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Kim Kardashian’s attorney has addressed the reality star being named in a new libel and slander lawsuit.
“It was a simple mistake of using the public photo of another man with the same name to promote Kim’s longstanding commitment to the cause of criminal justice reform,” Kardashian’s lawyer Michael Rhodes told Us Weekly in a statement on Thursday, February 20. “The image was taken down almost immediately once the error was discovered. We’d prefer to solve this without litigation, but of course will defend Kim as needed.”
News broke earlier on Thursday that Ivan A. Cantu filed a lawsuit against Kardashian, 44, claiming that she posted a photo of him in a previous social media message about a death row inmate with the same name. (TMZ was the first to report the news.)
“To all my friends and family, I am not getting executed, some idiot who runs @kimkardashian used my picture instead of Ivan ‘Abner’ Cantu,” the plaintiff wrote via Facebook.
Kardashian has become an advocate for criminal justice reform since she started studying to be a lawyer in 2020. Last year, she wrote about Ivan “Abner” Cantu’s death row sentence.
“I heard about Ivan Cantu’s case from Sister Helen Prejean and was really moved by it. In 2001, Ivan was convicted of killing his cousin, James Mosqueda, and his fiancée, Amy Kitchen,” she wrote via Facebook in January 2024. “Ivan has always maintained his innocence claiming that the rival drug dealer framed him for the murders. There was false testimony by the State’s star witnesses who later recanted their statements and evidence withheld by the prosecution that would be extremely impactful.”
She added at the time, “Even the jurors want to help now and support Ivan’s appeals, believing they did not hear all the evidence at trial. In April 2023, a judge canceled Ivan’s scheduled execution when the defense filed an appeal about false testimony and new evidence. But later that year the execution was rescheduled and he is set to die on February 28, 2024.”
Kardashian further asked her social media followers to write to the local “conviction integrity unit” in Texas to plead for a stay of execution.
“The prosecutor’s offices are beginning to recognize that there are a lot of mistakes in convictions,” the Kardashians star concluded. “They encourage you to write into their integrity units about specific cases, so I am encouraging everyone to write in about the case of Ivan Cantu. The time to act to save Ivan Cantu is now!”
