Kim Kardashian’s photo with a looted coffin hastened its return

Kim Kardashian arrives at the Met Gala 2018. ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images

Kim Kardashian’s connections to the art world are many: she has been associated with a 2nd century statue believed to have been illegally smuggled from Italy, and her personal collection includes work by George Condo. According to a recent revelation from the podcast “Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World”, Kardashian also recently played a passive role in a chain of events that resulted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art returning the coffin of the ancient Egyptian priest Nedjemankh to his country of origin. In 2018, Kardashian participated in the Met Gala and posed for a photo with the coffin.

Subsequently an anonymous informant in the Middle East apparently contacted Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos and let him know about the picture; the tipper said they had personally dug out the coffin seven years earlier and had never been compensated for their efforts. This revelation contributed to the investigation of the coffin that was already underway, and the investigation eventually established that the funeral artifact had in fact been stolen during the fall of the Egyptian revolution in 2011.

Apparently, after digging up the coffin, the looters who had seen the fruits of their efforts in photo by Kardashian sent the artifact to antique dealer Hassan Fazeli, who allegedly drew fraudulent documents who hid the true origin of the coffin. The artifact then changed hands several times before being sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017.

In recent years, Met has re-evaluated work in its collection that may have been accomplished with less than legal funds. The institution accumulated many antiques from Subhash Kapoor, who in 2019 was accused of having controlled a multinational human trafficking. In response to the ongoing trend of looted items consistently popping up across the United States, the Treasury Department has recently begun gathering facts in the process of drafting new rules to demystify and further legitimize the trade in antiques.