Keeping up with the exes.
Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian are speaking out about their volatile past relationship, his infidelity and drug use, and how she “enabled” him.
The former couple, who were married from 2009 to 2016, both appear in the new Netflix documentary, “Untold: The Death and Life of Lamar Odom,” to share their memories of their marriage and his near-fatal 2015 drug overdose in a Nevada brothel.
Odom, 46, exclusively tells Page Six that he is “grateful” for his time married to Khloe, 41, “but people and places in your life change.” These days, he says, “I’m just working on being my best self, and being present every day.”
On-screen in the doc, the former NBA player, says, “I had 12 strokes and six heart attacks,” recalling his 2015 ordeal following his overdose. “That’s not average s – t. I was dead for three days. I made it, though.”
Here are the biggest bombshells from the doc (now streaming).
Odom wanted to “better his future” though the marriage
Onscreen, Odom’s childhood friend Anthony “Pumpkin” Booker recalls attending Odom and Kardashian’s televised wedding in 2009.
At the time, Booker, claimed, Odom told him that, “The moves that he’s doing, he was doing it to try to better his future” because, the Kardashians “know people” and “have mad connections.”
In the doc, Odom recalls what he saw in Khloe: “I’m watching how she lives and their lifestyle. I’m like, ‘This is how I want to live.’”
Destiny, 28, Odom’s daughter with his childhood sweetheart Liza Morales, appears on-screen to say, “He did love Khloe … but, he had wanted to be on reality TV for a long time.”
His infidelity
Both Odom and Kardashian address how he cheated on her during their marriage. They’ve spoken about it before.
“What the f – k would make you think you marry this woman on TV and then go have affairs?” Odom says on-screen, seemingly scolding his past actions.
He recalls in the doc that one night when he was “high out of my f – king mind,” the unnamed woman he was cheating on Khloe with at the time got nervous, took his phone, and called Khloe.
Khloe recalls onscreen that she got a phone call from a woman who told her, “I’ve been f – ing your husband.” His mistress was freaked out by how “f – ked up” he was on drugs, Khloe says, and told her, “‘I’ve got to get off this ride, can you pick him up?’”
Khloe says she was an “enabler”
“I was looking for him in alleys, looking for him in motels,” Khloe says on-screen, adding that he would leave drug paraphernalia such as spoons and tinfoil around hotel rooms.
She says that she used to “go to hotel rooms to clean up after him” so that the housekeeping employees didn’t “sell a story” about his drug use.
“I was such an enabler without knowing I was an enabler,” she says in the doc, adding that she felt a “responsibility” to cover up her then-husband’s drug addiction to “protect him.”
Khloe “didn’t sleep for years” and “felt horrible about myself”
When she discovered the extent of his drug use, Khloe recalled that she was 24 at the time and “still trying to figure out my life.” She attributed her behaviour at the time to “youth.”
“I remember just keeping all these secrets, and feeling horrible about myself,” she says on-screen.
Musing over why she “enabled” him, Khloe says in the doc that he was her first love. She also knew that Odom had suffered trauma in his life — his dad was also a drug addict and left his family, Odom had also lost a baby son to SIDS — she said that his pasts experiences made her “rationalise” his behaviour. It made her want to “fix” him and “love him enough” to make him better.
“I was fighting every single day either to protect him, to not let him get caught, which sounds insane …. I didn’t sleep for years,” she says on-screen.
Khloe didn’t originally want to divorce him
The former couple originally signed divorce papers in July 2015.
At the time, it was part of an “intervention” that Khloe said she had been “advised” to do. She gave him the ultimatum that he needed to go to rehab, or they would get divorced. According to Khloe, Odom replied, “all I want is my passport and yeah, let’s get the f – ing divorce.”
After he said that, Khloe says, “I was looking around like, ‘I don’t want the divorce. You guys told me I had to say this!’” She didn’t specify if ‘you guys’ was the Kardashian family.
– This article originally appeared in Page Six and was reproduced with permission.