OJ SIMPSON has finally addressed rumors that he’s Khloe Kardashian’s real father in a new interview.
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star has encountered speculation for years that she is not Robert Kardashian’s actual daughter.
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OJ has denied rumors that he’s Khloe Kardashian’s real fatherCredit: AP:Associated Press
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Khloe has faced the speculation for years as she looks much different than her siblingsCredit: Hulu
Now OJ, 75, has finally spoken out regarding the 38-year elephant in the room.
During an interview with Hollywood Unlocked, the former football player addressed the wild rumor that has circulated in the media for years.
“I always thought Kris was a cute girl. She was really nice, but you know I was dating supermodels,” he laughed.
The interviewer then asked OJ if he “knew the rumor,” that he was Khloe’s actual father, to which he replied: “The rumor ain’t true.”
“It’s not even nowhere close to being true.”
The interviewer pressed on: “Some people think you might be Khloe Kardashian’s real dad.”
But OJ hit back: “No, no, no I’m not.”
Hollywood Unlocked continued: “Cause Kim’s like 5’5, Kourtney’s like 5’3, and Khloe’s like 6’2.”
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The famous broadcaster replied: “Well I’ve seen the family say something about a cook or something but I don’t know.”
FAMOUS FAMILY
Kris Jenner shares her four eldest kids, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, and Rob with her late ex-husband Robert Kardashian.
The lawyer passed away in July 2003 after a short but difficult battle with esophageal cancer.
The momager shares her youngest daughters Kendall and Kylie with her ex-husband Caitlyn Jenner.
Khloe has faced years of rumors that she was not actually Robert’s daughter, due to her lighter features and taller frame.
But the Good American founder has constantly denied all speculation, and continued to memorialize her father through social media.
MISSING DAD
In February, Khloe shared never-before-seen photos and home videos from her teen years as a tribute to her late dad.
Khloe took to her Instagram Story on Tuesday to share a number of throwback photos and videos in honor of his February 22nd birthday.
The first slide captured Khloe posing with Robert and her siblings Kourtney, 43, Kim, 42, and Rob, 35.
The family members smiled for the camera as they dressed up for a special occasion.
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians alum wrote above the photo: “Happy Birthday Daddy.”
The next slide featured a home video of Robert outdoors as he tipped his purple baseball cap while naming each of his kids, as well as his then-wife Kris Jenner, 67.
The following slide was another group photo of Robert with his kids, which Khloe captioned: “I miss you.”
The mother-of-one’s Instagram Stories continued with a few solo shots of Robert that captured him posing outside with a dog as he stood in between two cars, as well as close-ups of him donning serious expressions.
Other photos showed the lawyer hugging Khloe as he held a football and carrying a young Rob on his shoulders.
SHORT-LIVED SUCCESS
Before his family skyrocketed to fame due to KUWTK, Robert was best known for working as a successful lawyer.
The American attorney and businessman shot to fame as he stood by his pal and American football star OJ Simpson during his 1995 murder trial.
Robert was married to Kris from 1978-1991, while he went on to marry Jan Ashley and Ellen Pierson.
He died just eight weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 59.
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Robert Kardashian was a successful lawyer in Los AngelesCredit: Instagram
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Fans have always questioned Khloe’s parentage as she looks nothing like her dad
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Robert passed away in the summer of 2003Credit: Splash News
US aid to Ukraine could be in jeopardy if Republicans win the House in the midterms.
Several GOP lawmakers and candidates have signaled they would support reducing or cutting off Ukraine aid.
“Ukraine unfortunately has been hijacked sometimes in domestic politics. Now and then that happens,” a Zelenskyy advisor told Insider.
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In a phone call with Ukraine’s president this month, US President Joe Biden pledged continued solidarity with Ukraine as it battles Russia’s military invasion and illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory.
But that level of support could be in jeopardy if the GOP gains control of the House of Representatives in this year’s midterm elections.
The warning signs have been building for months.
In April, 10 House Republicans voted against a bill allowing the Biden administration to more easily lend military equipment to Ukraine. The following month, 57 House Republicans voted “no” on a nearly $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. Both measures ultimately passed the chamber.
“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who’s favored to become House Speaker if the GOP retakes the chamber, recently told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”
Ukraine has repeatedly defied expectations since Russia launched its unprovoked invasion, delivering a blow to the Russian military’s prestige. With the help of Western aid and at a massive personal cost, Ukrainian forces prevented Russia from seizing Kyiv in the early days of the war and more recently launched a counteroffensive that’s shown major signs of success.
But a far-right faction of the GOP has increasingly pushed against continued assistance to Ukraine, saying the billions the US has provided to Kyiv is too costly and not worth the risk of sparking a wider conflict with Russia.
In this Sept. 25, 2019 file photo President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File
A remarkable shift
The GOP’s gradual shift away from Ukraine and toward Russia has been years in the making and hit a pivotal point during Donald Trump’s presidency.
In addition to peddling the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election, Trump was impeached in 2019 for withholding hundreds of millions in vital aid to Ukraine as it fought a war against Kremlin-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region.
