Not everyone was a fan of Kim Kardashian West’s Saturday Night Live performance this weekend. Tanya Brown, sister of the late Nicole Brown Simpson, told TMZ that she believes Kim’s jokes about her deceased sister’s former husband were “in poor taste.”
During her opening monologue, Kardashian joked that her father, defense attorney Robert Kardashian, introduced her to her first Black person. “Want to take a stab in the dark at who it was?” she joked—a reference to Robert’s client O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend in 1995. “It’s sort of weird to remember the first Black person you met, but O.J does leave a mark. Or several. Or none at all. I still don’t know,” she continued, referring to the ambiguity of the case. (Two years later, in a civil trial, Simpson was found liable for the deaths of Nicole and Goldman and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages.)
Per TMZ, Tanya Brown believes that the jokes were “beyond inappropriate and insensitive,” and thinks that Kardashian should have pushed back or simply refused to do some of the material. Kim’s mother, Kris Jenner, was a close friend of Nicole Brown Simpson—close enough that she gave her daughter Kendall Jenner the middle name “Nicole” in her honor—and also appeared in the episode multiple times, seemingly co-signing the material in the monologue. Brown reportedly told TMZ that it was shocking to hear a crowd laugh at jokes pertaining to O.J. Simpson and her slain sister, and is now questioning whether the Kardashian family truly cared for Nicole.
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