Khloe Kardashian And Lamar Odom Started Dating And Got Married The Same Month
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Ever heard of a whirlwind romance? Well, Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom might as well have coined the term.
Khloe and the former NBA star met at a party in 2009, and dated for just a few weeks before getting married in September of that same year. The couple was together for four years, but their happily-ever-after quickly fell apart.
Now, Lamar’s TMZ documentary, Lamar Odom: Sex, Drugs and Kardashians, drops Jan. 2 on Fox. And from the looks of the trailer, it seems like it'll be a one-hour special covering everything from his cheating scandals to drug problems—and how that all affected his marriage to Khloe.
After all, these two used to be America’s golden celeb couple. Lamar was a star athlete, having won two NBA championships during his seven years on the Los Angeles Lakers (he also played for the Los Angeles Clippers and the Dallas Mavericks), per The New York Times.
And Khloe is... well, she's Khloe Kardashian. So, I, for one, am intrigued to hear more about what happened in their marriage.
Ahead, learn everything you need to know about Lamar and Khloe's relationship:
Khloe and Lamar met at a party in 2009.
After meeting at the party for NBA player Ron Artest, things heated up quickly between them, according to PEOPLE. Khloe and Lamar had only been seeing each other for a few weeks before they decided to make things ~public~ on their first date to Guys and Dolls, a club in West Hollywood, on Sep. 3, 2009, per Us Weekly. The outlet reported that the night was full of PDA.
They got married a month later.
On Sept. 18, 2009, news broke that the pair would be getting married, according to Us, even though Khloe didn't seem to be sporting an engagement ring. At the time, momager Kris Jenner said, "If you meet somebody, you just know,” Us reported.
Just nine days later, on Sept. 27, Khloe and Lamar got hitched at family friend and music producer Irving Azoff’s mansion in Beverly Hills, per Us and PEOPLE. There were around 200 guests in attendance, Us reported, and the wedding was televised on a season four of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, according to PEOPLE and InStyle.
“It may seem like it's a quickie wedding to everyone else, but Khloe knows what she wants," a source told PEOPLE.
Khloe and Lamar were happily married for four years.
A month after getting married, they got matching tattoos: Khloe got an "L.O." on her right hand, and Odom got "K.O." on both of his hands, Us reported.
In November, they bought a house in Mulholland Park Estates in Tarzana, California, for nearly $4 million, per Us. (The house had seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and was complete with a spa, waterfall, and home theater, BTW.) They tried to start having kids in January of 2010.
Khloe and Lamar even got their own reality show on E!, Khloe & Lamar, which ran for two seasons, from April 2011 to May 2012, PEOPLE reported. A majority of the show was about Khloe trying to get pregnant, and their resulting sex life, according to Us. “It's a little weird when it comes to [scheduling] sex,” Lamar said on the show.
She eventually began fertility treatments in June 2012, but they never ended up having a baby together.
Things got rocky around 2013.
Breakup rumors hit the media in February 2013, including stories that Lamar had cheated on Khloe after playing for the Dallas Mavericks. The pair denied the rumors, per Us and PEOPLE. Sources told Us that Lamar’s substance abuse problems began to interfere with their relationship in August, with one person saying the addiction had “taken over their marriage.”
Lamar struggled with cocaine addiction, and would be “high for three or four days at a time,” the outlet reported. He was also arrested for a DUI that month, and went to rehab in September.
Khloe filed for divorce on Dec. 13, 2013. But the divorce papers weren’t signed until July 2015, according to Us. (Lamar still hadn’t responded to her petition even ten months later, PEOPLE wrote.)
A source told Us that Khloe “flip-flopped several times, but she can't imagine having kids with someone who refuses to seek help for his disease.”
Khloe briefly withdrew the divorce filing in 2015.
In October of 2015, Lamar was found unconscious at Love Ranch South, a legal brothel in Nevada, having suffered multiple strokes, according to Us. He had a large amount of cocaine in his system at the time. Dennis Hof, the brothel's owner, told the Associated Press that Lamar had been taking an herbal sexual stimulant and was throwing up earlier, The New York Times reported. Khloe came to stay with him for the night, and had the divorce filing withdrawn afterward, putting “everything on hold,” Us reported.
Later, Khloe explained that she withdrew the filing so that she’d be able to make medical decisions for him during that time. “We paused the divorce, not for any romantic reasons but I wanted to be able to help take care of him and make sure that he would be OK again,” she said on the Divorce Sucks! with Laura Wasser podcast, per The U.S. Sun.
Lamar was able to leave Cedars Sinai hospital in January of 2016, Us reported, and Khloe supported him in the months after the hospitalization, PEOPLE reported.
Khloe and Lamar officially split in May 2016.
Khloe went forward with the divorce on May 26, 2016, and the split was finalized in December.
"This was always the plan," a source told PEOPLE at the time. "The divorce has never been officially off. Khloe was waiting for the timing to be right."
Meanwhile, Khloe started seeing Tristan Thompson in September, per Us.
Where does their relationship stand now?
They seem to be on good terms, but it doesn't seem like they interact at all. Lamar shed some light on the breakup and their marriage in his May 2019 memoir, Darkness to Light: A Memoir.
"For a while, being with her was bliss and I was the happiest I've ever been,” he wrote, according to The U.S. Sun. “We were one of the most famous couples in Hollywood and we made more money together than we had individually."
They chatted on and off in the following years, and they supported each other publicly. "She's a mother now, and she took care of me for four years," he told PEOPLE TV’s Reality Check in October 2019 after being eliminated from Dancing With the Stars. "But I wish her all the best. It's just meant for us to be friends."
Lamar celebrated five years being sober in 2021, per The U.S. Sun.
And in March of 2022, he admitted he wanted to connect with Khloe again, wanting to “take her to dinner,” on Celebrity Big Brother, PEOPLE reported. "It would be a blessing just to be in her presence to just tell her I'm sorry and what a fool I was,” he said. “She has the right to never see me again for the things I put her through, but time moves on, and people change.”
Lamar’s documentary is coming in early 2023.
Lamar Odom: Sex, Drugs & Kardashians drops on Jan. 2 and will cover his drug and sex addictions and how they impacted his marriage.
“Drugs—that was my girlfriend,” he tells TMZ in the trailer. “I had a wife…and cocaine.” They discussed how he had to tell her he was using during their marriage, saying they couldn’t “hide that forever.”
“The stories that y’all don’t know is, like, really crazy,” he says to end the trailer.
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