While withholding the aid, Trump and his allies pressured Zelenskyy, a political neophyte who won the 2019 election in a landslide victory, to launch an investigation targeting the Bidens ahead of the 2020 US election.
Foreign policy experts said Trump’s actions — dangling security assistance in exchange for political favors — were a threat to the US’s national security and bipartisan support for Ukraine. But the vast majority of congressional Republicans rallied to Trump’s defense, and ultimately, just one Senate Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to convict the former president over his actions.
In the years since, Trump has continued to take a controversial stance on Ukraine, praising Putin’s justifications for invading as “genius” and “savvy.” The former president has often lauded the Russian leader, going out of his way to avoid criticizing Putin amid a historically contentious period in US-Russia relations.
Hostility toward Ukraine doesn’t just come from the top of the GOP. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, many prominent right-wing politicians and media figures have moved in lockstep with the Kremlin, creating a feedback loop where each side amplifies and recycles the other’s propaganda.
On Fox News, for instance, the far-right host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly echoed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which originated in Moscow before taking root in the US, suggesting that Ukraine houses US-funded bioweapons labs.
Russian state-sponsored media outlets in turn frequently feature Carlson’s segments, and in March, Mother Jones reported that the Russian government instructed state media that it was “essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson” to spread negative information about Ukraine, the US, and NATO.
“When we see Fox News commentators, from our perspective, promote isolationist positions — that looks like support for Russia,” Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, recently told NPR.
Some GOP opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine is tied to Trump’s “America First” policy vis-a-vis foreign affairs. Trump embraced a non-interventionist stance and was often critical of US spending abroad, particularly when it came to NATO and European security.
Congressional Republicans like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have echoed these sentiments in their criticism of US assistance to Ukraine.
It’s a remarkable shift for the Republican Party, which for years touted a hawkish position on foreign policy, especially as it related to leading adversaries like Russia. But under Trump’s stewardship, the party has become increasingly more isolationist, and its growing opposition to aiding Ukraine is the latest and clearest sign of that.
Biden, meanwhile, has made the case that supporting Ukraine is part of a wider fight between democracy and autocracy. But a growing number of Republicans say sending aid to Kyiv should not be prioritized in Washington amid concerns over inflation and a potential recession.
“When people are seeing a 13% increase in grocery prices; energy, utility bills doubling … if you’re a border community and you’re being overrun by migrants and fentanyl, Ukraine is the furthest thing from your mind,” GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong told Axios.
Democrats are more optimistic about retaining the Senate, but according to forecaster FiveThirtyEight, their chances have gone down in recent weeks based on polling in four key contests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina.
And in Ohio, GOP Senate candidate JD Vance has made it clear that he would vote against sending more aid to Ukraine, saying in September that “we’ve got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually. We cannot fund a long-term military conflict that I think ultimately has diminishing returns for our own country.”
‘The cards have been dealt’
Ukrainian troops fire with surface-to-surface rockets MLRS towards Russian positions at a front line in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on June 7, 2022.
Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
There are some in Kyiv who believe that US support to Ukraine will continue regardless of which party controls Congress.
“Ukraine unfortunately has been hijacked sometimes in domestic politics. Now and then that happens,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, an advisor to Zelenskyy who previously served as Ukraine’s economic minister, told Insider. “We try our best to stay away from this. We would like to stay away from this.”
“Despite all that rhetoric, the support has always been bipartisan,” Mylovanov said, adding that the amount of assistance Ukraine needs is a small fraction of the US GDP. “In terms of what it means in the budget — it means nothing. It’s not trillions of dollars,” he said.
The US has provided over $20 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. The Biden administration has sent Ukraine $18.2 billion in military aid, including roughly $17.6 billion since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in late February.
Other Western countries have provided important assistance to Ukraine, but the US has contributed the most of any individual country so far.
Weapons the US sent, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), have turned the tables on Russia by blunting its previous advantages in armored vehicles and artillery. If US aid to Kyiv suddenly dried up, it would likely curtail Ukraine’s ability to oust sizable Russian columns from dug-in positions.
Trump, meanwhile, called for a negotiated settlement to the war during a rally earlier this month. “We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War III,” he said at the time.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in negotiating, as evidenced by the drastic steps he’s taken in recent weeks. Beyond the illegal annexations, Putin announced a partial military mobilization — calling up hundreds of thousands of men — and imposed martial law in the regions Moscow claims are now part of Russia but does not fully control.
Russia has also ramped up missile and drone attacks against civilian areas while destroying key infrastructure across Ukraine.
But Mylovanov, the former economic minister who is also the president at the Kyiv School of Economics, said that while Russia wants Ukraine to surrender, the “Ukrainian people will not have it.”
“People think that what happens in Kyiv is decided either in Moscow or Washington or Brussels, or maybe Beijing. It is not, it’s decided in Ukraine,” Mylovanov said.
“The cards have been dealt,” he added, and it’s up to the US if it wants to be at the table.
Israel and Lebanon have reached a historic agreement, leaders on each side said separately on Tuesday, settling a years-long maritime border dispute involving major oil and gas fields in the Mediterranean.
