Kim Kardashian Poses With Jeffree Star Following Apology For Racist Comments

Kim Kardashian’s launch party for her eponymous beauty line KKW Beauty this week at her home in Los Angeles was quite the lavish affair. However, the internet took notice after the 36-year-old “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” star was pictured with YouTube personality Jeffree Star on the same day he took to the social media platform to apologize for making racist comments.

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Star shared a photo of himself with Kardashian — for whose KKW Beauty line Star made a makeup tutorial this week — at the KKW Beauty launch party at her Bel-Air home Tuesday.

“Hey @KimKardashian!” said writer Kimberly N. Foster ‏in response Wednesday evening in a tweet shared hundreds of times. “You look super cute, but I'm concerned because you have Black kids and you're posing with a racist.”

In a 15-minute video posted to YouTube Tuesday — the same day as the KKW Beauty event — Star addressed his 4.5 million subscribers about past racist commentary for which he’s been called out.

“This video is something I feel like I owe to my entire audience,” Star said in the video, which had been viewed more than 2 million times by Thursday. “Though the last ten years, I have lived my life through social media, which is really crazy to think about. It’s been a really long journey a little music on a little website to my career now. As I sit here, I realize that I have a bigger platform sometimes than I realize myself.”

Addressing the comments he made in past videos, Star said hearing them now makes him “sick to my stomach.”

“In these videos I say some really disgusting, vile, nasty and embarrassing things,” he said. “The past can never be erased. It is always going to be there. My past has been recorded, it’s been videoed, it’s been exploited all over the internet. I’m sitting here, and those videos were 12 years ago. I look at them and it makes me sick to my stomach because I don’t know who that person was. I know who I am today. I know exactly the person I am today, but I do not know who that person was.”

He continued, “The person that said those horrible, vile things, that person was depressed, that person was just angry at the world, that person felt like they were not accepted, that person was seeking attention. I was someone that loved to seek attention when I was younger. I loved the shock value. I loved fighting anger with anger, and I didn’t know any better. And does that make it okay? Absolutely not.”

Kardashian did some atoning of her own this week in an interview with the New York Times published Monday. Following accusations that she had altered promotional photos of herself to make her skin appear darker, which critics said was akin to wearing blackface, the star said she “learned” from the incident and quickly worked to make the necessary adjustments. She stated that she “would obviously never want to offend anyone.”

Read: Kim Kardashian Addresses Blackface Allegations In Latest Interview About KKW Beauty

“I used an amazing photographer and a team of people. I was really tan when we shot the images, and it might be that the contrast was off,” she said. “But I showed the image to many people, to many in the business. No one brought that to our attention. No one mentioned it.”

She added, “Of course, I have the utmost respect for why people might feel the way they did. But we made the necessary changes to that photo and the rest of the photos. We saw the problem, and we adapted and changed right away. Definitely I have learned from it.”