was magical. But when I came for Fashion Week during that trip, it changed everything.”
Over nearly five hours on the stand, Kardashian retold her story in painful detail—sometimes at a level not previously public. “I was sure they were going to shoot,” Kardashian said when recalling the assailant with the gun. “I was sure that I was going to be raped.” When asked by the judge if she feared for her life, she said, “I absolutely thought I was going to die.” Kardashian continued, “I started praying for my family, my mom, my sisters, and my best friends. Kourtney was about to come home. And she was going to find me dead on the bed. She would have to live with that image in her memory forever.” After the assailants had vanished, Kardashian tried to undo the ties around her hands by rubbing them against the bathroom sink. She succeeded and left to find her stylist Simone Harouche on the floor below.
Harouche had preceded Kardashian on the stand, testifying that she was asleep in her bedroom on the ground floor of the duplex when she was awakened by strange noises: “It was a sound I’d never heard coming from Kim. It was terror. She was pleading, ‘I have babies, and I need to live. Take everything. I need to live.’ ” Harouche hid in the shower; she heard screams.
Harouche managed to warn the Kardashians’ bodyguard and Kourtney, who had both left for the nightclub. A few minutes of hesitation followed. Eventually, Harouche heard Kardashian call her name. She ran out and saw Kardashian hopping down the stairs, her ankles still bound with tape. The stylist removed the ties before worrying: What if the assailants came back? For a while they considered jumping out of the first-floor window, before hiding on the terrace behind some bushes. The bodyguard finally arrived: “We told ourselves we could start breathing again.”
