Keeping up with the exes.
Lamar Odom and Khloé 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.”
Onscreen in the doc, the former NBA player, says, “I had 12 strokes and 6 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 onscreen 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.
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 onscreen, 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 behavior at the time to “youth.”
“I remember just keeping all these secrets, and feeling horrible about myself,” she says onscreen.
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 “rationalize” his behavior. 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 onscreen.
Khloe says she had to “pump his stomach”
In Dec. of 2011, Odom was traded from the Los Angeles Lakers to the Dallas Mavericks. At the time, he was hurt and shocked to feel rejected by the Lakers, and turned to drugs.
“The drug use that transpired from the Dallas trade was monstrous…I had never seen so many drugs and such a dark aura around us,” Khloe says, adding that when they got to Dallas, there was an incident when he was doing drugs “locked in a hotel bathroom for maybe four days.”
In June of 2012, he was moved to the LA Clippers. Khloe recalls onscreen that when the Clippers season ended, he “did crazy drugs… He overdosed a few times, I had to pump his stomach.”
Khloe didn’t originally want to divorce him
The former couple originally signed divorce papers in July of 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.
Before she learned about his overdose, Khloe dreamed he was dead
On Oct. 13, 2015, Odom was hospitalized after overdosing at the Nevada brothel, Love Ranch. He was subsequently put on life support and in a coma. The night before she found out about it, Khloe recalled that she had been doing a magazine photo shoot and she “had a dream about Lamar that he was dead.”
After her photo shoot, she saw that her sister Kim had called her three times.
“I get in the car, I call [Kim] she’s like ‘Lamar overdosed, he’s in Vegas’ and I just remember screaming,’” she recalls.
Odom’s father allegedly tried to take him off life support
Odom’s father, Joe, was a heroin addict who left the family when Odom was young. Joe was at the hospital when Khloe rushed to see Lamar, she says.
“I assume he thought he’s the beneficiary to Lamar. Joe said, ‘Don’t put him on life support, turn the machines off.’ I remember walking in…like ‘sorry Joe, I’m still his wife. What do you need?’” Khloe recalls onscreen.
At the time, Khloe and Odom had signed divorce papers, but she paused the proceedings during his hospitalization and recovery.
She recalled that Odom’s father asked her for a pair of Nike shoes, $100, and a hotel room for the night. After she gave him those items, Joe “left and never came back.”
Khloe adds, “I trusted myself more than I trusted anyone in his circle.”
Kobe Bryant helped Khloe decide to save Odom’s life
Odom’s former Lakers teammate and friend, Bryant (who died at 41 in a 2020 helicopter crash), came to visit when Odom was hospitalized. Khloe recalls that Odom had brain damage and “his lungs collapsed.”
Doctors told her that they needed to give him risky surgery that might work, or “he might die on the table.”
She recalls, “Kobe Bryant was there. And he helped me make the decision of doing the surgery. We got his lungs to work, and he didn’t die, but he fell into a coma.”
Chaos in the hospital
Odom was hospitalized for around four months following his overdose. Khloe recalls that in the beginning, when people came in to visit, “I found out that three of them were drug dealers that were wanting to collect money, rummaging through his personal bags.”
Following that incident, she decided to go on “lockdown,” and said that she needed to authorize any visitors.
Khloe says she “punched him in his face”
When Odom was discharged from the hospital in 2015, he could speak a little but couldn’t shower on his own.
“We rented a home for him…I had a caretaker, I had a chef, and we were goning to rehabilitate him.”
Her plan fell apart when she visited him one day and caught Odom in the bedroom of the house she was renting for him, “sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking crack.”
“I just punched him in his face,” she says onscreen.
“I just put my life on hold to f–ng take care of you,” she angrily recalled. “He was better than I knew. He was playing me, so I could continue this lifestyle for him.”
After punching him, she told him that he had a few days to vacate the house. She recalls telling him, “I’m done, I’m not paying for a thing and I never want to speak to you again.”
“Untold: The Death and Life of Lamar Odom,” is now streaming on Netflix.
