Kim Kardashian West has been at the forefront of recent efforts to obtain a presidential pardon for Alice Marie Johnson, a 62-year-old great-grandmother serving a life sentence in Alabama for a nonviolent drug offense.
Kardashian West, wife of controversial rapper Kanye West, has been engaged over the course of several months in phone conversations with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner about the possibility of a pardon for Johnson.
The conversations have intensified over the past several days, with reality TV star aiming to soon bring the matter to Trump’s attention, news website Mic.com reported.
Coincidentally, West has recently come under intense fire for his increasingly vocal support of Trump.
Kardashian West first learned about Johnson’s situation last fall when Mic published a video about Johnson, who has been in federal prison since October 1996.
Johnson is one of thousands of first-time, nonviolent offenders who were given long mandatory prison terms. Her plight, which has also captured international attention from criminal reform activists, has been featured in the ACLU’s report, “A Living Death.”
Johnson said in an October op-ed on the Mic website that she became involved in drug trafficking during a particularly rough period in which she lost a job she’d held for 10 years at FedEx due to a gambling addiction. She had also gone through a divorce and lost her youngest son in a scooter accident.