The United States has been trying to broker a deal between the neighboring countries over the 860-square-kilometer (332-square-mile) area of the sea that has been under dispute for years.
It includes the Karish oil and gas field and a region known as the Qanaa prospect, which are expected to fall into Israeli and Lebanese waters respectively under the deal. Israel has said it would begin extracting oil and gas from Karish and exporting it to Europe imminently.
“The final version of the offer is satisfactory to Lebanon and meets its demands and preserved Lebanon’s rights of this natural wealth,” Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun said in a statement hours after receiving Israel’s final offer through US mediator Amos Hochstein.
Aoun said he hopes the agreement, which is yet to be signed, will be announced “as soon as possible.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said: “This is an historic achievement that will strengthen Israel’s security, inject billions into Israel’s economy, and ensure the stability of our northern border.”
The draft agreement meets all the security and economic principles laid out by Israel, Lapid said.
The Israeli prime minister will convene the security cabinet on Wednesday followed by a special meeting of the government, he said.
Lebanese officials have said the deal does not mean any “treaty” will be signed with Israel and this agreement is not a step toward normalization of relations between the two countries, which are technically at war.
Earlier Tuesday, Lebanese negotiator and deputy parliament speaker Elias Bou Saab told CNN that “Lebanon felt that [the deal] takes into consideration all of Lebanon’s requirements and we believe the other side should feel the same.”
Meanwhile, Israeli chief negotiator Eyal Hulata said: “All our demands were met, the changes that we asked for were corrected. We protected Israel’s security interests and are on our way to an historic agreement.”
On Tuesday, Lebanese Energy Minister Walid Fayyad also said the French energy company Total, which owns the contract to explore Lebanese waters, would start working on the Qanaa prospect “immediately.”
Talks gained momentum after London-based oil and gas exploration company Energean arrived in June to begin development of the Karish field on Israel’s behalf. Although the Energean ship is well south of the disputed area, part of the field is in an area Lebanon had claimed.
Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite milita, had threatened Energean’s gas rig if they started producing gas before a deal had been struck.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah declined to comment when contacted by CNN, but the Iran-backed armed group has previously said it would abide by any agreement signed by the Lebanese government.
The historic agreement does not affect land borders, but it is likely to ease security and economic tensions for both nations.
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Thursday that an agreement “will circumvent us from a definite war in the region.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Qatar on Wednesday in a sign of improving relations between the two Gulf kingdoms years after he helped impose a blockade of the tiny but hugely rich nation.
The visit, which follows a declaration in January by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf countries to ease the yearslong rift, is a big climbdown for Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, who spearheaded the effort to isolate Qatar, accusing it of supporting extremist groups in the region.
“It shows to a large extent the crisis amongst the Gulf states has more or less been addressed,” said Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London.
The office of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, tweeted that he would meet with the crown prince Wednesday evening in Doha.
After a decade of confrontation no one country, or group of countries, has emerged as a winner in the Gulf and they now face similar economic challenges such as the decarbonization of the global economy and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, said offering an explanation for the thaw in relations.
The crown prince’s visit to Qatar and tour of the Gulf also speak to a Saudi effort to position him as a regional leader and signal that while he is still a persona non grata in much of the West, that is not the case in the Gulf, Coates Ulrichsen said.
“The Saudis are trying to portray MBS as someone quite different from the image that he generated for himself in the Trump years,” he added, referring to the crown prince by his initials. “They’re showing someone who can work with others, someone who eventually will be king and will be capable of behaving as a king should.”
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates cut diplomatic, trade and travel ties with Qatar in 2017, separating families and businesses and shattering Gulf unity. The four countries alleged that the Qatari government supported groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, and accused it of close relations with the regional foe, Iran.
The embargo complicated American foreign policy in the Gulf as it frayed ties between important U.S. allies and security partners.
Qatar has deftly expanded its political influence despite its small size, which frustrated the traditional regional dominance of Saudi Arabia. Qatar is home to a major U.S. military base, it hosted U.S.-Taliban talks,and in recent months played an outsize role in American efforts to evacuate tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan.
The Saudi crown prince’s visit is part of a wider tour of Gulf Cooperation Council member states, also including Oman, Bahrain, UAE and Kuwait.
The tour has already turned out to be lucrative as Omani and Saudi firms signed 13 memoranda of understanding valued at $30 billion and comes ahead of the annual summit of the six-nation council this month, according to Reuters.
Qatar’s emir has already visited Saudi Arabia since the agreement to thaw relations was reached in the Saudi desert city of Al-Ula in January.
This time, however, it is the crown prince, widely seen as the power behind the Saudi throne, who will be the guest, a symbolic difference in a region where hosting is an indication that you approve of your guest, said Michael Stephens, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.
“This marks a very important step in ending the tensions once and for all,” he said.
The crown prince’s tour comes after French President Emmanuel Macron became the first major Western leader to visit Riyadh since the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
In February, the Biden administration released an intelligence report that concludes that the crown prince approved the gruesome killing. The crown prince has denied any involvement.
Saphora Smith is a London-based reporter for NBC News Digital.
