NEW YORK, Jan 06 2017 – Naomi Campbell has revealed that she was the victim of a violent robbery in Paris – and likened her traumatic experience to the attack on Kim Kardashian West last fall.
In an appearance on Thursday’s Wendy Williams Show, where she opened up for the first time about the 2012 incident.
The topic came up when Williams was speaking with the 46-year-old supermodel about her friendship with Kardashian West — and photo the pair took in the City of Light just two days before West was tied up, gagged, held at gunpoint, and robbed of nearly $11 million worth of jewellery on October 3.
“I sympathize with her a lot…because in 2012, I was attacked in Paris,” Campbell said, to the shock of both Williams, 52, and the audience.
“They followed me from the airport,” she continued. “They attacked me — they opened my car door and said ‘Naomi Campbell, we’re going to kill you.”
Campbell was travelling by herself at the time, having just taken a plane from Switzerland to Paris where she was visiting friend and shoe designer Azzedine Alaia. “It was like one hour,” she said. “I didn’t call a security because I thought it was just a quick trip.”
She knew something was up the moment she arrived at the airport and went to get in her car. “I went to the car and it wasn’t my normal driver,” Campbell recounted. “Which is weird because he had the window rolled down. It was November and it was right before Thanksgiving, and all the windows were down — it was freezing cold in November. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is weird.”
On the way to Alaia’s home, Campbell said she wanted to stop at a pharmacy outside Alaia’s shop.
It was then that robbers opened the car doors, trying to steal her purse. Campbell fought back.
“Am I going to let this guy take my bag with all my passports, or am I going to fight for it?” she asked herself. “And my decision was, I’m not letting my bag go.”
“In the interim — you lose sight in a very split moment,” she continued. “I don’t know if I’d ever do [that] again in hindsight.”
Alaia rushed outside to help, Campbell said, “[He] saved me, basically.”
Looking back, Campbell believes the driver was in on the whole thing.
“I was in the car with blacked out windows,” she told Williams, explaining that he didn’t lock the door to help the robbers. “It’s a whole ring that’s been happening for a few years now. So I very much sympathize for [Kardashian West], and I felt for her right away. And I hated hearing these stories that it wasn’t true. It was absolutely true and it happened to me.”
Campbell said she kept her story out of the press and “on the down-low” because she wanted privacy. “I didn’t make it so public. I didn’t want it to be.”
She added that she and Kardashian West are not the only ones who have been robbed in the past. “It’s happened to a few other people — but it’s not for me to say, that are well-known also.”
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