Kim Kardashian opens her heart in stark detail about a marriage she now calls “toxic”

15 October 2025

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in Nov. 2019. ECP/GC Images

On the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Kim Kardashian sat with host Alex Cooper and peeled back the curtains on her split with Kanye West, revisiting episodes of marital turmoil she once held close. What had long been the subject of whispered speculation she now frames in her own words. She describes the ups and downs of life with someone whose behavior could swing between tenderness and chaos. She confesses that the emotional and financial uncertainty, the public jabs, and the unpredictability of his moods drained her sense of safety.

She says one moment that haunts her was coming home to find their lineup of Lamborghinis gone, given away during what she calls “episodes.” She would wake in the morning and not know what the day would hold, whether peace or discord, stability or fragility. She says she wrestled with the impulse to stay, to be supportive, to believe that love and loyalty could redeem instability. But over time she felt she was losing her ability to be present, to parent her four children the way she needed to, to protect her own well-being.

Kim does not shrink from naming mental health as central to the story. She recalls signs and warning lights she perhaps ignored, believing love could mend more than it could, though eventually she also saw that change must come from within. She says Kanye was unwilling to make what she judged necessary adjustments, and that made the effort of staying too steep. She says she felt unsafe not in a physical way always, but emotionally, financially, in the realm of certainty. She realized that she needed to save herself.

Still she rejects the notion that the marriage was a failure. She emphasizes that more than a decade together, four children, years of shared life cannot be dismissed. There is poignancy in how she frames the duration and depth of their bond as something of value even amid heartbreak. The relationship got to a point where it did more damage than good, but she holds her memories of love and partnership as part of the truth.

During the podcast she also reflects on her own nature in particular her habit of remembering the good more readily than the bad. She admits she is forgiving by nature, but at her current age she no longer tolerates toxicity. She says she has not encountered relationships with that kind of intensity since the divorce. The passage of time, she suggests, has sharpened her boundaries and clarified her priorities.

She speaks too of their children North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm as central in shaping her decision. She says the marriage began to harm her capacity to parent as she felt she should. She wanted to model a standard of dignity, clarity, and accountability for them. She wanted them to understand that walking away is not defeat but self-preservation. She says that once the toll on her mental health became undeniable, she understood that one of them would have to carry the burden, and she could no longer carry both.

Even now, her voice registers the ambivalence of anger, love, grief. She recounts that some of the more damaging moments included public attacks he made on her family, comments she never expected to absorb, hurtful salvos that eroded more than trust. The emotional landscape she maps is one of fragmentation: jolts between devotion and dread, between hope for the person she once knew and the person she had become in that life.

In addressing all this publicly she is also redefining narrative control. She is reframing what it means to break apart from someone when the fractures run deep. She is refusing the version of the story that would reduce everything to scandal, gossip, defeat. Instead she wants honesty, nuance, a reckoning not just with a marriage but with the self across crises.

Ahead of the premiere of The Kardashians season 7 and the launch of her legal drama All’s Fair, she speaks from a place both vulnerable and resolved. She is not trying to provoke pity or judgment, she says just clarity. She wants to be seen not as the party who lost but the one who chose. She wants the children, and the public, to see that strength sometimes lies in exit as much as in endurance.