it’s over for Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West.
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star filed for divorce on Friday, Yahoo Entertainment confirms, after nearly seven years of marriage. They share four children: North, 7, Saint, 5, Chicago, 3, and Psalm, 21 months. Kim has requested joint legal and physical custody of their kids, E! News reports. The couple’s split comes weeks after sources told Yahoo they were on the brink of divorce.
The news follows a tumultuous summer for the Wests.
When the 43-year-old rapper unsuccessfully ran for president, he shared deeply personal information about his family, including that Kim, 40, once contemplated getting an abortion. Kanye launched various Twitter tirades about his wife and the KarJenners. In one since-deleted post, he claimed that he’d been trying to divorce the reality star since Nov. 2018, when he believed she acted inappropriately with rapper Meek Mill. Kanye later apologized.
Kim ultimately spoke out after multiple upsetting messages, pleading for “compassion and empathy” in a rare statement about Kanye’s bipolar disorder. She offered support for her husband, adding, “Those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his attentions.”
The KKW Beauty mogul stuck by Kanye, despite reports in July claiming that “divorce had been in the process for several weeks.” The Wests reunited as a family in the months that followed with Kim sharing a loving post about her husband on Nov. 22.
But in December, multiple reports surfaced about Kim and Kanye’s “separate lives.”
“Kim has work and projects that are important to her, and Kanye has his,” a source told People. “Their lives don’t overlap much.”
Days later, a similar report emerged from E!, the home network of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, with an insider alleging, “They spend a lot of time apart.”
The Wests, dubbed “Kimye,” have been one of pop culture’s most talked about couples for eight years. They met in 2003, and while the rapper said it was love at first sight, they were friends for a while before their relationship turned romantic. For the reality star, it took marrying Kris Humphries (for 72 days) to understand her feelings for the musician.
“I think I had to go through that to figure out what I wanted. After my breakup, I was feeling really low and down and he said, ‘Just come to Paris and see my fashion show.’ He jokes that he put on this whole fashion show just to get a date with me. So I went there and I stayed with him, and that’s where we started dating,” Kardashian recalled in 2017. “I swear from the moment I landed, I fell madly in love with him and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, why didn’t I do this sooner?’ Like, this is what real life is like — love and fun and real support.”
The couple welcomed their first child in 2013 and wed one year later. The Yeezy designer said their love had nothing to do with money or popularity. “She’s my joy and she brought my new joy into the world,” he gushed. “And there’s no paparazzi and there’s no blog comment, there’s nothing that is gonna take that joy from me.”
Kim and Kanye weathered more storms than paparazzi and blog posts, though, including her robbery in Paris and his hospitalization, both in 2016. Kanye even rapped about how Kim stood by him amid mental health challenges in 2018.
This is the third divorce for Kardashian and first for West.
