Kim Kardashian Is Being Sued Over Tables
Kim Kardashian has been on a home decor kick over the last couple of years. Last week, she tried to decorate the court at a Lakers game with her $40,000 Hermès bag. In January, she gave fans a sneak peek into her monocolored SKKN offices, where she displayed a mannequin with her custom measurements and 3-D models of her brain and her plane. And for Christmas last year, she spruced up her bathtub by filling it with brown water — like hot chocolate! But if you, like Kimberly, have “gotten really into furniture lately,” you might want to double check your product knowledge, or things, as they did for Kimberly, might get a little litigious.
In a since-deleted 2022 video tour of her 40,000-square-foot SKKN office space — not to be confused with the 2024 SKKN tour of the same nature — the woman who would like us all to get our “fucking ass[es] up and work” flitted throughout a sea of beige while announcing that her “Donald Judd tables are really amazing and totally blend in with the seats.” The late artist was celebrated for his elegant minimalism, so it makes sense that the arbiter of thoughtless monochrome spaces might invoke Judd’s work. All that might be fine and dandy, except that on Wednesday, the Judd Foundation — which oversees the artist’s legacy — sued Kardashian, alleging that she’d made false claims and has never owned Donald Judd tables.
According to the New York Times, the lawsuit names both Kardashian and the West Hollywood-based Clements Design, the company that reportedly designed the Los Angeles office space in question. The Judd Foundation has accused Clements Design of knowingly imitating two original Judd pieces: the $90,000 La Mansana Table 22 and $9,000 Chair 84. (To make its point, the foundation included an invoice from Clements Design that describes the proposed furniture as “in the style of Donald Judd.”) In the last 15 years, the foundation says only three authentic tables have been sold, not a single one of which was awarded to Kim Kardashian.
The lawsuit went on to note that the Judd Foundation first contacted Kardashian about the furniture three days after the office tour video was posted. A spokeswoman from Kardashian’s team apologized for the inconvenience and offered to “update the video caption with a retraction.” But, according to the lawsuit, the Judd Foundation wanted a bolder response: they asked for the video to be deleted, the table and chairs “recycled” (or destroyed, in the fine art world), and for Kardashian to issue a public statement. Kim’s representatives countered by offering up a social media post in support of the foundation, but Judd and friends apparently weren’t pleased because two years later, here we are.
The Cut is awaiting comment from Kardashian’s team, but Clements Design released a statement Wednesday saying there were “obvious key differences” between Kim’s tables and the original Judd table. The company added that it felt “blindsided” by the lawsuit after it had tried to “resolve this issue amicably”: “These claims have absolutely no merit.”
“It is lower quality than Donald Judd’s furniture,” Megan Bannigan, a lawyer representing the Judd Foundation, told the Times. “We don’t want to be mixed up with Kim Kardashian. We respect what she does, but we don’t want to be involved with this.”
Anyway, let this be a cautionary tale to know your tables — and not just the periodic ones.