Kris Jenner has spent decades in the public eye as the architect of one of the most famous families in America, but in a recent conversation on Jay Shetty's podcast On Purpose, she pulled back the curtain on something far more personal than business strategy: how she managed to stay close, even domestically close, with the man she divorced more than three decades ago.
The revelation centers on her first husband, attorney Robert Kardashian, who Kris says had what she described as an open invitation to walk into her home whenever he wanted, long after their marriage had legally ended. She told Shetty that Robert knew he could come through the back door at any hour, and that he could count on dinner being ready at 6 p.m. There was no need to call ahead, no need to check if it was a good time. He was, in her words, simply always welcome.
That kind of arrangement is unusual by most divorce standards, where boundaries are drawn and former spouses often become polite strangers at best. But Kris explained that this level of comfort didn't happen overnight. She was candid about the fact that it took her a couple of years after the divorce to get to a place where she could extend that kind of unguarded welcome to Robert. Healing, she suggested, isn't instant, even when both parties want to move forward peacefully for the sake of their children.
Kris and Robert Kardashian married in 1978 and divorced in 1991, a split that came before Kris's marriage to Caitlyn Jenner, then known as Bruce Jenner. Robert and Kris had four children together: Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob Kardashian. Long before the family became a reality television phenomenon with Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Robert was already a fixture in the American cultural consciousness for a very different reason — his role as part of O.J. Simpson's defense team during the 1995 murder trial that captivated the nation.
What makes Kris's recent comments notable is how deliberately she framed the choice to keep Robert close as a parenting strategy rather than simply a personal preference. She explained on the podcast that she made a conscious decision early on not to speak badly about her exes in front of her children. In her view, that kind of ongoing criticism does real psychological and emotional damage to kids, who are already processing their own grief over their parents' separation, even when the adults involved have moved on.
That framing — divorce as a form of grief for children, regardless of how amicable the adults manage to be — is one Kris returned to more than once in the conversation. She pointed out that the fathers of her children are, by definition, also the fathers of her grandchildren, and that her feelings toward them didn't simply switch off because the romantic relationship had ended. Loyalty to family, in her telling, extends well past the terms of a marriage license.
According to Kris, that philosophy showed up in tangible ways throughout her children's early lives. Robert Kardashian was present for major family milestones long after the divorce, including Kendall and Kylie Jenner's first birthdays, even though those two daughters were from Kris's marriage to Caitlyn Jenner and not biologically his own. The Kardashian-Jenner children reportedly grew up calling him 'Uncle Robert,' a nickname that speaks to how thoroughly he remained woven into the family's day-to-day life rather than becoming a distant, occasional figure.
Kris also made clear that this wasn't a one-time policy she applied only to her own past relationships. She said she's carried the same approach forward with her daughters' exes as well, extending similar warmth and access to men who were once part of the family through relationships with Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie. Her reasoning, as she explained it, comes down to legacy: she wants her grandchildren to remember their families being treated with respect and warmth, not division.
It's a philosophy that stands in sharp contrast to how a lot of blended and post-divorce families operate, where former partners are often kept at arm's length, especially once new relationships and new households enter the picture. Kris's approach required not just her own emotional work, but buy-in from her children, from Robert, and later from the various partners who came in and out of her daughters' lives. That kind of sustained cooperation across a large, high-profile family is not easy to maintain, and Kris has acknowledged in other interviews over the years that keeping the peace within the family has required real effort, not just good intentions.
Robert Kardashian's story took a difficult turn in the early 2000s. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the summer of 2003, and passed away just two months later, in September 2003, at the age of 59. His death came relatively early in the Kardashian family's rise to mainstream fame — Keeping Up with the Kardashians wouldn't premiere until 2007 — meaning Robert never saw the full scale of the media empire his children would go on to build. Kim Kardashian has spoken publicly in the years since about how much she wishes her father could have witnessed her success, and about the void his absence left in major family moments.
Kris, for her part, went on to marry Caitlyn Jenner later in 1991, the same year her divorce from Robert was finalized. That marriage produced two more daughters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, expanding the blended family that would eventually become the center of one of the most-watched reality television franchises in history. Kris and Caitlyn's marriage lasted over two decades before their own split, which played out publicly as Caitlyn transitioned and the family adjusted to a new chapter.
Across both of her major relationships, Kris has consistently framed her post-divorce approach the same way: prioritize the children's emotional stability over any residual bitterness between the adults. That's a message she's repeated in various forms over the years, whether discussing Robert Kardashian, Caitlyn Jenner, or the string of relationships her daughters have navigated in the public eye, from Kim's marriages to Kourtney's long on-and-off relationship with Scott Disick, who himself has often been treated as a permanent extension of the family despite never marrying into it.
The Jay Shetty interview arrives at a moment when Kris Jenner, now in her seventies, has increasingly leaned into a role as something of an elder stateswoman on topics like family, resilience, and reinvention, subjects she's uniquely positioned to speak on given the decades she's spent building both a business empire and a sprawling blended family under constant public scrutiny. Her comments about Robert Kardashian's open access to her home aren't just a nostalgic anecdote — they function as a broader statement about the kind of family culture she says she tried to build on purpose, one rooted in forgiveness and continuity rather than resentment.
Whether or not every family could realistically replicate the specific dynamic Kris describes — an ex-husband with unrestricted access to the family home, welcomed at the dinner table for years after divorce — the underlying message she's offering is a more universal one about co-parenting: that former partners can choose to remain part of a shared family story, and that doing so can be a gift to the children caught in the middle of a split they didn't choose.