The Tennessee grandmother whose life sentence was commuted last week thanks to Kim Kardashian’s advocacy had never heard of the reality-TV queen before she took up her cause, she admitted in an interview aired Thursday.
“I did not know her name, I didn’t know Kim,” Alice Marie Johnson said on the “Today” show, moments after meeting Kardashian on the show.
“As soon as I found out who she was, I started getting every magazine I could find, I started reading everything I could about her. And everyone was amazed and I was amazed too.”
Kardashian, 37, first heard about the 63-year-old woman’s plight on social media last year and started conferring with her lawyers about what she could do to help.
“It became this mission that I just didn’t want to give up,” Kardashian said in her joint interview with Johnson.
After speaking with Ivanka Trump, Kardashian was able to set up an Oval Office meeting with President Trump last month to ask for clemency for Johnson, she said.
The socialite revealed she broke the ice with Trump by saying, “I’m here because I want to know why you kicked Khloé off ‘The Apprentice,’” referring to her sister Khloé Kardashian, who was on the president’s former reality show in 2009.
After the two discussed Johnson’s case, Kardashian said, the president “had compassion for her right away.”
“To me this has nothing to do with politics, this has to do with people,” Kardashian said, adding that she thinks the president’s views on punishment for drug offenses are starting to change.
Johnson was released a week after the meeting.
“Thank you is not big enough, I have to walk it out, I have to live my thank you out,” Johnson said. “Thank you, President Trump, for making that wonderful life possible.”
Both Johnson and Kardashian said they plan on continuing to advocate for prison reform.