- As Polish women strike over planned abortion ban
Kim Kardashian West was robbed of millions of dollars worth of jewelry while visiting Paris on Sunday night, according to a judicial source and reports.
A second source with knowledge of security at the private mansion where the reality TV star was staying told NBC News that she was tied up during the incident and that a wedding ring was among the valuables taken.
Kardashian West’s spokeswoman said that she was left “badly shaken but physically unharmed” after being held at gunpoint by two armed, masked men.
The culprits escaped with a ring worth about $4.5 million and a jewelry box containing other items worth $5.6 million, the judicial source said. The Associated Press also cited a Paris police official as confirming that account.
The judicial source told NBC News that five individuals dressed as police officers went to the building Sunday night.
An authoritative source with knowledge of the hotel’s security said an overnight watchman was on duty when he was overcome by armed men. They took the key to where Kardashian West was staying and ran around the building trying to find the correct apartment.
Once inside, the source said, the men tied her up and put her in the bathroom. The source added that the robbers seemed to have known that security was light on Sunday night, triggering speculation it may have been an inside job.
It’s unclear if the couple’s two children, 3-year-old daughter North and 10-month-old son Saint, were with Kardashian West at the time.
Kardashian West had traveled to France for Paris Fashion Week and attended the Givenchy show Sunday night.
On Monday morning, police were gathered outside the Hotel de Pourtales, which has been described as a “no address establishment” which offers luxurious and discreet apartment rentals to the rich and famous.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo condemned the incident on Twitter Monday, saying that Kardashian West “will always be welcome in Paris.”
She later released a statement stressing that such robberies are “very rare.”
Kardashian West left Paris Monday morning.
Her husband, Kanye West, abruptly walked off the stage during a New York concert when he learned of the news, leaving hundreds of fans bewildered and unhappy.
Paris has been a special place for Kardashian West and her husband. They spent the weekend there before marrying in Florence, Italy, in May 2014.
The incident, however, comes on top of a bad week for the star in the city. On Wednesday, a prankster lunged at Kardashian West as she was getting out of her car, causing her security guards to intervene.
West, 39, was performing his hit “Heartless” when he learned of Sunday’s robbery during the star-packed Meadows Music and Arts Festival at CitiField in Queens. He stopped, said he’d had a “family emergency” and walked off.
West had performed most of his biggest hits when he left, and the festival’s organizers, Founders Entertainment LLC, thanked him for “the great show he put on for fans to close out the inaugural Meadows Festival.”
But many in the crowd left unhappy. Shouts of “Of course!” “So Kanye!” and “I want my money back!” could be heard in the audience.
“The crowd just stood there in shock,” Mike Kravchenko, a 17-year-old from Long Island who captured the moment on cellphone video, told NBC News. “Most people didn’t believe it and thought it was an act.”
In the meantime, women wearing black clothes and waving black flags are demonstrating across Poland, boycotting their jobs and classes as part of a nationwide strike in protest against a new law that would in effect ban abortion.
Many men also took part in demonstrations on the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk and elsewhere across the largely Catholic nation.
Thousands of people also protested on Saturday in front of the parliament in Warsaw. Women were wearing black in a sign of mourning for the feared loss of reproductive rights; they have also warned that some women will die if the proposal passes as it stands now.
Poland already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with terminations legally permitted only when there is severe foetal abnormality, when there is a grave threat to the health of the mother, or if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.
But the new law would criminalise all terminations, with women punishable with up to five years in prison. Doctors found to have assisted with a termination would also be liable for prosecution and a prison term.
Critics say that even a woman who suffers a miscarriage could be under criminal suspicion, and that doctors might be put off conducting routine procedures on pregnant women for fear of being accused of facilitating a termination.
Although a ban has received public support from elements within the Catholic church and Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS), neither initiated the proposals. They were drafted by hardline conservative advocacy group Ordo Iuris and submitted by the Stop Abortion coalition as a “citizens’ initiative” – a petition considered by parliament once it has received more than 100,000 signatures.
While it was difficult to gauge strike participation in small towns and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative, participation in the cities appeared to be significant.
A large crowd gathered in central Warsaw and people were also out on the streets in other cities. Coffee shops were filled with groups of women dressed head to toe in black.
Agnieszka Krysztopolska, a 34-year-old banker, was sitting with several friends who were all boycotting work. “I have two children and it’s not like I am some kind of hardline feminist but I do not agree with somebody depriving me of the right to my own health or that of my children. I think this bill is just dangerous,” she said.
Nearby, 28-year-old Magdalena Gwozdz chatted with her 17-year-old sister, who was boycotting school. “This should be a woman’s choice and abortion should be available in case of rape or a damaged foetus,” Gwozdz said. “This is Europe and we are in the European Union.”
The private news broadcaster TVN24, with some of its own presenters in black, showed images of establishments joining the strike, including a restaurant in Wrocław that closed to let female employees participate and a museum in Krakow where none of the women showed up to work.
In Częstochowa, perhaps the most Catholic city in the overwhelmingly Catholic nation, the city hall reported that 60% of female workers had not turned up to work.
Pro-choice activists called for the strike, or “national absence campaign”, after the Polish parliament voted on 23 September for Stop Abortion’s proposals to be scrutinised by a parliamentary committee. Women were encouraged to take a day off work and domestic tasks and gather for meetings or demonstrations, to donate blood or do charity work.
Many Polish women say they are sick of deals being cut over their fundamental reproductive and human rights, which they argue threaten both their safety and their dignity.
“A lot of women and girls in this country have felt that they don’t have any power, that they are not equal, that they don’t have the right to an opinion,” said Magda Staroszczyk, a strike coordinator, over the weekend. “This is a chance for us to be seen, and to be heard.”
Organisers cite an assault on women’s reproductive rights that goes beyond Stop Abortion’s proposed ban. A separate, PiS-sponsored bill restricting IVF, which would make it illegal to freeze embryos and allow women to fertilise only one embryo at a time, was also passed to the parliamentary committee stage in September.
Monday’s protest was inspired by an all-out strike more than 40 years ago by the women of Iceland, when 90% of women refused to work, cook, or look after their children for a day in October 1975.
The intensity of the so-called “black protests” has proved tricky for PiS, which presents itself as the guardian of traditional values in a country beset by liberal notions of multiculturalism, relaxed social mores and restrictive political correctness, but which remains mindful of the risks of alienating mainstream public opinion.
The party’s leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has suggested that the government might accept a compromise whereby terminations carried out because of foetal abnormalities would be banned, but terminations of pregnancies as a result of rape or incest would still be permitted.
NBC with additional report from Guardian
